‘LONDON is on an almost total shutdown,’ RMT General Secretary Mick Cash said yesterday during the 24-hour tube strike.
Pickets were out in force at tube stations around London. At King’s Cross yesterday morning RMT member Andy Littlechild said: ‘The station staff have shown everyone how they can put action on. There is RMT and TSSA solidarity on the ground at rank and file level.
‘And there’s more to come because this dispute is about safety for the travelling public and our members. Station control rooms need to be restaffed and we need hundreds of jobs back, that London Underground took away from us, to get the Underground functioning safely and properly again.’
Union leaflets pointed out that 834 jobs have been cut. Chris Clark, TSSA executive member for London Transport, said: ‘This strike is about public safety. We need to restore the jobs that have been cut by the Underground management.
‘Our members have been facing difficulties providing a quality public service and in many cases have been faced with a tirade of abuse and insults. So we need those jobs back now.’
RMT Regional Organiser John Leach added: ‘We need the resources to do the job, we need the staff, this is all about safety. Thousands of London Underground staff, career men and women, public servants who usually spend their entire working career working in these stations have all gone on strike, they do not do that for any small reason.
‘Last year London Underground under the previous Mayor’s instructions imposed a reduction in front line available uniformed staff on stations by 834 and decided to close a number of station control rooms.
‘That has had a devastating impact in two specific ways. One on the safe running of the Underground in the fact that basically it is falling apart at the seams. On a daily basis stations close, with overcrowding incidents and they are just about getting away with it.
‘And then of course the impact on the actual staff who are left behind has been crushing. We have tried to make it work for the last nine months and it just won’t. They have agreed with us in writing that they need to put more people back, and when we say “well how many?” it is a maximum figure of two hundred, that is just ridiculous.
‘This is just a drop in the ocean when you think about what they have taken out which is 800. The station control rooms have been shut at a number of locations, these are the hubs of a busy station where they are watching close circuit TV and monitoring the crowd control, some of these have been closed and de-staffed, that is just intolerable.’
