RMT Demands Re-Instatement Of Victimised Safety Rep

AROUND 2,500 Tube infrastructure workers at Metronet are to be balloted for industrial action over breakdowns in industrial relations following the victimisation of an RMT safety rep, dangerous plans to reduce signals maintenance and attempts to impose rosters.

RMT, the Tube’s biggest union, is to ballot its entire membership in Metronet after the crudely engineered suspension of experienced health and safety rep Andy Littlechild for attempting to uphold the company’s own health and safety policy.

The union will also ballot Metronet signals staff if the company does not withdraw proposed cuts in signals maintenance and recognise that rosters are subject to negotiation.

“Andy Littlechild has been fitted up on a bogus charge that would embarrass the Spanish Inquisition, and to add insult to injury he was thrown out of his depot at 3am with no means of getting home,” RMT general secretary Bob Crow said today."

“Andy has spent more than two years trying to get Metronet’s official safety policy applied, and it is the management that has brazenly ignored that policy that should be disciplined. Andy’s diligence has clearly upset someone, because they have gone to the trouble of unilaterally altering a risk assessment in further breach of agreements with the sole aim of entrapping him, and it is as clear as day that he has been set up."

“Industrial relations on the signals side have also plummeted in recent months, and we now have a management throwing weeks of patient talks out of the window and attempting to impose rosters and transfers which our members are telling us are unacceptable. But most worrying is the company’s intention to halve the frequency of signalling maintenance and move to what it calls risk-based maintenance – something that even Metronet managers have admitted privately is simply about saving money."

“The company says it needs to divert staff for an urgent survey of signals cabling that is half a century old, but it must be unacceptable to do that at the expense of basic maintenance. We know that it will undermine safety as well as our members’ jobs, and we have made it clear that we will ballot all our signals-side members for action unless these proposals are withdrawn,” Bob Crow said.

Read full press release here

Source: RMT

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