ENGLAND (Commonwealth Union) – There has been an undercurrent of disgruntled staff at the London metro services. There has been talks between the RMT, also known as the Rail Maritime transport union, and the corporates about the changes in pension and the job cuts. Unfortunately, those talks don’t seem to be going to well.
It all started late last week when there was notice claiming that there would be job cuts along with pension changes although an official reason for this notice was not given. If this leads the RMT to go on strike, the entire railway system comes to a standstill. Seemingly the talks are not going as well as they hoped as the union is threatening to go on strike and the minister in charge of this should ideally do something before the entire metro comes to a standstill.
The transport minister has not made a statement regarding this but the people who use this service to commute, which is about 60% of the working population, is on edge. Clearly there could be a solution to all of this if they are willing to compromise on both ends but it does not seem to happening that way.
The Railway union is happy to go on strike as they know that the rest of the public transport will not be able to cope with the number of increased passengers and they possible don’t go on the routes that these people need to go to. If you take for an example the busses, it is possible that the busses don’t have as many stops as the RMT does, which means people will have to make room for delays.
According to the media reports, it seems that the union will be going on strike as the talks haven’t gone well at all. Mick Lynch, the RMT general secretary, has openly stated that this is a good opportunity for the bosses to have made the strike go away by listening to the demands at coming to a compromise, but he says if the bosses don’t want to listen then neither does the union.
Glynn Barton, the Chief Operation officer of Transport for London (TfL), made a statement that they are hoping to meet with the union and to come to some sort of agreement hoping that they can stop the strike from taking pace at all but it seems like a far-fetched idea as the Union is holding the power cards and the “bosses”, according to Mick Lynch, have lost their footing in this situation.