August 21st - Brace yourselves for the next round of train strikes
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 21 August 2023
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For today’s travel podcast, I’m on the train again, from London Bridge to Gatwick Airport – making the most of the opportunity of rail travel ahead of the next round of national strikes across England on:
26 August RMT, the main rail union
1 September Aslef (train drivers)
2 September RMT.
Thousands of trains will be cancelled every day. Check before travel.
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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 on the road again or on a train again. |
| 0:10.8 | This happens to be a Thameslink train just pulling away from London Bridge Station heading for Gatwick Airport and Brighton. |
| 0:29.8 | I'm making the most of it today because, well, from Saturday, the National Rail Strikes across England resume. |
| 0:37.7 | That will mean that this train, almost certainly, will be cancelled along with thousands of others. So I wanted to tell you what was happening and then dig a bit deeper as to how long this is going to be going on for. |
| 0:47.0 | Just the background, of course, the National Rail Strikes, first one since the 1980s, resumed in June 2022. |
| 0:56.0 | Yes, that is exactly 14 months ago. |
| 1:01.0 | 21st of June it was midsummer's day. |
| 1:05.0 | The disputes, well there's a couple of them really, the RMT union and as left the train |
| 1:13.3 | drivers union against the train operators and even though the unions have rather |
| 1:20.2 | different views and different asks and they've been made different offers the |
| 1:26.8 | disputes really boil down to a couple of things. |
| 1:29.3 | The first one is that they want a no strings pay offer. That's all they want. They just want a decent pay rise to reflect the fact that many of them haven't had an increase in pay for four years and |
| 1:45.7 | they want something which at least recognises the very high level of inflation since then. |
| 1:52.3 | So that's what is happening with the union side and you may well think well that sounds entirely |
| 2:00.0 | reasonable. |
| 2:05.7 | On the other side, you've got the train operators, 14 of them, |
| 2:11.8 | including all the main long distance intercity services in England, |
| 2:14.4 | as well as main commuter services, |
| 2:19.4 | as well as companies such as West Midlands trains and Chiltern, which have lots of stuff going on in the Midlands and Northern, which runs, well, quite a lot of local |
| 2:24.8 | services. Guess what, in the north of England? They say, yes, we want to give you a pay increase, |
| 2:34.0 | of course we do, because we want to make sure that you |
| 2:36.6 | are properly rewarded for the excellent work you do but we can only afford to give you a modest |
... |
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