Rail workers are Covid heroes – I’m proud to be on the picket line with them

theguardian.com:

The rail workers I stood with on the picket line told me harrowing accounts of how they and many of their colleagues are routinely forced to collect donation parcels from food banks at the end of shifts. I was proud to stand with them– it would have been an abject dereliction of duty for me as a Labour MP to refuse to join workers in their struggle for a fair wage.

As a Labour party shadow transport minister, a position I held until just a few days ago, I was duty bound to I speak out against horrific Tory attacks on working people.

While I’m saddened to be removed from the Labour frontbench, and I’m no longer part of what I firmly believe is a “government in waiting”, it’s nothing compared with the hardship endured by our rail workers.

Ticket collectors, signal workers, train cleaners and catering staff are so badly paid, often on annual salaries in the low £20,000s, that some are forced to rely on the generosity and compassion of charities and faith groups to survive.

These are the same workers who kept Britain’s trains running at the height of the pandemic. Remember the rail network was never shut, even before vaccines, when Covid was claiming untold numbers of lives and causing devastating levels of hospitalisation.

Rail employees put their own safety and wellbeing in jeopardy to ensure other key workers were able to get to work, and that medicines and other provisions could be transported. Belly Mujinga, a member of the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA), even lost her life to Covid after working on the rail frontline.

Britain, and the UK government in particular, owes a debt to these Covid heroes.

But instead, the Tory transport secretary, Grant Shapps, takes to the airwaves to insult and lambast our rail