FIGHTING DOO ON SOUTHERN

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: february 2017 :: RMTnews 4 A deal agreed with Southern Rail bosses, ASLEF and the TUC which would have extended Driver-Only Operation (DOO) has been rejected by ASLEF members working for the company. RMT had been barred from the TUC talks but when RMT entered direct talks with Southern it became clear that the company was bulldozing through DOO further and faster with safety and access to services not even on their agenda. RMT general secretary Mick Cash said that Southern had refused point blank to give a guarantee on a second safety- critical member of staff and revealed that the deal negotiated by the TUC was even worse than first expected. He said that it was a betrayal of not only the conductor grade and drivers, but also passengers, including disabled passengers, who had lost the guarantee of a second member of staff on their trains. “The ASLEF referendum rejecting this deal is entirely a matter for them and their members but RMT will remain focussed on the industrial and public campaign to protect the safety of the travelling public and to put access and safe operations before profits. "RMT will now look to take that campaign into its next phase working with our sister rail unions, the wider trade union movement and the passengers who use the railway. "RMT repeats the call to Southern to give the guarantee of a second, safety critical member of staff on their trains and to sit down with the unions in new talks around the issue of safe train dispatch,” he said. The union also discovered that right in the middle of the TUC talks, Southern was stripping On-Board Supervisors’s (OBSs) of their safety accreditation in a spiteful act designed to undermine and humiliate RMT members. The union has written to GTR Chief Executive Charles Horton regarding stripping guards of their license/certification cards which detail their safety critical competencies. “This sort of aggressive and provocative behaviour does nothing to resolve the disputes and RMT repeats the call for immediate inclusion in talks, a cessation to this hostile approach from the company and a genuine attempt to negotiate a settlement,” said Mick Cash. RMT also highlighted the fact that new figures show the equivalent of a thousand services per year continue to operate without a second member of staff, despite promises made by GTR bosses. RMT had already revealed that at least six times more Southern services were travelling without a second member of staff than was promised. At that time the company dismissed the figures as exceptional by claiming last- minute changes to services caused by the industrial action and the drivers' overtime ban had displaced the on-board supervisor. However, the new figures provided by rail workers and passengers when there wasn’t any industrial action and show that at least 26 trains did not have a scheduled On Board Supervisor, maintaining the average of three services a day without an OBS, the equivalent of a 1000 a year. FIGHTING DOO ON SOUTHERN ASLEF members reject TUC-brokered deal to extend Driver-Only Operation