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RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: march 2013 :: RMTnews 13 S ince winning the Greater Western franchise in April 2006 FirstGroup (FGW) has made £321 million in franchise payments and received £533 million in subsidy. That adds up to a whopping £212 million subsidy-funded profit! With bumper taxpayers’ hand-outs on this scale you might expect good employment practices and respect for workers delivering the services that keep FirstGroup shareholders' noses in the trough. First Group's corporate mantra states:“Our people are fundamental to the success of our business and key to satisfied customers. We aspire to be the employer of choice in our business sector”. But that's not the experience of RMT members employed by Mite Facility Services, the agency FGW uses to provide turnaround cleaners for trains at Paddington station and overnight deep cleaning at Old Oak Common maintenance depot. The majority of these workers are paid as little as £6.37 per hour; 18p above the national minimum wage, with no additional Sunday, rest day or overtime enhancements, no right to join the railway pension scheme, no statutory sick pay, statutory minimum annual leave and no travel facilities as enjoyed by other RMT members. What is worse than working for £6.37/hour with no job security? Try not getting paid at all! Out of 44 workers employed by Mitie at Paddington, 40 were owed wages, or had been owed wages on at least one occasion in the last year. Many were owed hundreds of hours with some members receiving no wages at all on more than one occasion. One RMT member cleaning FGW trains received no wages in October, November, or December 2012, only to receive a mere £400 on Xmas Eve. Not even enough to pay back the loans borrowed from payday loan-sharks to avoid eviction. How's that for Xmas cheer? His case is not a lone example. Not a single worker surveyed received payslips on time and some never received a payslip at all. Bullying and intimidation was rife. Every single member has to rely on benefits to survive, so it’s a double hand-out from taxpayers for greedy First Group profiteers: once for franchise subsidies and a second time to subsidise the wage bill. Many workers surveyed were employed on 'zero-hours' contracts: the holy grail of ‘flexploitation’. The EU Agency Workers Directive, which seeks to normalise labour casualisation, is at the heart of a trend among employers using sub- contracting to swerve their to the workers who deliver their profits. Unless we unite to defend workers in our industry ‘flexploitation’ will become the default employment model in the future, first with cleaning and security staff, then for revenue protection, gatelines and ticket offices. In theory, all non-safety critical roles at FGW and other train operating companies could be provided through labour agencies and how long before this becomes the primary employment route for the entire industry? The spectre of outsourced and agency employment is as great a danger to transport workers now as rail privatisation was in the 1990s. With Mitie, as with other agency labour providers, hard work by RMT reps and activists brought union recognition, but what has it delivered? At Paddington, victory after a hard fought dispute won our members a three-year pay award achieving just 18p per hour above the minimum wage! Well done to all involved, but in reality that amount barely pays the members' union dues! We delude ourselves if we imagine that we are fighting for low-paid workers by pursuing a policy limited to organising the workers employed by gangster agencies, rather than forcing train operators like FGW and other railway employers to bring agency workers ‘in-house’. Labour agencies are a double injustice: exposing the most vulnerable workers in the transport industry to 'flexploitation' and also undermining jobs and conditions of directly employed members! There can be only one response, drive 'flexploitation' out of the transport industry. RMT's National Cleaners' Campaign must focus on forcing train operators, LUL and Network Rail to bring work ‘in- house’ and all workers currently victims of the flexploitation scam so they can benefit from railway pensions, sick pay and all the other benefits fought for and won by this union. We need to fight for direct employment rights for agency workers before more jobs are tendered out to the gangsters running the flexploitation scam. Name supplied. said one member. He went on to explain completely unsafe work practices but, as he explained, “you have little choice as an agency worker” and the next day he was sacked anyway. A litany of similar incidents of chaos, danger and confusion are very common among those who work for the sub contractors, who pay workers as little £45 a day. RMT has also been raising serious concerns about the shortage of overhead line crew and capacity on Britain's railways for a number of years now. The latest overhead line failure at St Neots, causing chaos on rail services, came weeks after the lines came down at Radlett. Assistant general secretary Mick Cash said that while experienced staff were being lost by job cuts or being driven out of the industry due to casualisation, poverty pay and dangerous conditions, Network Rail managers were collecting huge bonuses of 40 to 50 per cent of their pay as reward for cutting costs. "RMT wants all cuts to staffing, maintenance and renewals reversed and all track works brought back in house rather than subbed-out to contractors. “The current contractor staff should be transferred over to direct Network Rail employment. “We also want the pressure from the centre to run services at any costs lifted to enable safety-critical works to take place immediately. "Finally, we want an end to the further cuts proposed by the government in its McNulty Rail Review before we end up with another rail tragedy on Britain's tracks with ministers paraded on our screens with blood on their hands. “Those ministers have to take responsibility right now for the rail scandal that is unfolding on their watch," he said. RMT general secretary Bob Crow said that the travelling public had a right to know the real impact of cost-cutting and privatisation. “RMT members are sick and tired of the corner cutting and dash for profits which is undermining safety on the tracks,” he said. 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