London Underground Ltd

The circular below is from Bob Crow, RMT General Secretary. Please use the reporting line he outlines to tell the union about any incidents at work which concern you, or which illustrate the effect of the OSP job cuts. Perhaps you are station staff and want to report assault or abuse from passengers unhappy with the reduced service, or a station evacuation that took too long because of under-staffing, or your station having too few staff available to give adequate help to a disabled or vulnerable passenger.

Circular LUL/4/5 from RMT General Secretary Bob Crow

It is apparent that London Underground management has been deliberately victimising our representatives and activists for doing their job namely representing you and fighting to protect jobs and ensuring a staff presence in stations.

New Stations Rosters - Minus Jobs!

London Underground’s new stations rosters - minus hundreds of jobs - are due to come in on 6 February. Staff will be expected to work even more anti-social hours with staffing levels so low that stations will struggle to cope. Ticket offices will be open for significantly shorter hours, causing huge extra workload for staff in the ticket hall and elsewhere around the station - and yet, despite LU’s claims, their numbers are being cut too.

Extract from the RMT General Grades Committee's decision on Wednesday 19 January, the day that London Underground sacked our Green Park group rep, Peter Hartshorn ...

We are disgusted to hear that London Underground has summarily dismissed our representative Peter Hartshorn on trumped up charges of swearing at a manager despite witnesses stating otherwise. The alleged incident took place while Peter was carrying out trade union duties and it is clear that the company has victimised him for his activities as a representative of this union.

Your representatives report ...

Meetings so far have worked on separating the health and safety issues from the industrial relations issues which are contained within the collective grievances. This process took up until 12pm on Friday 14 January, after which reps and managers were due to sort out the timeframes to deal with the industrial relations content in the colective grievances.

RMT General Grades Committee decision ...

That we note the absence of a reply from London Underground on this matter. We instruct the General Secretary to urgently contact the company demanding a reply.

We also seek the views of the relevant branch, Stratford no.1, on how this matter should be pursued, and instruct the General Secretary to place this matter back in front of the GGC once those views have been received.

From RMT General Secretary Bob Crow:

I write to advise members of the latest situation in our dispute with London Underground over their planned job cuts. Many of you may have today seen the totally false reports made by the BBC that RMT had decided not to call strike action in January. Please be assured that this statement is totally false and your Executive continues to deliberate on the way forward. Nothing has been ruled in or ruled out at this stage.

The General Grades Committee has today met to discuss the dispute and the following decision has been taken: -

Click on the attachment to download the December edition of Monthly News.

In this edition:

VICTIMISED FOR BEING A GOOD REP? - Green Park rep, Peter Hartshorn, is the latest activist to face a company stitch-up;

FOURTH STRIKE IS STRONGLY SUPPORTED - area roundup.

RMT's General Grades Committee has today taken the following decision:

That we note the views of our representatives freely expressed at the meeting on 20th December in the Indian YMCA Hall.

We further note the report from our Regional Organiser.

The General Secretary is instructed to liaise with our sister union and make clear to our members and LU Management that unless real progress is achieved on this issue we may name further days of industrial action in support of a safe working system and in defence of jobs.

The General Secretary is further instructed to continue our campaign in the media and by other means to highlight the increasing risks to safety created by understaffing and at time non-staffing on stations and other jobs on the system.

Earlier this week, RMT's Council of Executives agreed to make dispute payments to members in the event of further strike action in the LU Job Cuts dispute.

Click '1 attachment' / file name to download a poster supporting both our campaign against job cuts and students' campaign against fees and cuts. The poster highlights Nick Clegg's pre-election pledge to vote against fee rises and Boris Johnson's pre-election pledge to oppose ticket office cuts and closures, and lists several ways in which people can support the campaigns.