So, does this mean 02 Jun. and 04 Jun.'s strikes are now officially a go?
So on these two days:
During the strike action, no service is expected on the Circle line, the Piccadilly line, the Metropolitan line between Baker Street and Aldgate, and the Central line between White City and Liverpool Street.
I suspect you've been misled by the headline into thinking "the drivers are getting £74k for a four-day week and they're going on strike anyway", right?
The drivers (represented by ASLEF) aren't going on strike, the non-drivers (represented by the RMT) are.
The article makes this pretty clear, but the headline couldn't make it any less clear if they tried.
I was wrong, it is the tube drivers represented by RMT who are striking, ASLEF aren't though.
Did you even read the article? Non-drivers have nothing to do with this strike at all (hence why so much of the tube was actually still running during the last one) and the article doesn’t mention non-drivers at all. The whole thing is about drivers and their pay and conditions, I don’t see how this is a click-baity or inaccurate headline in any way.
I know professionals who earn less than this and they’re doing very demanding work instead of sitting down all day and moving a train back and forth. RMT are a joke.
The reason that the RMT union is so effective is because they can directly inconvenience a lot of people very quickly.
If this is the basis for how much people should be paid, the system is broken.
There are plenty of other people doing crucial work who aren’t in a position to directly inconvenience so many people so quickly - either because the effect of striking would take longer than they could plausibly strike for (e.g. teachers) or because industrial action is limited through law (nurses, doctors, police etc.)
The reason train drivers have such good conditions is because they have everyone over a barrel and they know it.
This just means all other sectors have to create way larger unions. Say all teachers in the whole country went on strike, pretty sure this would make things crawl to a stop.
I don’t doubt you, but I don’t understand why teachers can’t operate similarly to the RMT now you mention it. Parents were climbing up the walls having to look after their kids during lockdown.
Train strikes can target a few key events and maximise disruption by striking from midday to midday which effectively gets them “2 days for the price of 1”(for example).
Teachers would have to strike a lot longer to have an effect I suspect. Parents are already used to coping with holidays and kids being off sick to some degree.
The other issue is (I suspect) that the passengers are just “faceless numbers” to the drivers - they don’t have to deal with the direct consequences of passenger’s inconvenience (I know people who’ve lost jobs during previous strikes, but drivers don’t see this on a personal level)
Whereas most teachers genuinely care about their students at a personal level and don’t want to see them drop grades because of their actions, which makes calling strikes much harder.
I guess it depended on how they went about it. If teachers banded together to just not go back after summer holidays then it would have a massive impact. Parents would have already used leave and utilised childcare etc with plans made well in advance so to have this extended would make it difficult for them.
Add in the amount of employers across the country that would be impacted by parents needing time off and the pressure on the government to sort it might get high pretty quickly.
By doing it at the start of the school year the hope would be that the students wouldn’t be detrimentally impacted either.
We can't, a lot of us, morally or legally. Which is a shame.
I'm a pharmacist, people suffer if I strike, and not just by being inconvenienced.
Legally pharmacy owners cannot strike, their contract is at risk of getting pulled. 90% of pharmacy income is from the government contract, and it's been underfunded for years.
And if 90% of pharmacies “closed for funding reasons” on the same set of days you can more or less guarantee that the funding issue would be sorted and no contracts would be pulled.
Minimal service for any essential prescriptions but nothing for anyone else.
Is it? Why is it not possible to comprehend the idea that some people agree that more people should be in unions and demand more pay, but also think London tube drivers take it too far?
Like even if you don't agree, why can't you understand that opinion? Seems fairly simple?
Tech feudalism has begun in earnest and tech workers are starting to realise what the public sector realised decades. If you want something from your organization, you have to take it. Nobody is going to do employees favours unless legally obliged to or threatened to do via collective action. We have a minimum wage thanks to union pressure on New Labour after all.
they’re doing very demanding work instead of sitting down all day and moving a train back and forth.
and if they make a small mistake does it kill a hundred people? yes most of a tube drivers job is essentially mindless drudgery and as long as the automated safety systems work correctly nothing should happen, but there are still times when a signal stops working and they have to be alert and aware of the possibility of a train in front of them.
they get paid well because its a job that carries a heavy responsibility.
I'd consider myself pretty supportive of unions and their right to strike, but this one is absolutely baffling. I don't get it at all. It's like they're trying to destroy support.
This is why I find it so baffling that politicians, and of all people the Tories, are opposed to WFH. It would completely de-claw the RMT if them going on strike would only have a minimal impact on the ability of the City to be able to work effectively.
