Tuesday, July 26, 2022
Tomorrow, the United Kingdom will see the chaos of rail strike, set to drag on for weeks with station staff, operational, maintenance, supervisory and management staff, set to join a fresh walkout in mid-August. The Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA) said staff at seven train operating companies will walk out on 18 August and 20 August over pay and conditions, causing even more disruption over the summer break.
The passengers are being warned to only travel by train if “absolutely necessary” during this week’s rail strikes with half the UK’s network expected to be closed. Nearly 100,000 staff are set to walk out as the Rail Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA) and (Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF) unions continue their disputes over jobs and pay.
Some train operators are still finalising their timetables with less than 48 hours before the first RMT strike begins on 27 July, but all are expected to run significantly reduced services.
Network Rail says there will be a “very limited” timetable running between 7.30am and 6.30pm across England, Wales and Scotland, and that some areas of the country will have no rail services at all.
Disruption is also expected on the day that follows the strike, Thursday 28 July, “due to the knock-on impact of industrial action on shift patterns”, Network Rail says.
The walkouts are set to cause major headaches for several sporting events this week.
The strike action will be taken at Avanti West Coast, c2c, East Midlands Railway, CrossCountry, Great Western Railway, LNER, and Southeastern. The action short of strike will be taken in West Midlands Trains, Northern, Greater Anglia, TransPennine Express and Southeastern.
The latest planned walkouts come on top of expected further strike action by the RMT union, which is already poised to grind the UK’s rail network to a halt this Wednesday. Train drivers for some drivers in the ASLEF union are also set to walk out on Saturday, 30 July.
Manuel Cortes, TSSA general secretary, said that essential items like food, energy and clothing costs are going through the roof yet the Government has chosen to pick a political fight with rail workers. Most of our members are going into a third or fourth year of pay freezes, seeing their real take-home pay decrease. For many rail workers in our union this is the first time they have been directly involved in an industrial dispute. They do not take strike action lightly, but enough is enough. The Conservative government is the clear block to a deal for rail workers.
The Transport Secretary Grant Shapps must either personally come to the table or empower train operators to reach a deal on pay, job security and conditions. Instead of wanting to resolve this dispute, we now see proposals for hundreds of ticket office closures and widespread job cuts across our railways.
A Department for Transport spokesperson said that this is hugely disappointing that, rather than commit to serious dialogue with the industry, the TSSA is seeking to cause further misery to passengers by cynically coordinating strikes to cause maximum disruption to the rail network. The United Kingdom railway is in desperate need of modernisation to make it work better for passengers and be financially sustainable for the long term.
The only thing more strikes will do, however, is wreak further havoc on the very people unions claim to stand up for – people who, on average, stumped up £600 per household to keep our railways running throughout the pandemic while ensuring not a single worker lost their job.
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