Ten Reasons Why Engineering and Fleet Workers Should Vote YES-YES to Save Jobs

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1. London Underground management propose to cut around 800 station staff. This means that they are looking to get maintenance staff who work out on the operational railway attending and assisting in emergency situations eg. If a train gets stalled in a tunnel, with no station staff available, they will send out a callpoint maintainer or technical officer.

2. If LU gets away with station staff cuts, it will leave maintenance staff to deal with passengers. Instead, trained, skilled station staff should deal with passengers and maintenance staff maintain the equipment.

3. LU is abusing its own sickness policy, by attempting to dump maintenance workers who now suffer from years of poor manual handling and so now have damaged backs, ankles, knees etc. Their attitude is that you are a spent force to be thrown on the pension fund scrap heap.

4. The £5 billion wasted on PPP is being plugged by wholesale maintenance cutbacks under the guise of ‘progress’. Fleet are pushing to move train exams out from 14 days to 28 days and Signals maintenance from 12 weeks to 26 weeks. All to enable staffing cut backs within maintenance. It's only a matter of time.

5. Fewer station staff will mean more frustrated access to stations as they go uncovered. Not only will management will then expect you to walk into that station from another location - but in an emergency, the ambulance or the fire brigade will find it hard to enter the station you are working on.

6. Our management is withdrawing Protection Master Engineering Hours and placing all the roles and responsibility onto the SPIC. To compound the issue, in a possession the SPIC will be expected to do the Train Master’s role. Three jobs for the price of one! Safe? Or money before safety?

7. Large numbers of unfilled vacancies across the whole of maintenance. Fleet have 60 alone. And now being told none of these will be filled and on top overtime is being restricted and that there will be more jobs to go!

8. A YES vote supports every grade. It will knock LU back as it tries to pick off groups of workers one by one. Remember, we stand together - unity is strength.

9. LU has watered down safety training over the last year by getting rid of fire training in maintenance and putting the LU Access course online as a one-off course (what next?). This is all about reducing the time (cost) of you being away from your normal job. This will result in only one thing: an increase in accidents and the real possibility of fatalities of either LU workers or members of the public - again, all to save a few pennies.

10. Voting YES will put pressure on LU management to either withdraw these cost-cutting plans or at least start to hold meaningful discussions with RMT reps. Voting NO give the green light to LU to push these job cuts and money-saving risks through. And WHEN it all goes wrong it will be you LU will look to blame and carry the can.