SOUTHERN CAMPAIGN FOR DOO

G TR Southern is deliberately preventing trains from stopping at specific stations to force though Driver Only Operation. The revelations expose the fact that the company is hell- bent on DOO, despite public claims, and are determined to have 1,600 trains a day running without a guard by January regardless of the impact on access and safety. Passengers expecting to travel to Redhill, on Victoria to Portsmouth and Southampton services earlier this month were told to leave the train as it would not be stopping at their destination. RMT general secretary Mick Cash said that GTR has shown a blatant disregard for the travelling public in its drive to get rid of the guard. “What is even more shocking is that there physically were guards working on those trains but they had been ordered by GTR bosses to not get involved in any train dispatch duties in the Redhill area,” he said. A leaked memo from the train-company funded Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) also shows that not only is Southern Rail boss Charles Horton a key player in it but he is advocating the sacking of train guards to maximise profits. The briefing, which lists Southern chief Charles Horton as a participant, claims that: “Adopting a strategy of guards redundancies delivers the greatest economic benefit while a strategy of staff turnover and redeployment of guards delivers a reduced but positive NPV [net present value] over a 20-year analysis period.” Mick Cash said that the leaked briefing blew apart repeated claims from Southern Rail that RSSB was an independent organisation. “It is a classic case of ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’ and makes a nonsense of the claims in Southern's taxpayer-funded advertising campaign. “Nowhere in this memo does it mention safety, it is all about axing guards and making fat-cat returns for the private train operators, the issue at the heart of the dispute,” he said. On the anniversary of the Paddington rail crash in October 1999 one of the survivors Helen Mitchell gave her full support to the union’s campaign to keep the guard. “As a survivor of the crash in which 31 died and countless others were burnt and injured, I am only too aware of the role of the guard/conductor. “Colin, our guard helped many people and in my eyes was a hero, directing many survivors to safety as the drivers were sadly, both immediately killed which for me underlines the deep importance of guards,” she wrote. RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: october 2016 :: RMTnews 4 R MT forced Southern to scrap it's ‘Strike Back’ poster campaign of incitement to violence against staff after a huge public backlash. After as deluge of hostile twitter messages the company hurriedly told managers to remove and destroy the offending posters which cost the taxpayer up to half a million pounds. It also led to a continuing torrent of twitter messages denouncing the company, the opposite of its intended affect SOUTHERN STRIKE OUT SOUTHERN CAMPAIGN FOR DOO