Prime minister Boris Johnson has hit out at rail workers’ unions for the “reckless and wanton” move of striking on key dates in June, which will likely cause severe disruption for people travelling.
The RMT Union has said that strike action will take place over June 21, June 23, and June 25, after talks over salaries and redundancies failed to yield a breakthrough.
Railway operators and RMT have suggested that they will engage in further talks in an effort to avoid the industrial action taking place.
RMT secretary general Mick Lynch said: “We've got another two weeks before this action starts. There's plenty of time to get proposals forward.”
The planned strike has already been billed as the “biggest” of its kind “in modern history”, with over 40,000 staff working for Network Rail and 13 different train operators set to down tools.
The 13 operators affected include Chiltern Railways, Cross Country Trains, Greater Anglia, LNER, East Midlands Railway, c2c, Great Western Railway, Northern Trains, South Eastern Railway, South Western Railway, TransPennine Express, Avanti West Coast and West Midlands Trains.
The action will leave roughly a fifth of mainline rail services running on the days of the strikes. Thousands of passengers are expected to be affected given that the industrial action coincides with major events such as the Glastonbury Festival and England cricket’s Test match against New Zealand at Headingley.
The fact that each strike is planned to span a period of 24 hours means that it is likely to affect periods of non-strike days and prolong disruption throughout the week commencing June 20.
On June 21, the opening day of the strike, the London Underground will also be disrupted as RMT union workers are planning their own separate strike over pensions and redundancy packages. Transport for London and London Underground workers signed up to the Unite union have also said that they will partake in the strike in solidarity.
So great is the level of disruption likely to be that the prime minister lambasted the planned industrial action during Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions and urged the Labour party to oppose it.
The BBC later quoted a Downing Street source as saying that the plans were “thoroughly irresponsible” and would inflict “pain and economic disruption” on people in “really tough times.”
In response, Lynch said that RMT members only wanted a decent salary, job security and “decent terms and conditions”, which he insisted the government had “the key to unlock” and his union had been trying to achieve for the last two years.
Lynch said that another of the reasons behind the strikes was that Network Rail had informed union representatives that 3,000 maintenance jobs in 11,000 were set to be axed, which he warned would lead to safety risks.
Network Rail has denied that any such proposals for mass redundancies are in the pipeline, and it was in talks on how to modernise operations while avoiding job losses. It also refuted the suggestion that it would take any course of action that could pose a risk to safety.
Elsewhere, the Rail Delivery Group has said that the industry’s revenue currently stands at 82 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, which equates to a £38 million shortfall per week. Its managing director Steve Montgomery stressed that the sector could not continue to operate in the same way on such margins and was obliged to “reform” and "look at all options" of doing so.
Emphasising the importance of getting RMT back at the negotiating table, Montgomery also warned that government subsidies would not be a viable long-term solution, with ministers investing £16 billion into propping up the sector through the Covid-19 pandemic.
Meanwhile, transport secretary Grant Shapps said that following Covid, the taxpayer has continued to contribute to keeping the railways in operation at a cost of £600 per household.
Despite this, RMT boss Lynch insisted that railway firms could “easily afford” to give workers a pay rise if they were to “cut back on their profits”.
Lynch said: “They are ripping off the passenger, they are ripping off the taxpayer. The government needs to fund the railway properly, and we need the companies to give up some of their profits to give our members a pay rise.”
In response, the Rail Delivery Group has accused RMT of highlighting “inflated figures” on profits to further its agenda.
Information published by the Department for Transport suggests that the average salary of a rail worker stands at £44,000, which is superior to the median pay of other public sector workers.
However, RMT says that this figure is “unrepresentative” since it is calculated after taking into account the salaries of high-earning train drivers, most of whom are part of different unions.
RMT claims that its members receive an average salary of £33,000 per year.
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