Off The Rails

There's been uproar on South Western Railway (SWR) today, as workers received a threatening letter from bosses, attempting to intimidate them out of striking. The letter, which we reproduce below, suggests workers or the union could be liable for any losses incurred during the strike, saying SWR is "entitled to recover the loss and damage in sustains as a result of you participating in the strike." The legality of the letter's claims is dubious; what is not in doubt is that it is a clear attempt by a frightened employer to prevent workers from exercising their right to withdraw their labour.

As RMT guards gear up for what will be the longest rail strike in British history, taking place throughout December, except 12 December, a guard and union activist has written an open letter to their colleagues, responding to the bosses' threats.

Dear all,

I am writing in response to a letter, which you will have received by South Western Railway (SWR) to your addresses this week. This is nothing, but scaremongering nonsense. Firstly, let’s be 100% clear, this is legal strike action. It was completed legally with a ballot and two weeks notice. This strike action is to protect your job and terms and conditions.

SWR have not guaranteed a guard on every train, the last framework stated that a train could go without a guard on board in “extreme circumstances.” Southern Railway had stated this as well, with their OBS grade. Now over 50% of their trains run regularly without a second member of staff on board. There was a deal in front of Acas, which has been withdrawn by SWR and First Group up in Aberdeen. SWR are citing that they withdrew the deal because RMT told their members about it. That is complete rubbish. SWR are being peddled by the Department for Transport (DfT) because strikes will be a critical part of this General Election.

Don’t cross the picket lines. Don’t listen to the scaremongering.

SWR are scared that we are walking out because they don’t want their middle managers being bogged down in a months worth of paperwork in January. Therefore the people at the top of the business are bullying their workforce into trying to cross pickets.

All that SWR are entitled to do are withdraw pay for not signing on for a shift. Because of this legal strike, SWR cannot take any legal action against you personally.

In the letter they have graciously given us some scary sounding bullet points.

They say that thousands of people will be disrupted. If you look, our core routes are running with buses on ones that are not and alternative transport available. People won’t be disrupted. Our lives will be when we’re all made redundant.

You will not be paid. But you will receive hardship payments and any annual leave, which you are booked on. Please see your local guards rep and tell them what you are booked to work. Help us to help you.

You are entitled to swap shifts as per the 1999 GRI agreement. 6.4 Exchange of Duties. Please don’t listen to this false threat. (Attached)

If your rules and assessments are due in December, that’s not your problem. You will just come back to work on the 3rd of January to normal circumstances.

No legal action will be taken against you as a person or employee of SWR. It is illegal to take legal action against employees during legal industrial action.

Please take no notice of this letter from SWR. It’s four pages of wasted trees.

Support the strikes. Spend December with your families this year. Don’t cross the picket line.

Yours faithfully,
An RMT member and guard

A recently published Rail Accident Investigation Board report has again highlighted the important safety function played by the Guard. On 2nd March 2018 trains on the Kent suburban lines running through Lewisham ground to a halt in the icy conditions caused by the “Beast from the East”. One train was left unable to draw into Lewisham station, with the platform about 10 metres ahead of the front of the train. After an hour, with no food or drink or toilet facilities, passengers started to get out onto the track out of desperation. The third rail was still live, the lines were still open to whatever traffic could move. Only two minutes before a train had gone by the door passengers began to leave from. In the confusion it was a further three minutes before the current was isolated.

Southeastern metro services are Driver Only Operated. This was a packed 10 coach evening peak train. The driver was responsible, as the only member of staff onboard, for both communicating with the signaller about what was happening and also managing the passengers onboard. The driver made regular announcements but was confined to their cab, so they could still be in contact with the signaller via the radio. Ultimately a disembodied voice over the PA was insufficient to persuade passengers of the dangers of leaving.

If there had been a Guard on board there would undoubtedly have been far better flow of information to passengers about the general situation. They could have talked to people face to face. The incident investigation highlights the shared feeling of helplessness among the passengers, observed on social media, as a key reason for their growing frustration. The complete absence of visible staff exacerbates this, creating the feeling that no one is coming to help, and no one cares what you do.

A Guard would also have been able to place devices on the track to immediately turn nearby signals to danger and short out the traction current. The driver did this 5 minutes after the passengers had started to leave. Their first priority was to inform the signaller what was happening. There is no escaping the fact that having two safety critical staff on a train rather than just one allows crucial tasks to be performed quicker in an emergency, when delays can be disastrous.