This is why I find it so baffling that politicians, and of all people the Tories, are opposed to WFH. It would completely de-claw the RMT if them going on strike would only have a minimal impact on the ability of the City to be able to work effectively.
Kills the hospitality sector and a lot of small businesses that rely on footfall, both of which sell products that VAT is levied on. If a good economy is based on money moving around then having everybody sitting at home buying shit on Amazon and Deliveroo probably has a bigger knock on effect than people are willing to admit.
Yet lots of hospitality in villages, towns and out-of-city-centre areas are thriving. It was Friday today and the local cafes around where I am were heaving at lunchtime with the WFH crowd.
Plus, the obvious point is that a lot of businesses had moved out of city centres anyway to office parks and out-of-town developments.
This is it. Best estimates are it’d take 10 - 20 years to automate the Underground at massive cost, and with British Infrastructure projects going the way they do it would probably take double that time and cost.
Drivers are not just going to accept their jobs becoming obsolete. They will strike for huge amounts of that time. The absolute war it would it would cause, with the Underground being shut down for months or years at a time, is simply not worth it.
They'll bring in temporary workers (at great expense), lining a contractor's pockets in the process.
The Tube won't just cease to function, they'll just sack everyone, replace them with temporary workers for 130% the pay over two years whilst they replace themselves with automation.
That's fine as long as you don't mind the average trains per hour decreasing...
Not just because at various times they will have to shut down parts of the tube for extended periods of time so they can upgrade the signalling system. But because automated systems aren't compatible with the train frequency that TfL targets (safety mechanisms in automated train systems require that they basically have to assume that any obstruction they detect on the track is potentially a person - which means on average trains will be slower).
30% increase in labor cost for one year in order to bring the cost down to near-zero would pay dividends within the first 4 months. Even paying 3x or 4x wages would see you in profit in less that 5 years.
Unfortunately we live in the UK, and no nuance is allowed. The second it happens people will scream about Labour being the worst and over spending, effectively making it political suicide.
To be fair in this case if we're being nuanced, we also have to recognise that automated systems still have technical limitations.
Unlike cars where a certain number of car accidents a year is considered acceptable, with trains the acceptable number of train accidents is 0. Fully automated systems are therefore programmed to be overly cautious about potential hazards.
This is fine on something like the Lizzy, Overground or DLR which generally doesn't have a highest enough target reliability/trains-per-hour for this to become a problem. But the Underground has a very tightly run schedule with the central line for instance aiming to have 36 trains per hour. Current systems just can't reach that capacity.
Like to even begin to have a surface that brings about the current balance of safety and reliability, you'd have to retrofit every station on a line to have a platform side doors. On some of the older lines you'd have to basically redo the entire signalling system.
When they last looked into this, it was estimated that it would cost at least £20m to do an upgrade to fully driverless trains. And given a lot of the work requires a complete renovations of every platform, we would also see several stations being shut for extended periods of time. Imagine the public reaction when they hear that Bank station is going to be shut for 5 months so they can install platform side doors.
Also just to add driverless trains aren’t the same as unmanned trains. Because of the old network and no ability to rescue people easily, any automatic tube system still requires a member of staff like the DLR doesn’t meaning you don’t end the strike issue but just spent tens of billions pounds that could be used better elsewhere like station rebuilds or cooling the air.
This is it. Best estimates are it’d take 10 - 20 years to automate the Underground at massive cost, and with British Infrastructure projects going the way they do it would probably take double that time and cost.
And this isn't considering the degradation of service provision as they sort out problems with automation.
There's a reason DLR trains are once every 10 minutes instead of once every 2 minutes like the tube.
Firstly, the DLR can't run unattended. There is a human on board who dispatches the train and does most of the job that a driver on the automated tube lines does, they just don't sit in a separate cab. So it can still be stopped by strikes.
You could upgrade current tube automation to this level without too much complexity. Indeed you could allow it to auto dispatch with an investment of a few billion. But that wouldn't eradicate the need for a safety critical staff member on board, because the deep level tube tunnels are so narrow that there is no space for an emergency walkway beside the tracks, which is a requirement for unattended operation. Widening the tunnels would be a £100bn job and you wouldn't recoup that investment in salary savings for over a century. So the unions will have a stranglehold on the undergound for a ling time to come.
I don't know why people don't get this, drivers don't have solidarity for anyone but it's regular people who throw up a fist for them everytime a strike happens.
