April 5th - That Friday feeling as more rail strikes hit
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 5 April 2024
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
National rail strikes by train drivers have entered their 22nd month with a series of “rolling” walk-outs, one region at a time, planned for early April.
Members of the Aslef union plan to halt thousands of trains on 5, 6 and 8 April. The aim is to disrupt services on the 14 rail firms in England that are controlled by the UK government and represented by the Rail Delivery Group (RDG). Rolling strikes cause maximum disruption for minimum loss of pay.
Today I'm talking to Mick Whelan, general secretary of the train drivers' union, Aslef, on the first day of the latest round of strikes.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Friday the 5th of April, which means that it's another train strike day. |
| 0:13.7 | Train drivers belonging to the Aslef Union are walking out at four train operators today of Ante West Coast, East Midlands Railway, West Midlands Railway and cross-country. |
| 0:25.0 | Those rail firms have cancelled all their services today. |
| 0:29.1 | And other train operators who you might wish to switch to, such as Chilton between London and Birmingham, say, |
| 0:36.8 | essential travel only due to strike action on other |
| 0:41.2 | operators. It's a very, very intractable dispute. There hasn't been any negotiations for the past |
| 0:49.5 | year between, as left the train drivers union and the rail delivery group representing the train |
| 0:57.3 | operators who are in dispute ultimately the train drivers say we want a no-strings pay rise |
| 1:05.2 | to reflect the fact that many of us haven't had a pay increase for five years and then we can talk about changes to |
| 1:12.4 | working arrangements but we'll do what we've always done which is effectively sell those to you so |
| 1:18.4 | we get another pay increase on top the department for transport says hang on we are offering a pay |
| 1:27.3 | rise which will take the average train driver's salary |
| 1:30.4 | from 60 to 65,000 pounds, and by the way, we cannot afford to keep subsidising the railway to this |
| 1:39.1 | extent. Rail revenue is 8 million pounds a day less than it was before the COVID pandemic. |
| 1:47.0 | There's more rolling strikes along the way, so tomorrow it will be at the turn of LNER on the East Coast mainline, |
| 1:56.0 | children, northern and Transpenine, all cancelling all trains, as well as cross-country, saying, please travel only if essential, because of a number of passengers who want to switch and Great Western region running no long-distance trains at all. |
| 2:14.0 | On Monday, you will see effectively all the London commuter services not running or having an |
| 2:22.2 | extremely limited service. I've been talking to Mick Wheelan. He is the general secretary, |
| 2:29.4 | the boss of the train drivers union, Asle about the dispute he has some interesting things |
| 2:36.0 | to say just a couple |
| 2:38.0 | of terms that he uses talks |
| 2:39.9 | they are the train operating |
... |
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