Safety fears revealed by rail workers on strike

One rail worker told the Journal that morale was severely affected and that they are “seen as a bunch of drones”.

The strike is not just about pay but in response to changes to their working conditions and redundancies.

Striking at Salisbury Railway Station, Chris Luckins, a commercial guard and a health and safety representative, said: “They want to change our terms and conditions of employment and have even talked about altering our pension age.

“They want multi-staffed training so a ticket office employee might be performing platform duties, but you have to be trained to dispatch trains.

“They are just trying to cut staff numbers and to streamline the railway, so it runs itself, but it won’t. It needs people and it is people that make it work.

“We are understaffed, and the railway runs on overtime as it is now. On the ground level, we don’t have enough staff. “

Train Strike at Salisbury

Steve Dudman, a signals engineer, said: “There won’t be sufficient staff to cope with any faults. It will increase train delays; and trains might be cancelled.”

“One of our main issues, is that they want to stop maintaining a lot of the signal assets.

“Most are maintained every twelve weeks, but that has now changed to every four years. It is called fix on failure, so they wait for stuff to fail rather than provide regular checks.”

Network Rail has multiple employee contracts and under the proposed changes, the terms and conditions that represents the middle ground will be selected. Within these new terms, there is no overtime, weekend hours will be expected and leave days impacted. 

Steve added: “They are also trying to bring in Sunday working, which many of us already do but for lower paid staff, which will impact their wages even more. They could end up doing 60-70 hours over a seven-day period.

 “If I work a night shift, I get a 25 per cent uplift but they want to bring it down to 10 per cent. So, I would have to do unsociable hours at 15 per cent less.

“Morale is at an all-time low. We are seen as a bunch of drones.”

Salisbury MP John Glen said: “I am extremely disappointed that the RMT has gone on strike. 16 billion pounds of support has been made and we are facing tough times. Eight per cent is on the table and it is a good offer.

“I am always happy to speak up for my constituents but don’t believe I have had any correspondence from them. The proposal I am familiar with is that the signalling equipment is different, but it gives continuous information into the cab and is used in EU countries.

“I urge the RMT to call off the strikes.”

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