Transport strike stirs chaos

Commuters trying to get around London faced chaos on Tuesday as the entire underground network was shut down by the first two days of strikes planned for this week.

Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union, or RMT, voted overwhelmingly to strike in protest at what they see to be a threat to their jobs and pensions, following an independent review organised by London Mayor Sadiq Khan on how the system can recover from the pandemic’s impact.

London’s underground Tube railway was suspended, the capital’s transport body said, as staff strike over fears of job cuts and pension changes due to a funding crisis.

“All tube lines are suspended,” a Transport for London spokesman told AFP, as the organisation urged commuters to work from home or use alternative public transport.

Members of the RMT transport trade union are staging separate walkouts on Tuesday and Thursday in a bitter dispute that has sparked travel chaos, with knock-on effects also expected on Wednesday and Friday.

The action comes as the British government handed TfL a new financial lifeline last week after Covid lockdowns shattered revenues.

The RMT warns that any spending cutbacks as a result of the deal will lead to hundreds of job losses, reductions in pensions and affected working conditions.

Transport for London, or TfL, identified the pension scheme and a reduction in station jobs as ways to save money, but RMT general secretary Mick Lynch accused the government of “deliberately engineering” a financial crisis within the service “which would savage jobs, services, safety and threaten working conditions and pensions”.

“These are the very same transport staff praised as heroes for carrying London through Covid for nearly two years, often at serious personal risk, who now have no option but to strike to defend their livelihoods… politicians need to wake up to the fact that transport staff will not pay the price for this cynically engineered crisis.”

He also said Sadiq Khan could “solve this dispute by agreeing to talks that meet the concerns of his own workforce”.

“For the good of his workers and London’s recovery, Sadiq needs to stand firm against the government, stop the pensions raid and end the job massacre,” Lynch said.

With disruption expected all day, people were advised to work from home wherever possible.

The second day of strike is planned for Thursday, with the days in between also likely to be affected because of the knock-on effect of the previous day’s actions.

Huge queues

The strike also meant that other public transport services were busier than usual, with the BBC sharing images of huge queues and even reporting scuffles among passengers trying to get onto buses.

Arbitration talks to try to avoid the strike broke down because TfL “confirmed all the union’s worst fears that nothing is off the table in terms of the threat to jobs, pensions, conditions and safety”, said the RMT.

TfL chief operating officer Andy Lord called the strike “extremely disappointing” and said the suggested savings would not mean any compulsory redundancies, as vacancies would be left unfilled.

“No proposals have been tabled on pensions or terms and conditions, and nobody has or will lose their jobs as a result of the proposals we have set out,” he said.

“The devastating impact of the pandemic on TfL finances has made a program of change urgently necessary and we need the RMT to work with us, rather than disrupting London’s recovery.”

Taxpayers will provide TfL with £200 million ($270 million, 240 million euros) in a fourth extraordinary funding settlement that helps TfL through to June 24, the government had announced Friday.

Britain has now provided TfL with close to £5.0 billion in emergency funding since March 2020 when the UK first went into lockdown.

TfL also runs bus and overground railway services throughout London.

Its revenue crashed by 95 per cent at the height of the first coronavirus wave in 2020, while in recent months the Tube has been plagued by strikes.

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