A second 24-hour strike by around 550 First ScotRail guards, drivers and sleeper-train managers took play on 1 March. The workers oppose company’s plans to run driver-only trains on the new Airdrie-Bathgate route, due to open in December.
The striking RMT members had voted to back strike action by nearly five to one (“yes”: 379; “no”: 80) on an very high (82%) turnout.
The level of support for the strike was the result of an RMT campaign. Members recognised that running trains without guards on this line was going to be the thin end of the wedge.
If First ScotRail could get away with it this time, which route(s) would be next?
In planning to run Airdrie-Bathgate trains without guards, First Scotrail is tearing up a two previous commitments (in 2001 and 2004) to the union that there would be no extension of driver-only trains.
First ScotRail has claimed that the cost of employing a guard on the trains would be prohibitively high as the controls for opening and closing the train’s door have already been installed in the driver’s cabs.
In fact, the cost of relocating the controls and employing guards would amount to no more than £320,000. This is small beer compared to the risk to passenger safety posed by running trains without guards.
And it is even smaller beer when compared to the £429,000 which First ScotRail paid its highest-paid director last year, or the £18 million which the First Group paid out in dividends to its shareholders last year.
In the run-up to last Monday’s strike First ScotRail tried to pass the buck to Transport Scotland, a Scottish government quango which is accountable to the Scottish government.
According to the company running driver-only trains on the Airdrie-Bathgate route had been agreed with Transport Scotland in the summer of 2009.
This would mean that the SNP’s Scottish Transport Minister Stewart Stevenson was not being entirely frank when he met with the RMT in early January and claimed that the Scottish government had not taken a final view on the use of driver-only trains.
RMT General Secretary Bob Crow has now written to First Minister Alex Salmond demanding an urgent meeting to discuss the issues.
Even if the impetus for scrapping guards on the Airdrie-Bathgate route has come, to one degree or another, from Transport Scotland, First ScotRail is only too keen to press ahead with running train services on the route on the cheap.
First ScotRail employees have been pressurised into working as guards on strike days. Again, this shows up First Scotrail’s contempt for health and safety: they have been given just a fortnight’s training, compared with the six months needed to fully train up a guard.
Staff from another First Group company — First Great Western — have also been flown into Glasgow by First ScotRail in order to try to keep trains running on strike days.
First ScotRail does not need to worry about the cost of lost services or of bringing in and accommodating staff from other First Group companies. Under its franchise agreement — reached with the then Labour-Lib-Dem administration — First ScotRail can be indemnified at the discretion of the Scottish government for any losses arising out of industrial action.
This is not a dispute about a pay claim, where some kind of “compromise” might be reached between a union’s pay claim and an employer’s pay offer. There can be no “half-way-house” in this dispute: either there will be guards on the Airdrie-Bathgate route, or there won’t be.
This makes it all the more important that the RMT strike action is fully supported by other trade unionists — both those working on the railways, and those employed elsewhere.
