Of all the low moments in the long-running rail dispute, few have possibly been as dispiriting as the past 24 hours. After Network Rail and the RMT union reached agreement on a two-year deal in March, longsuffering passengers and workers might have assumed the truce was also leading to a wider settlement between train firms and their staff.
The subsequent calm, with no further strikes on the horizon, abruptly ended on Thursday when first the train drivers union Aslef and then the RMT announced fresh action. Aslef’s move to three days of strikes and a week-long overtime ban is the union’s toughest single action yet, underlining the anger felt by drivers at a lowball offer with strings attached.
The RMT accused the Rail Delivery Group (RDG), the train operators’ representatives in talks, of “reneging” on its proposals. The RDG said it was mystified. And in an escalation of rhetoric, the transport secretary, Mark Harper, bracketed unions with Putin for targeting Ukrainians, by striking on the date of the Eurovision final in Liverpool on 13 May.
How much attention unions had given Eurovision is unclear. Either way, the strikes and uncertainty spell more misery for train users and even less revenue coming to the battered railway. Few have any interest in spinning this out – bar perhaps a government that is bearing down on wider pay claims and wanting to show it can face down the unions.
The latest war of words suggests that there remains a fundamental breakdown somewhere along the chain between railway workers and the ministers who ultimately control the budget. The pay offer that came to Aslef on Wednesday, of 4% a year, failed to match even the lowest end of the sub-inflation deal the union was reluctantly expecting after months of talks – or the rate of increase offered to other staff.
But the RMT’s rejection of the offer after two weeks of consideration seems to have genuinely “blindsided” rail firms, as the RDG’s chief negotiator, Steve Montgomery, put it. According to Mick Lynch, general secretary of the RMT, a conversation clarified terms of the deal that would have stripped the union of its immediate mandate to strike while still negotiating towards a second year. That is deemed unacceptable – although rail firms question why the RMT failed to notice the wording laid out on page 1 of the offer immediately.
The lament on both sides has long been that the other’s negotiators are unable to commit – whether union leaders outflanked by a more hardline executive, or rail bosses whose contracts and payments are now minutely dictated by the Department for Transport (DfT).
Some in the DfT undoubtedly see the post-Covid environment as a moment to demand long wished-for reform and “modernise” the railway, as they like to put it, while ministers have also made clear that the pay rises are now considered in the Treasury as a benchmark for wider public pay settlements to more people. In the context of nurses’ pay, a cumulative £5,000 rise for drivers sounds reasonable – even if those train drivers have had their pay frozen for longer than, say, MPs.
Some staff remain furious at their falling real-terms pay. But enough are strike-weary, demonstrated by the vote for a similar – though in some crucial details, better – deal at Network Rail to encourage ministers to think they can win this, possibly with fewer strikes than they had budgeted for.
In the middle are firms growing tired of the disruption and reputational damage, and the lack of freedom to manoeuvre – even if they are indemnified by the taxpayer against immediate strike losses. Most of their owning groups also operate bus services – where they either concurred that their staff were due a decent pay rise in a time of crisis and soaring inflation, or weighed up the cost and concluded it wasn’t worth the lost revenue or pain of a prolonged strike. Unfortunately for operators, staff and passengers, on the railway it appears a different calculation applies.
