LONDON (AP) – Britain’s railway network ground to a crawl yesterday after 40,000 staff walked off the job in a dispute over jobs, pay and working conditions. Train companies said only about a fifth of services across the country were due to run.
The 24-hour strike by cleaners, signallers, maintenance workers and station staff comes a month after the country’s most disruptive rail walkout in three decades brought trains to a halt across the United Kingdom (UK) at the start of the summer holiday season.
The dispute centres on pay, working conditions and job security as Britain’s railways struggle to adapt to travel and commuting habits changed – perhaps forever – by the coronavirus pandemic. There were almost one billion train journeys in the UK in the year to March, compared to 1.7 billion in the 12 months before the pandemic, and rail companies are looking to cut costs and staffing.
Negotiations have so far ended in deadlock. The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) Workers said employers’ latest pay offer falls short amid soaring inflation – currently at 9.4 per cent – and the worst cost of living crisis in decades.
It accuses the Conservative government of preventing train companies from making a better offer. The government said it is not directly involved in the dispute.
RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch said the union “will continue to negotiate in good faith, but we will not be bullied or cajoled by anyone”.
“The government need to stop their interference in this dispute so the rail employers can come to a negotiated settlement with us,” he said.
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps accused union leaders of “trying to cause as much disruption as possible to the day-to-day lives of millions of hardworking people around the country”.
He said the strike had been “cynically timed” to disrupt a semi-final of the European women’s football tournament yesterday in Milton Keynes, north of London, and the opening of the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham today.
The union staged three one-day strikes last month that stopped services across much of the country.
