This is the excerpt from the General Secretary's report to the 2009 AGM concerning the obs, pay and justice dispute on London Underground ...

At the time of writing these notes RMT again found itself having to withdraw from a ballot for industrial action on legal grounds. The tragedy here is that we had a massive vote in favour of both strike action (3,165 for and only 619 against) and action short of a strike (3,495 to 266) delivered by our members.

Sadly, LUL seriously questioned the legality of the ballot in relation to the information we sent them as set out in the anti-trade union laws. Instead of sitting down and negotiating on the important issues of dispute, they went running to their lawyers trying to find any loop-hole they could to ensure members' rights to take industrial action against them was thwarted.

The Matrix we sent to them setting out members' workplaces and grades had a number of anomalies, which is inevitable when you consider the amount of members employed by LUL. I would also point out that this was also the first time we have attempted an all LUL ballot since some 2,000 former Metronet employees were brought back into the fold. But the cruel truth of the situation was that the Union's Solicitors advised us that it would be very likely a court would side with the employer as usual.

If we had gone ahead with a decision to take any industrial action as a result of our ballot, and an injunction was granted as would almost certainly have been the case, then we would have found ourselves in the undesirable position of not being able to ballot members again for a several months on the extremely important issues of dispute. It was decided that it would be unacceptable to put members in this position and to instead re-ballot on the same issues as soon as possible.

I continue to very much share our members' disappointment that the union was not able to use this magnificent mandate but the anti-trade union laws had again achieved their aim which is to stop working people defending their pay, terms and conditions. But hopefully by the time the AGM meets, I shall be in a position to report that RMT successfully conducted a re-ballot and again members voted overwhelmingly in favour of industrial action.

If so, this will come as no surprise. This was not a good time to be working on the Underground. LUL had been breaching their own disciplinary and attendance procedures for some time and had encouraged aggressive and punitive behaviour by local managers. For example, members being given 52 week warnings for a first attendance warning, maximum attendance warnings given as standard, members regularly subjected to unreasonable pressure and being refused representation for interviews while they are ill as well as being refused representation at other interviews where these could lead to disciplinary action.

Even worse, like a lot of other employers, LUL were trying to use the economic situation to their advantage to convince staff that there needs to be a large degree of cost cutting. They were attempting to push through the Organisational Change policy which meant compulsory redundancies despite the agreement made between management and RMT in the PPP Code of Conduct. We could not accept any dilution to the agreement for these members nor could we accept compulsory redundancies for any other LUL employee.

And how were LUL proposing to reward staff for all this stress? Not very highly. LUL not only failed to respond to our claim for a one-year pay deal and other improvements, but their multi-year offer of RPI plus 1% and flat RPI for the next 4 years is simply unacceptable.

But as I said I hope to be in a position to report more positively at this AGM.