Behind the train driver strikes

On 1 December we begin a nine day ban on Rest Day Working (RDW, voluntary overtime) and a series of one day strikes by train driver members of Aslef employed by Train Operating Companies (TOCs). A long-running dispute over pay has turned also into a battle over conditions of employment.

On the table since the beginning of 2023 has been an offer of 4% for 2022-3 and 4% for 2023-4 in return for huge cuts to key terms and conditions on training, redundancy, ill-health retirement (important in a job where a wide range of health conditions can make it unsafe to continue work), rostering (what and how much work can be given to a driver in the course of a working week) and diagramming (how a working day is structured — driving time, minimum rest periods, breaks from the cab etc).

These conditions vary from TOC to TOC but there are some features that are pretty much common to all operators that the government and rail bosses (represented by the Rail Delivery Group) would love to slash in order to run the network more cheaply.

This offer was designed to be rejected — the government knows that these are some of the fundamentals of what make the job secure and tolerable, and that many of these items are unlikely to be sold for any price, let alone a below-inflation pay increase.

The day before the start of the RDW ban sees the close of a referendum of RMT members on a revised offer put to their non-driver members employed by the TOCs. That offer is a one-year deal of 5% with “no strings”, other than an obligation to negotiate the “strings” on the subsequent year’s pay increase, already months overdue. The RMT leadership has made no recommendation on this offer, although it is signalling strongly to its members that it wants out of the dispute rather than to fight any further. There are various possible motivations for the new offer to the RMT but the most likely are just a desire to avoid strikes over the Christmas period, and to isolate Aslef as the smaller (and therefore financially weaker) union.

Drivers will strike at East Midlands Rail and London North Eastern on Saturday 2 December; at Avanti West Coast, Chiltern, Great Northern Thameslink, and West Midlands on Sunday 3 December; at C2C and Greater Anglia on Tuesday 5 December; at Southeastern, Southern/Gatwick Express, South West Rail main line, SWR depot drivers, and Island Line on Wednesday 6 December; at CrossCountry and Great Western on Thursday 7 December; and at Northern and Trans-Pennine on Friday 8 December.

This spreading out of the one-day strikes is a tactical departure for Aslef, which has up to now been holding sporadic one-day strikes of all involved members on the same day. The aim appears to be to appear to be escalating the action without costing any group of members additional pay. In the context of “strike as protest” rather than “strike until victory”, there is a certain logic to trying this, and some of the media reporting on it suggests that it may well be perceived that way. Certainly the union’s leadership will be hoping to stay in news headlines for longer as a result of having its members out for more consecutive days, albeit in much smaller groups and with less overall impact on service on any given day. It remains to be seen whether or how well this approach will work.