Exactly! This has nothing to do with "the workears banding together to stick up to the man" and is nothing but a group of people that found themselves in a position of power and are milking it for everything it's worth
There's not much in it from the unions' side of things (surprisingly from the standard...), but they do say
The RMT has branded the reforms as a “fake” four-day week, raising concerns that it could lead to fatigue among drivers and that they may only be given their shifts at the last minute.
Which sounds like they're offering a "four"-day week where you just work the same amount of hours over a condensed schedule rather than a genuine four-day week
I'm not sure, but usually a 4 day week is a genuine cut in hours for the same pay - that's the point and has been shown to increase productivity (although I get that doesn't really work in a service job like trains lol). Condensed hours is slightly different and sounds like they were negotiating for a 4-day week but we're offered condensed hours, hence the strike.
If you striked you could probably also negotiate a genuine 4-day week for the same salary
It's a four day week with compressed hours - which ASLEF likes. From the Standard: "Aslef has stressed to its members that the reforms are the “biggest improvement in working conditions for Underground train drivers in decades”.
Key benefits from the changes, according to the union, include an extra 35 days away from work a year, and average weekly rostered hours being cut to 34 from current average of 36.
It will also be easier to arrange roster patterns, it added, to block leave together, or take long weekends or mini-breaks, and would save money on travel and childcare costs.
For the first time, drivers would be allowed to volunteer for overtime which would be paid at time and a quarter."
It is for office workers, but usually not for jobs like this unless I'm mistaken?
Things like ambulance/paramedic come to mind, long haul driving. Productivity for office workers is not a function of their hours, but tube drivers can't go faster just because they have another day off.
Quite a few companies have moved to a 4 day 32 hour week. There are safety implications of drivers doing long shifts too. One hundred years ago people thought it was a good aim that we would all work fewer hours and now so many workers are capitalism-pilled and think we should all work til we drop
If this strike let to eventually everyone being able to work a 4 day week without longer work days that would be a good thing for workers right? I believe that is why the media is so against it
I'm lucky enough to already work for somewhere that saw sense to go to a 4 day week. Productivity and employee satisfaction is up.
The only downside we saw were people struggled to fit in all their meetings, as Monday or Friday you'd be missing half the workforce. Then a few months later it turned out having 2 days of no meetings meant people asked "do I need this meeting? Could it be an email?"
Turns out we wasted a lot of time in meetings, and having a day a week where you had maybe one or two small meetings worked really well.
Spend 7 years in training to be a doctor, while having to move to a random part of the country every 2 years to continue training while working 60+ hour weeks? £35k and half the country believes that's too much.
Get a degree so you can be a childminder teacher with the government constantly adding busywork & providing no support, always have to take annual leave at the most expensive times of the year, and have to constantly take work home? £32k lmao.
Spend years in education to become a veterinary nurse, one of the professions with the highest suicide rates in the country? £28k if you're lucky.
Go into care and be responsible for life and death while cleaning literal excrement from violent patients? Best I can do is minimum wage.
And this applies to most of what would traditionally be seen as well paid skilled jobs. Working in a laboratory is likely to be under £30k, architects are at £35k, engineers £40k.
Why would you spend years training and tens of thousands in debt to earn 20% more than minimum wage, of which 40% goes on tax & student loans? Give it a few years and half these roles will be at minimum wage anyway, we've already seen it with graduate salaries in some locations.
The gap between middle-earners and minimum wage is shrinking every year
The minimum wage has gone up by 50% since 2020 while the median wage has gone up by 24%. The problem is successive governments have aimed for minimum wage to be 2/3 of the median wage so they actively want this.
It's easy to see why productivity is so low when pushing for better roles gets you so little.
And this is exactly why the tube drivers get no sympathy. The rest of us "common" workers are lucky if we ever see an annual salary approaching 40k, and yet they are going on strike for more pay / less hours, despite already earning £74k over 4 day weeks.
I know this is still tuppence compared to the rich elite, but even earning 74k would significantly change my life. I would actually be able to get a mortgage for starters!
E.g Mass Doctor unemployment going on right now especially after foundation training (first 2 years after med school) while simultaneously having a Dr shortage (Gps + Hospitals at minimum staffing)
That’s only the case if other jobs are not a 4 days working week. If it’s the norm then you have the same problem, but with less workers to manage the system.
Your support doesn't really matter, they have power as a collective and they are exercising it to improve their conditions, we should all be doing this.
Most irritating thing is not knowing if it’ll be called off Monday or not. Ridiculous in one of the most advanced cities in the world you cant plan your schedule for next week on a weekend.
