... But LUL and ASLEF don’t want to know

From 'RMT On The Trains' newsletter, August 2008

Some RMT driver members are having to make do without a local rep due to the collusion between LUL and Aslef to exclude RMT reps from Hammersmith, Barking (H&C), Stratford and Loughton. At Loughton, Aslef only have a dozen members and have a local rep, we have 42 members but no rep.

On the Functional Council the situation is even more extreme: Aslef have 6 members to the RMT’s 3. At a recent Company Council, Aslef claimed to have in excess of 2,000 drivers (which is an absurd overestimation) on the Underground but refused to produce figures. RMT produced figures showing we have over 47% of the drivers as members but were ignored by LUL.

All these years of “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” are clearly paying off for Aslef; nowadays even TSSA are more militant than Aslef, and their members are leaving them in droves.

The RMT are considering going to ACAS to seek their involvement in sorting out this anomaly; in the short term we will redress the imbalance between areas where we are over-represented and those where we have no representation. Our aim, as always, is to ensure that our members continue to have the very best representation.