From Bob Crow, RMT General Secretary

You will shortly be receiving a ballot paper from the RMT over the issues of massive job cuts and the resultant detrimental effects they will have on your working conditions and safety.

Time and again we have met with senior management to get them to negotiate in a sensible way over these issues that will affect your future. Despite five joint working parties management refuse to negotiate on job cuts and are even refusing to go to ACAS over the issue in defiance of LUL’s agreement with the trade unions and even LUL’s own policy.Apart from the mass closure of ticket offices, RMT has warned that stations would not function properly with this extreme level of job cuts. The inevitable outcome would be huge pressure on the remaining staff, more unsafe lone working and that stations would be unstaffed at times.

The effects of having 800 less staff have driven LUL to propose that drivers self despatch trains, reverse blindly after passing red signals and even detrain passengers in a tunnel with no assistance.

At the same time train drivers’ jobs are being cut by stealth through reducing pool numbers, cutting team talk and annual training being cut from five to three days. In addition to their plans to cut 800 station admin and operational managers jobs, management claim that they have 300 more drivers than they need and indeed seem to be cutting them down with sackings for the most trivial offence.

Our engineers have already been warned of job cuts in a leaked management document which warned of cuts on “a huge scale” and labelled their loyal staff “ageing and entrenched.”

All grades will be affected by these savage job cuts which are only the beginning of LUL’s attempt to cut costs (largely accrued from the collapse of Metronet) ,and we must fight them together.

The RMT has won a no compulsory redundancy agreement and defended it successfully last year but whether people go voluntarily or are pushed, the result is that those left behind have to pick up the extra work and suffer the effects of horrendous rosters and dangerous procedures just to keep the job running.

Your union cannot accept that you should pay with your job and safety for management’s financial incompetence. If savings need to be made they can come from the 200 TFL managers who earn more than £100,000 a year. We will not sit idly by whilst your safety is compromised.

For this reason we will be asking you to vote ‘yes’ for strike action and ‘yes’ for action short of strike in the forthcoming ballot. Support your own job and safety by supporting your union.