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- You can download this newsletter below, print it out and distribute it in your depot
“We’ve just had the most effective strike on the underground in 15 years, we can hardly follow that by accepting a worse offer than the one we went on strike over”. These were the wise words of one of the delegates to the reps’ meeting held at Unity House on Monday. The reps’ meeting followed a session at ACAS on Friday July 31st where LUL proposed a final, final offer for wages and Night Tube (NT).
The offer for Train Ops included a reduction of the non-consolidated NT payment from £2,000 to £500 for drivers affected by its introduction; replaced by a payment of £200 per night shift for drivers working NT during the “interim” period. Following on from this 12 month period all shift enhancement payments will be stopped – for ever.
This falls a long, long way short of our reasonable demands for working all through the night on Fridays and Saturdays. Just a reminder of what we are seeking in compensation for significant changes to our working conditions:
- A shorter working week
- A consolidated payment for changing our framework agreement
- Enhanced payments for each time we work a NT shift
- A guaranteed 2 rest days, not counting Sunday in the week following a Saturday NT
- A freeze on weekend work at current levels with a phased reduction to 1992 levels
The wage offer should be totally separate from the talks on NT, but LUL has insisted on amalgamating the 2 issues. The reason of course is that Mayor Johnson is insisting on getting NT on the cheap, so LUL has to plunder the pot set aside for a wage increase to finance Johnson’s latest vanity project. This means that the pay offer is either just above or just below 2% for all grades, for T/Ops it is exactly 2%. It could be argued that in isolation this offer isn’t a million miles from offers in other train operating companies – the key difference is that we won’t get this unless we agree to drastic changes to our work-life balance.
To rub salt into our wounds LUL threw another spanner into the works late on Friday: they want to raise the number of occasions we can be compelled to work “special events” from 3 to 7 nights per year. Recently LUL hasn’t needed to use more than 1 (NYE) so why would this need to be raised to 7? Well, the simple answer is we don’t know, but it may well be a cunning plan to get us to work all through the night on those Sundays preceding Bank Holidays. And what will that do to our work-life balance?
We are now dealing with a set of senior managers who believe that as we are contracted to work 36 hours a week, as far as they are concerned they can make us do anything they want within those hours. They are on a politically motivated campaign against workers on the Underground, at the behest of Johnson and Cameron. If they get away with forcing through the introduction of NT in this way our jobs will be unrecognisable in a year or two. We must stand together, workers of all unions united against this onslaught.
The strike will go ahead as planned. No T/Ops to book on for any duties between 21.00 on Wednesday 5th August and 20.59 on Thursday 6th August.
United we Will Win.
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