Jobs fight: London Underground, media

Submitted by Anon on 9 April, 2009 - 2:40

As we go to press workers on London Underground are balloting over strike action to defend job cuts and pay.

London Underground is cutting more than a thousand jobs in administration grades. Transport for London is due to cut around three and a half thousand jobs over the next eighteen months.

At the same time London Underground have made an offer of a five-year pay deal — RPI plus one percent in the first year and then RPI only for the next four years. That is an effective pay cut.

ISS and Tubelines have also announced that they would not be paying the final instalment of the London living wage (£7.45 per hour) for the cleaners who work on the Underground — so they are going to ballot for strike action.

• Uptodate news: www.workersliberty.org/tube

Media companies across the UK and Ireland are making massive cutbacks. Journalists at the Yorkshire Post, Yorkshire Evening Post and Leeds Weekly News are taking strike action to defend jobs (18 journalists). Meanwhile the newspaper group Johnston Press continues to make profits.

Members of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) working for the Daily Record and its sister paper the Sunday Mail (two mass circulation papers in Scotland) took 24 hours strike action on Saturday 11 April) as part of their campaign against job losses at the two papers.

The strike action was triggered by plans by Trinity Mirror, the conglomerate which owns the two papers along with five national newspapers and 140 regional newspapers, to merge production of the two titles and cut overall editorial staffing levels from 276 to 206.

Over 40 members of staff applied for voluntary redundancy. But proposals from the NUJ which the union has described as “a compromise solution” to prevent the need for any compulsory redundancies were rejected by Trinity Mirror management.

Strike action is now being followed up by a work-to-rule and by a further 24 hour strike on 17 April. That strike will hit the production of the following day’s edition of the Daily Record, a more profitable title for Trinity Mirror than the Sunday Mail.

Messages of support can be e-mailed to alicem@nuj.org.uk or texted to 07836 542699. Donations should be made payable to the Alan Hutcheson Fund and sent to NUJ Scotland, Third Floor, 114, Union Street, Glasgow, G1 3QQ.

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