This is the second incident like this to have happened recently on Driver Only Operated trains. In November 2017 a London Overground train broke down 30 meters outside of Peckham Rye station. As in the Lewisham incident the train was busy and had no toilets. The driver had to communicate by radio with London Overground control, the signaller, and the on-call fleet technician, as well as keeping the passengers informed. After an hour of back and forth the entire process broke down as a route controller authorised the train to be evacuated, having gained the impression it was in the station platform not merely close to it. The signaller was unaware this was happening and did not shut the lines or switch off the current.

The driver was in a position to challenge the instruction to evacuate the passengers but didn’t do so. The subsequent RAIB report suggested that working alone in a very challenging situation for a prolonged period had put the driver into “cognitive overload”, and their decision-making capabilities had been greatly diminished. The end result was scores of passengers evacuated the train onto live lines, walking in the dark inches away from the third rail on uneven ballast over a narrow roadbridge. The evacuation was only halted when the Peckham Rye station manager realised what was happening and informed the controller exactly where the train was. They were the only other safety critical member of staff anywhere nearby.

Cutting Guards jobs is taking a chance on safety. We know the risks are there; it is just that the industry considers those risks to be acceptable. We need to campaign not just to keep Guards jobs where they are threatened, but to reinstitute Guards where they have been cut long ago.

The breakthrough in the anti-DOO dispute is a cause for celebration, but some caution must also be exercised. No formal settlement has yet been reached, and the "other stakeholders" referred to in Acas chair Brendan Barber's letter to RMT General Secretary Mick Cash must be drivers' union Aslef.

Aslef has past form selling out RMT members as well as its own members in the big DOO dispute with GTR Southern in 2016/17. In addition, Aslef reps on the Northern Company Council has been acting to aid the company in pushing forward its DOO agenda.

In June last year, they deliberately bailed the company out from having the franchise confiscated by agreeing to sanction voluntary overtime for drivers, in return for a £1,000 cash payment to each driver. They were roundly lambasted by their members soon after, when it was discovered that they had mistakenly failed to check the wording of the agreement, meaning that although overtime rates increased for longer-serving drivers, for newly qualified drivers they were actually lower under the new agreement than they had been the last time there was a rest day working agreement in place.

Despite promising to rectify their mistake, they have allowed rest day working to continue for six months under this shoddy agreement, and recently recommended a further three-month extension.

The extent to which these reps are in the employers' pockets runs still deeper. It recently emerged that they have negotiated extra release from driving duty for themselves (but not local level reps), so that even if a meeting they were due to attend is cancelled, they are still given extra "staff side" time. Worse still, they recently recommended the union accept a training agreement for new rolling stock that includes drivers being expected at certain times to check CCTV screens showing feeds from inside the train - something that a driver has absolutely no reason to do when operating a service that is also staffed by a guard.

Commendably, the Aslef Executive Committee refused to accept that agreement - presumably because they realised that the Company Council reps have gone rogue and are now willing to do more or less anything the employer wants them to do in return for the vaguest promises of future improvements to drivers' salaries or terms and conditions.

So there is a clear and present danger to this hard-won victory. Northern bosses and the DfT will try to buy drivers off and snatch back the win for their side - RMT must not allow any secret talks between Aslef and the company. Ideally they should fight to bring Aslef into joint talks, to ensure that they are not forced into giving away any more than absolutely necessary for Aslef to then try to capitalise.

The Aslef leadership should learn from the condemnation they rightfully received when they agreed to exclude RMT from the talks with Southern brokered by TUC General Secretary Frances O'Grady, and agree to joint talks as set out in Brendan Barber's letter.

Off the Rails has been covering the recent developments in RMT's dispute with Arriva Rail North, operators of Northern Railway over the company's plan to introduce Driver Only Operation.

In a letter from Acas chair Brendan Barber, RMT were informed that the company and Department for Transport were now willing to agree to a "Conductor on every train... ...for the remainder of the franchise". The letter invited the union to talks with the company and "other stakeholders" to discuss any necessary "changes to the operational mode".

The main "other stakeholders" here are Aslef, the union representing the vast majority of drivers. Aslef's leaders must not be allowed to collude in a sabotage the RMT's victory by agreeing to separate talks, which would open the door to a deal transferring hugely significant parts of the guard/conductor's operational responsibility onto the driving grade in return for improvements to drivers' terms and conditions.

Unions representing guards and drivers must negotiate together, in joint talks, to ensure a deal which pushes back DOO and protects the rights, and terms, and conditions of workers in all grades.