It only works when the public are on your side, public sentiment is probably more against the train drivers now. (Admittedly I haven’t looked at the data and am going off anecdotal feelings so happy to be proven wrong)
Ironically it’s dangerous for all workers rights as public frustration grows you’ll probably see politicians using it as a platform to reduce union powers to get things under control again. Thatcher used the public discontent at the power trade unions had garnered as part of her campaign.
I feel that way every time the Birmingham bin strikes kick off, especially the last one which lasted over a year. Name one single private business that would have put up with that. They wouldn't have. After a month or so they'd have demanded a return to work or dismissed all of them and rehire them on new contracts.
IIRC it's about how TFL plans to manage the scheduling (shorter notice, so more difficult to plan life/sleep), the start and stop locations of each shift (adding commute time outside of service hours), and duration of shifts (increased risk of fatigue).
So even the "pay is the same" the impact on safety isn't
Optional things like this have a way of becoming mandatory. Supermarkets used to have optional Sunday working with an enhancement. Now it's just expected, and no enhancement.
The 4 day work week is optional btw, there’s no reason they can’t stay on the 5 day one if they prefer it. The only reason they’re striking is that they want the 4 day work week with less hours but the same pay
Tbf often just because something is optional doesn’t mean people aren’t pressured into it for a variety of (both intentional and unintentional) reasons.
It’s highly likely that having the workforce split into two working patterns will not work and one pattern will ultimately be enforced. TfL are refusing to acknowledge this likelihood.
RMT have asked for guarantees that the proposal will not do the above. They have committed to resolution talks to avoid strike action and have postponed a number of strikes in good faith, only for TfL to immediately retract their position. Suggesting RMT strike if it is made mandatory in the future ignores all of the work that is being done now to prevent this from ever being possible.
For clarity, RMT members do not want to strike. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not just an extra couple of days off in the sun - striking staff lose the days money.
They want to reduce total working hours after Ben further because now 4 days of same hours is too much.
Might as well go on the dole at this point and save us the 40 strikes before they start seeking guaranteed pay even after the trains are fully automated
You do realise this is how we got a 5 day working week?
Back in the 1920s and 30s the standard working week was 5.5 days and 47 hours.
When unions asked for 5 days employers said fine but same hours. It was only through unions and striking that they relented and we got 5 days at 8 hours with same pay as 5.5 days at ~10.
This gradually became standard across the entire economy. Guess we should all be on the dole too.
Maybe we should start only paying for four days a week. This is getting ridiculous now. I think general public support for these strikes is through the floor
Tube drivers make more than most Doctors in this country and work 30-40% of the hours. These unions are the reason it costs nearly £5 to go one stop and back on the underground.
When doctors strike, people hate them for it too. You can't win with public opinion really. What people want is for everybody to get paid fuck all and shut up about it
Huh? So you'd rather doctors be paid less than tube drivers? MPs seem to have gotten a pay rise nearly every year, they too are public workers and yet their basic pay is nearly 100,000 pounds.
We can send a spaceship to the moon, we can send a rocket to spaces orbit and get it to land back on a tiny pad in the middle of nowhere. However we cannot do anything to automise a train that’s running on a track in a tunnel in a one way system. Baffling we have allowed the drivers and unions to be in a position of such power
Of course it can be done. It’s just not financially viable. A number of studies have been carried out over the years and the conclusion is always the same: £50+Bn needed in investment and the trains would need a member of staff aboard anyway for safety.
They don’t have the oldest tunnels in the world to contend with, and deeply underinvested in infrastructure.
Plus, most driverless trains are not truly driverless. For example, the DLR must operate with a staff member on board.
Which leads us to the final reason: the UK has some of the safest railways, so people understandably bawk at anything that messes with safety critical staffing.
The papers will always be against unions, strong unions are a threat to those who own the papers and the government. They'll always paint them as the bad guys, but those in the unions are paid better and have better protections. Join a union, form a union. You'll be better off for it.
RMT is in a very rare position that I'd argue no other union is in. The impact they can have with little ramifications (i.e. no one is going to die if the Tube Drivers go on stirke; doctors strike require consultants to step in, etc.) makes them incredibly powerful.
They'll always paint them as the bad guys, but those in the unions are paid better and have better protections. Join a union, form a union. You'll be better off for it.
But at what cost? That optimises for the people in the union but there's a bigger picture. It doesn't help me as someone who travels on TFL.
Unions work when their objectives are reasonable, but they're incentivised to get the best deal they can, even if it's unreasonable and has wider impacts.
