Rail unions vow to fight curb on strikes

Ministers drawing up plans to beat disruption

RAIL unions yesterday threatened the ‘fiercest resistance’ to ministers’ plans to thwart the impact of planned strikes.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said the Government was considering legislation to make strikes illegal unless a minimum staffing requirement was in place.

Union plans for a ‘summer of discontent’ – which could see the biggest walkout since the General Strike of 1926 – risk ‘fatally damaging the railways’, where passenger numbers have not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels, Mr Shapps said.

His warning drew an angry response from rail union leaders, who have balloted their members over whether to launch a national strike. Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union general secretary Mick Lynch said he expected his 40,000 members to back a campaign of industrial action over jobs, pay and conditions.

He said: ‘Any attempt by Grant Shapps to make effective strike action illegal on the railways will be met with the fiercest resistance from RMT and the wider trade union movement.’

Manuel Cortes, general secretary of the Transport Salaried Staffs Association (TSSA), which is also threatening industrial action, said threats of government legislation were ‘desperate nonsense’. Mr Lynch has warned a strike by his union would ‘bring the country to a standstill’. A ballot of RMT members, including staff on Network Rail and 15 train operating companies, is due to close tomorrow.

Industry sources said it would create ‘serious challenges’ in keeping goods moving and supermarket shelves stocked, and plans are being drawn up for freight trains to take priority over passenger services.

Mr Shapps is expected to meet with the Prime Minister and the Chancellor this week to discuss the unions’ threat. He told the Sunday Telegraph that Britain’s railways were on ‘financial life support’ because of the fall in their use during the pandemic, and warned a strike could deter more people from using trains.

He cited a pledge in the Conservatives’ manifesto to ‘require that a minimum service operates during transport strikes’.

He said: ‘If they really got to that point then minimum service levels would be a way to work towards protecting those freight routes and those sort of things.’

A change in the law could make indusa

‘On financial life support’

trial action illegal if those minimum staffing requirements were not met.

Mr Lynch said such legislation would make any effective strike action illegal, and claimed it amounted to an attack on ‘the democratic rights of working people’.

TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady accused ministers of ‘picking a fight with unions’ to distract voters from their failure to deal with the cost of living crisis.

The dispute centres on pay, working conditions and job cuts as ministers ask the rail industry to make £2billion of savings.