London’s entire underground tube system – apart from the Elizabeth Line – is being paralysed for almost a week by a rolling series of strikes called by the RMT union to which the Tube drivers belong. The Tube is not due to return to ‘normal’ until 8 a.m. on Friday. The disruption is the first all-out strike on the Underground since March 2023.
There is a solution to the stress and strain that Tube drivers suffer which would remove the need for such massively disruptive stoppages permanently: the driverless train
The union has called the strikes despite only 57 per cent of its 10,400 London members having bothered to vote in a postal ballot for strike action. Tube train drivers take home an average annual salary of between £65,000 and £75,000, but RMT say that the real value of their pay has been eroded by inflation, and are demanding a reduction in their working week from 35 to 32 hours to compensate. TfL management say that this is ‘neither practical nor affordable’ and have offered a 3.4 per cent pay rise instead.
Drivers work 35 hours a week in three shifts and say the stress of shift work to keep trains running for 24 hours a day takes a toll of their physical and mental health. The union has accused TfL of not taking this ‘fatigue management’ seriously.
There is, however, a solution to the stress and strain that Tube drivers suffer which would remove the need for such massively disruptive stoppages permanently: the driverless train.
The Docklands Light Railway (DLR) in east London, which links the City airport and Canary Wharf to other parts of the capital, is a driverless metro train service which first opened almost 40 years ago in 1987 and has been extended several times since. It runs trains along 24 miles of track and has operated continuously without major adverse incidents or disasters ever since.
Despite this success story, London’s mayor Sadiq Khan announced last year that there were no plans to convert the underground system to a driverless service, even though the technology to do so is clearly achievable. The RMT oppose the driverless trains, ostensibly on safety grounds, but though drivers would disappear, there is no reason why they couldn’t be retrained to act as guards and inspectors.
What is preventing such progress is the stubborn Luddite refusal of the unions to accept and adapt to such an inevitable change. Their reactionary attitudes reminds me of the futile resistance of the printing unions to change which did so much to speed the decline of the national newspaper industry.
I worked in Fleet Street, the traditional heart of the newspaper industry, in the 1980s when newspaper management lived in fear of the tyrannical power of the three printing unions the NGA, NATSOPA and SOGAT. The crooked ‘Spanish practices’ and constant strikes of the unions made the smooth production of national newspapers increasingly difficult, and yet the unions adamantly refused to accept the introduction of new computer technology which threatened to make them redundant.
Rupert Murdoch finally broke free of the union blackmail when in January 1986 he moved production of his papers out to Wapping, defying the bullying and intimidation of the Luddites, causing a revolution that would soon be followed by the rest of the press barons.
So long as Sadiq Khan and his administration running (and ruining) London remain in hock to the RMT and their short-sighted greed, millions of Londoners will continue to suffer the misery of such unnecessary and anti-social action.
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