After nearly 50 days of strikes, Northern guards have forced their employer, Arriva Rail North (ARN), to scrap a plan to impose "Driver Only Operation" (DOO). ARN has instead committed to maintain a conductor on every Northern train, including on services using new or newly modified rolling stock.

This is a massive victory for Northern workers, who have won a prolonged war of attrition with a previously intransigent employer, backed up by a Tory government determined not to cave into union pressure. If the victory is consolidated it could be one of the biggest wins for the labour movement in Britain for some time.

The strikes have forced a shift in position not only from ARN, but from the Department for Transport too, which has agreed to further fund the franchise and to alter the requirements laid out in the franchise specification document.

Brendan Barber, the former head of the TUC who now chairs conciliation service Acas, confirmed ARN’s climb-down in a letter to the RMT, in which he invited the union to further mediated talks with ARN on the basis of their commitment to retain a conductor on all services.

The discussions that will now take place to agree a method of working trains in future will still need to be approached with care by the union, although they can now negotiate from a much stronger position.

New technology is still going to be introduced, and "other relevant stakeholders" will still be involved with the negotiations. ARN are highly likely to want to transfer as much of the current guard/conductor's job as possible over to the driver, and will want to try to bribe drivers' union Aslef to help them.

RMT must stay on its guard until they have an acceptable settlement in black and white, and refuse to tolerate any attempts by the employer to negotiate with Aslef behind their backs.

Workers must also resist pressure, for example from moderate elements within unions and the Labour Party, to take the threat of further strikes off the table or to wind down disputes elsewhere. Worryingly, the RMT press release announcing the win reserved special praise for Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram, the Labour mayors of Greater Manchester and Merseyside respectively. In reality their role has been inconsistent at best, mainly centring around attempts to broker a fudged compromise rather than throwing their weight and the weight of their offices fully behind the workers and their strikes.

The Northern victory should also serve to revive action on Merseyrail, where the RMT has been tied up in slow-moving negotiations. The RMT branches organising Merseyrail workers have passed policies calling for a return to industrial action, and guards’ strength on Merseyrail is bolstered by the fact that it is the only train company where they can rely on the solidarity of large numbers of Aslef drivers.

Further strikes on Merseyrail and South Western, where RMT guards recently voted by a resounding 84% for further strikes, in a new ballot forced on them by the stipulations of the anti-union laws, could see the momentum of the Northern victory translated into wider gains. More widely, the victory on Northern should give organised workers not just in the rail industry but across the country confidence and hope.

It shows what can be achieved by determined, sustained strikes, and by knowing what your red lines are in any negotiations and sticking to them. When the negotiations are completed there will be more to say about the lesson we can draw from this long dispute, but for now we should celebrate a big step forward.

We've collated a few recent items from our blog into a printed bulletin, for distribution at workplaces.

Look out for it in a mess room near you!

Click here to download the PDF.

The DOO strikes on Southern have been over for a while now. The next big battle will be over proposed cuts to platform dispatch jobs, which are likely to be targeted on Brighton mainline stations. Lots of managers have been trained as "contingency" dispatch staff in the event of a strike. But as always the issue will be what Aslef drivers will do.

On the Great Northern and Thameslink side it's a more peculiar picture. When that was West Anglia Great Northern, and then First Capital Connect, they had a management policy of no strikes - which meant they conceded almost any demand Aslef made. The RMT have very little power as guards and platform dispatch staff were largely cut on those routes in the 90s. So workers have no real experience of being involved in a prolonged dispute involving industrial action, and the management have an ingrained culture of not wanting confrontation. The whole point of the GTR franchise is to drive through DOO, new routes through the London core, and bring in new trains. So we have a peculiar cold war going on at the moment over the 717 units that are being introduced on the Great Northern metro route (which will no doubt at the end of this franchise all be parcelled off as a new London Overground of TfL Rail route).

Aslef health and safety reps have decided they can use this introduction to try and fight DOO. So they're pushing for more and more platform staff. But Aslef on GN route have accepted DOO for nearly 30 years, so it's all a bit muddled. They're objecting to various bits and pieces they've been happy to accept until no. And the Aslef full timers won't touch it. Normally this would be an untenable position for a union. They're not organising around this at all at workplace level, just sending reps to meetings to object. But the management have no concept of how to push back against it, as their long-standing policy has been to just give in. So the 717s, which were due in November, are nowhere near introduction and its not clear how it will all pan out.

There are rumours circulating that GTR will be given a two-year extension on its franchise. The optics of that will be appalling after what happened in May but the rumour is that the franchising system is in such a mess the Department for Transport don't want to actually touch it if they can avoid it. All round… a complete shit show of incompetence!