Tube Lines engineers on the Northern, Jubliee and Piccadilly lines will strike for 48 hours from 23 to 25 June.
The strike is about jobs and safety. Tube Lines want to reduce the number of safety inspections and will not guarantee that this won’t cost jobs.
With TfL’s purchase of all Tube Lines’ shares, the PPP has now come to an end. And now Tube Lines workers are striking to make sure they don’t pay the price.
PPP has been a disaster as we all predicted. It has just emerged that five years’ worth of Tube Lines contracts haven’t been completed. A recent safety inspection on the track around the Piccadilly Line derailment found 231 track faults in a 1km area. There were 10 faults with safety implications over 600 days old at one set of points at Boston Manor. The PPP has been no more than an unaccountable, profit-making machine for multinational companies.
But despite making a killing, TubeLines is spending its last days trying to make workers pay for its failures. Tube Lines workers are in a no-man’s land – not part of Metronet or LU. They feel very vulnerable. Are they going to be re-packaged and sold to private interests in the near future?
We should all give this strike our maximum support. It will show TfL that they cannot push the cost of PPP onto our shoulders without a fight, as they are also attempting with the London Underground job cuts. It will protect the future safety of the network. This is TfL’s showcase: whatever erosions of safety standards they get away with here could be replicated elsewhere.
With JNP Tube Lines workers on strike, there will be no maintenance on the signals and track, no train preparation, no-one to affend to faults on stations from defective OPO equipment to lifts stuck in the shaft. As Tube Lines runs the Emergency Response Unit, it will also be striking, so the entire network will be without the specialist staff who attend emergency incidents. To keep yourself and the public safe, remember you have the right to refuse to work on safety grounds.
Tubeworker thinks it is excellent that another 48 hour strike has already been named for July. This piles on the pressure and sends the message that we are not going to give up easily. We are going into this dispute determined to win.