EUROSTAR SECURITY GUARDS TAKE STRIKE ACTION

september 2005 :: RMTnews 5 S trike action by more than 130 RMT security guards employed by Chubb at Eurostar’s Ashford International and Waterloo International stations and North Pole depot is being stepped up following the company’s failure to table an acceptable pay offer. “The action has been 100-per cent solid and reflects their desire to win a just pay settlement,” RMT general secretary Bob Crow said. “But rather than sit down with us and negotiate, Chubb have chosen to waste huge sums of money on futile attempts to undermine our strike action,” he said. The union understands that the company have recruited scab security guards in Hungary, flown them into Britain and put them up in a hostel in Neasden before putting them to work on the Eurostar contract with limited training. “That makes a nonsense of their claim that our action is having no effect, but it also raises serious further concerns about their cavalier attitude to the professional security services they are supposed to be providing. “It smacks of desperation that a company should go to such extraordinary and expensive lengths to avoid negotiating a settlement with its own workforce, and it is astonishing that Eurostar should go along with it,” Bob Crow said. Chubb have agreed a framework for negotiation, but the problem is that so far they have simply failed to negotiate with RMT over pay. The depth of members’ anger was made clear when every single vote cast in the recent ballot was in favour of strike action. EUROSTAR SECURITY GUARDS TAKE STRIKE ACTION ‘BUSTITUTION’ OF WOLVERHAMPTON-WALSALL TRAINS CONDEMNED R MT condemned the Strategic Rail Authority’s “Beeching- style” decision to replace Wolverhampton-Walsall local rail services with a ‘fast coach service’ from next April. The move, the first ‘bustitution’ under new powers created by the 2005 Railways Act, was confirmed in the SRA’s Route Utilisation Strategy for the West Midlands, which also takes a further step towards permanent closure of Wedgwood, Barlaston and Norton Bridge stations on the Stoke on Trent-Stafford line. “This is the thin end of the wedge we warned about when the Railways Act was debated in parliament, and it marks a sad day for Britain’s railways, passengers and the environment,” RMT general secretary Bob Crow said. The original Beeching cuts started by replacing trains with buses, and when the bus replacements were run down whole rural communities found themselves with no public transport links at all. “Rather than cutting rail services, spending billions on new roads and pouring huge sums into private operators’ pockets we should be encouraging people out of their cars and investing in more and better railways,” Bob Crow said.