Five rail workers on the strike: ‘There is no justification for us to get poorer every year’
Tens of thousands of rail workers have joined Britain’s biggest nationwide rail strike in 30 years. Disruption is expected for the rest of the week after 40,000 members of the RMT union voted to strike over pay and conditions. Here, five rail workers share their views on the decision to take industrial action.
TfL train driver, 40s, east Midlands
On the national rail side, the strike has to do with pay and cuts to staffing. But for TfL staff it’s about terms and conditions, not pay. On the Victoria line we have been striking for the last six months on night tube services that have been implemented without our agreement. We’re fighting against this because of fatigue, caring responsibilities – there are various reasons we didn’t want to work night tube, it’s not in our contract.
We want to keep the staffing to pre-pandemic levels for safety. We’ve got stations that are unmanned and if anything happens there’s nobody on those stations. During the pandemic we had a lot of staff with Covid, a lot of staff with long Covid, we’ve had colleagues pass away. Yet we still ran a full service as best we could. I think a lot of the staff have just about had enough. We want some long-term funding. We want to keep London running. We want to keep our jobs and we want to keep the conditions we’ve got now.
Signaller, 50s, Surrey
Nobody I work with wants to go on strike, we enjoy our work and signallers are well paid but there is no justification for us to get poorer every year. We have a very responsible job. The first line of the job advert says signallers are the guardians of safety. We worked through the pandemic not questioning the pay freeze or the withholding of annual bonus, but now inflation is seriously affecting our standard of
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