The ASLEF Union, which represents train drivers, has announced that it will take a further week of industrial action later this month.
An overtime ban is currently in place, running from Monday 17th July until Saturday 22nd July 2023.
However, the union has now confirmed that an overtime ban will now also take place from Monday 31st July until Saturday 5th August.
The ban is part of the long running dispute over pay and conditions.
ASLEF says that services will be severely disrupted due to non of the train companies employing enough drivers to deliver the timetabled service.
The overtime ban will affect Avanti West Coast, Chiltern Railways, CrossCountry, East Midlands Railway, Greater Anglia, Great Western Railway, Great Northern Thameslink, Island Line, London North Eastern Railway, Northern, Southeastern, Southern, Gatwick Express, South Western Railway, TransPennine Express and West Midlands Railway / London Northwestern Railway.
Mick Whelan, ASLEF’s general secretary, said: ‘We don’t want to take this action. We don’t want people to be inconvenienced. But the blame lies with the train companies, and the government which stands behind them, which refuse to sit down and talk to us and have not made a fair and sensible pay offer to train drivers who have not had one for four years – since 2019 – while prices have soared in that time by more than 12%.
‘The proposal they made on Wednesday 26 April – of 4% with a further rise dependent, in a naked land grab, on drivers giving up terms & conditions for which we have fought, and negotiated, for years – was not designed to be accepted.
‘We have not heard a word from the employers since then – not a meeting, not a phone call, not a text message, nor an email – for the last twelve weeks, and we haven’t sat down with the government since Friday 6 January. That shows how little the companies and the government care about passengers and staff. They appear content to let this drift on and on.
‘In contrast, we want a resolution. A fair resolution. That’s why we are taking this action, to try to bring things to a head. Then I can concentrate on my day job working with others in the industry to rebuild Britain’s railways for passengers, for business, and for this country.’
Responses
Whelan: “We don’t want people to be inconvenienced” Yes, he does, Without customers being “inconvenienced” as he weasel-words it, ASLEF and the other toxic rail unions wouldn’t have any power. They profit at ordinary working people’s expense.
Every time Whelan and his cronies play the thug card, we lose the chance of seeing our family, people lose their jobs because they can’t get to work, self-employed people lose customers or even their businesses. All this so wealthy people can get even richer.
It’s self-defeating, of course. The sky-high wages and mollycoddled lifestyles of the few have to be paid for somehow – cutting services, closing ticket offices, removing train wifi, shutting stations and eventually closing whole lines. ASLEF and RMT are making the railway unviable – just as they did in the 1970s & early 80s. Like feral kids in search of an ASBO, they always blame their bad behaviour on someone else.
That’s not how I see it at all.
The government has wrecked Britain’s economy by imposing a disastrous Brexit, and other failings such as money wasted during Covid-19 – paid in the main to Tory donors.
As a result most working people are considerably worse off – but the government seems not to care.