CALL TIME ON AGENCY WORK!

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: june 2023 :: RMTnews 16 Earlier this month RMT members who work in track protection for London Underground led a protest outside London’s City Hall, calling on the London Mayor to take action to address their pay and conditions, but also their employment status. The protesting workers are agency workers, mostly bogus self-employed and engaged by London Underground via two companies, Morson and Cleshar. Their employment status is a fiction. Nearly 95 per cent of the workers responding to a recent survey reported that they had worked on London Underground for more than five years, averaging between four and five days a week work. Yet because Morson and Cleshar engage these workers as supposedly ‘self-employed’, they are denied sick pay, holiday or pensions and live in a state of constant precariousness. The workers are often notified of work at short notice, often by text message. Although they are supposed to be given 72 hours’ notice, it is often less and because of their pay and working conditions, the workers have little choice over whether to take shifts. As one put it, ‘Waiting for the text messages on the phone day in day out and thinking about the location they are going to send you to is a nightmare.’ Alarmingly, TfL’s use of agency workers like this is on the rise again. According to the latest data put before the TfL Board, there are 400 Full Time Equivalent fewer permanent staff than in 2019/20 and almost 2,000 agency workers, 400 more than before the pandemic. The amount that TfL is spending is accordingly also on the rise. In 2019/20 it spent £86 million on agency staff which rose to £105 million in 2022. £89 million of that total went to Morson and Cleshar. There is a direct link between the government mandated austerity cuts at TfL and the growing use of agency staff. As staff leave and vacancies are unfilled, the need for labour is filled by greater use of agency workers. NETWORK RAIL There is a similarly disturbing story on Network Rail. The infrastructure company’s spending on ‘Contingent Labour’ has grown from £14 million in 2021 to £24 million the following year. This growing use of agency workers comes on top of its continued outsourcing of renewals work. Network rail spent £3.2 billion on renewals in 2021-22 and the vast majority of this went to a handful of construction companies. These are among the top 20 recipients of network Rail contracts: BAM Nuttall, J Murphy, Balfour Beatty, Amalgamated Construction, Atkins, Story and Amey. As RMT exposed back in 2013 in ‘The Great Payroll Rip Off’, its contracts with these CALL TIME ON AGENCY WORK! Agency work and the gig economy is growing on London Underground and rail infrastructure