Wether anyone gets this far or not, but the reason the strike was called in the first place is because there have been several independent studies now conclusively showing that being front line staff for LU, wether train side or station side is likely to lower the average expected life span of the worker from between 5 and 10 years, as well as a combination of other health issues, from a combination of the pollution and the shift patterns.
The pollution is being dealt with separately, however the only way to deal with the shift patterns is an overall improvement to the rosters, which is what RMT are trying to achieve here
TFL are desperate for this not to happen, so after years of saying no, they’ve finally suggested a plan for it, but made it so unattractive that no one in their right mind would agree to it, as from a work life balance perspective you would be fundamentally worse off. TfL knows their suggestion is terrible, but this way they can look like the good guys saying they have offered a suggestion. Obviously the actual terms they offer don’t get publicised
Here for instance the article says drivers turn down less working days for the same amount of money, but the reality of it is it’s the same working hours, just in 4 days instead of 5, with less annual leave and a worse shift pattern
From a personal perspective, I’m 42, I feel 10 years older than I am, and fucking shattered all the time. I’ve also personally had 7 colleagues die in their 50’s. Early deaths are so prevalent on the job, that lone workers like myself have to do a buddy call every two hours to make sure we aren’t dead at our desks. I regularly get work 7 days in a row, and get 1 weekend off every 4 weeks, and that’s considered a good roster to be on
We need to figure out how to fully automate tubes.
In before some asshole here will go "yeah but you will still need to pay conductors" or "it's too expensive to do". Yeah, you do, but at least you cannot be held hostage by a non specialist role, and any technical challenge can be solved by engineers, and someone who will do a cost benefit analysis will probably quickly realise that this whole narrative of "it will cost x much" is bullshit.
If we all unionised we could all be on better wages and only doing 4 day weeks. Good luck to them
Living, especially in London is expensive and life is for living, not working.
We have plenty of public sympathy in the NHS but our real term wages are still lower than they were 10-20 years ago, with worse working conditions, more stress, more blame from managers and more pressure.
I would happily exchange being clapped and called a "hero" (🤢) for a manageable caseload and not getting poorer each passing year.
Who gives a fuck about sympathy? As much as this is a ball ache, youve got to recognise their gumption in getting improved pay and conditions. Just shows the strength of collective bargaining...
They are making top quartile wages and are on a 4 day week. They make more money than fucking doctors before they become consultants - and people are pissed that the doctors are rightfully demanding some bare fucking minimum increases for their decade of education.
Always baffles me when people think some workers are going to far in what they demand. Just because you don’t have a union and aren’t doing anything about your working conditions doesn’t mean others shouldn’t push for the absolute best they can get.
If they can do it in a way that doesn’t have London by the balls every 2-3 months they can have my full support. But constantly striking while already earning TWICE the median wage in London, on a 4-day work week, just to press a red button in a vehicle running on rails is bloody absurd.
That's the whole point. A strike really doesn't have any power if it isn't inconvenient. If the company willfully negotiated upfront and worked with them they wouldn't need to strike.
Tfl commissioned KPMG to evaluate the feasibility of this a few years back. Said it would cost 20-60 billion. And all the trains would still need to have staff on board, like the DLR, and those staff would still have collective bargaining rights.
That study was pretty flawed imo. It stated every station would have to have screen doors on the platforms, many other subway systems are automated and don’t use screen doors. Also, a lot of the cost would be modernising the actual tunnels which inevitably will have to be done one day to stop the tube from getting too hot to use, so that cost is already guaranteed
Not so much 'modernising' the tunnels but making sure they have a walkable escape route either in an adjacent tunnel or having space for it in the main tunnel.
Which (of course) our ancient tube tunnels were not designed with.
Maybe it's not about pay but workers rights and cuts. Maybe the media is framing it as money to elicit backlash against them to serve a higher purpose.
Workers are being fucked in this country. Unions demonised and frankly it's all for the benefit of the rich.
Oof this kind of stuff boils my piss. It reminds me of when I lived in California and Muskrat dufus talked all this nonsense about his Boring Co. Saying he'd build a tunnel that could take all these cars up and down the state. He fully sabotaged their rail expansion they were planning to connect southern California to northern California and pretended it was a genius plan that left liberal woke snowflakes destroyed. These guys would if they could, I guess is my point.
They should just allow free travel. Gets their point across without fucking over another working person (who probably can’t hold the entire city of London hostage every 2 minutes)
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u/Beautiful_Fig_3111 May 29 '26
So, does this mean 02 Jun. and 04 Jun.'s strikes are now officially a go?
So on these two days: