UK: The RMT trade union has written to Secretary of State for Transport Heidi Alexander saying the government should not use ‘flawed productivity measures and wage restraint’ in the rail sector.
On October 20 the union said that linking railway workers’ pay offers above CPI to staff productivity savings would be ‘a dangerous approach that risks repeating the mistakes of austerity and undermining the railway’s long-term future’.
RMT said that concerns about railway staffing costs ‘ignore major structural problems in the industry, such as the ongoing costs of outsourcing, leasing charges, and private debt, while focusing narrowly on labour inputs to push a political agenda’.
’Not afraid of productivity discussions’
In the letter, RMT General Secretary Eddie Dempsey said the union ’is not afraid of productivity discussions, far from it’, and has its own suggestions for ’increasing the efficiency of spending on rail, for tackling the low productivity of parts of the railway and for how to increase output’.
But he said ‘we cannot have a situation where productivity is debased into meaning trading work intensification for pay. That is not real productivity, it’s another version of the doom spiral characteristic of the debate around austerity cuts and it will be just as damaging to the real base of productivity growth as those cuts were to the economy.’
He said using pay negotiations ‘to con the public into thinking this will fix the industry’s problems is not the right approach’.
