Yesterday the RMT attended Acas with our sister union, Aslef.
The intention was to finalise the agreement that we have been working on since May 2016 and there was very little outstanding to resolve. Unfortunately the talks have completely collapsed as LUL have now stated that they wish to discuss job losses and our previously worked proposals were now invalid.
Transplant – Proposed ETO Regrading Initiative – updated Proposal 23 1 17 – Final for submission
At the meeting the RMT and Aslef stated:
- That the RMT and trade union position was that they would not allow a situation whereby people were made redundant to fund a payrise. This was completely rejected.
- That the company was again deliberately moving the goal posts and that they needed to be honest, they either wanted to ‘do a deal’ or they didn’t. This was also perceived as an attempt to further delay talks by introducing a proposal that would take months to discuss
- The RMT and Aslef proposal had given them every productivity that they had asked for.
- That basically the company are ripping up the previous proposals and saying ‘screw you’
- We continually asked them, that on the basis of a company proposal to link job redundancies to a payrise was completely unacceptable, and given that we was at a dispute resolution meeting, how did they intend to solve this issue. They could not answer
- We informed them that our members would therefore answer for them with their action over the next few weeks and months and we will then see how the company feel
- There are no further meetings planned on this dispute.
The company stated that they are going to table these job losses at the Tube Lines Company Council which we believe the first available time slot is approximately March 2017.
Our response will be from our members starting this Friday when their Industrial Action will commence. We expect there to be serious impacts and we are dismayed that our members have been forced into this position when there was a deal there ready to be signed off.
We will remain available to talk should there be a change of heart from the company