Are the Tube strikes relevant outside London?
Post categories: City Hall, Industrial action, London Underground, Politics
|15:31 UK time, Monday, 6 September 2010
If you don't use London Underground and live miles away from the capital, you might be wondering why and how the Tube strike affects you.
Well, in London there's been a Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson for the last two years.
And one of the first things he did was to instigate £5 billion of efficiency savings at Transport for London, which he oversees.
A lot of money has been saved in the renegotiation of contracts but London Underground wants to save £16 million a year by cutting 800 posts and reducing ticket office opening hours.
London Underground says there will be no compulsory redundancies and is rationalising staffing due to the success of an electronic payment card called Oyster.
It says every station that has a ticket office will continue to have one and no station will be unstaffed.
The unions say it's a safety issue and will mean a poorer service for customers.
At the moment we are in dead-lock with a wave of strike dates planned through the Autumn. While the RMT union has a reputation for striking, the TSSA union, who represent station staff, don't and isn't militant.
So the cuts we are seeing in the capital have taken some time to come through and certainly City Hall thinks it is two years ahead of the cuts being talked about by the Coalition government.
Other unions will be watching how this dispute plays out.
Will either side compromise? Has this now become a clash of ideologies?
Will other Unions react in a similar way if job cuts are proposed there? Will the Unions in other areas copy these tactics of a long drawn out dispute with a strike for 24-hours every four weeks? Some think they could.
Not everyone agrees though.
Tony Travers at the London School of Economics thinks it's very difficult for other unions to copy the action on the Tube.
London Underground is a monopoly and he thinks the unions know it's very difficult for the politicians to do anything about the strikes.
He also believes the action is unique and not a harbinger of cuts elsewhere.
Let me know what you think...
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