AROUND 2,500 Tube infrastructure workers at Metronet
are to be balloted for industrial action over breakdowns in industrial
relations following the victimisation of an RMT safety rep, dangerous plans to
reduce signals maintenance and attempts to impose rosters.
The safety rep is Andy Littlechild. Managers are picking out RMT
representatives and activists right across the underground. It doesn’t matter
if you are a driver station staff controller cleaner or engineer.
Andy has achieved wonders for permanent and contract staff making sure safety
is paramount whatever the cost to management. Andy is a workplace leader, who
chaired the Metronet strike committee that stopped massive job cuts, won pay
rises, got free travel and a Tfl pension for all Metronet staff. Unable to
attack Metronet workers as a group because of their strong organisation,
managers are attempting to destroy the union by making an example of one of its
best organisers.
“Andy Littlechild has been fitted up on a bogus charge
that would embarrass the Spanish Inquisition, and to add insult to injury he
was thrown out of his depot at 3am with no means of getting home,” RMT general
secretary Bob Crow commented.
For more than two years management has ignored a
central plank of Metronet’s health and safety policy, based on the ‘hierarchy
of control’, under which the first principle is to eliminate a particular
hazard, failing which attempts should be made to change the way in which a job
is carried out or the tools with which it is done, while the use of personal
protective equipment (PPE), including hard hats, is regarded under the policy
as a last resort – indeed ‘PPE is the last resort’ is a Metronet slogan.
Despite this Metronet management insist on workers always wearing a hard hat. A
manager unilaterally rewrote a risk assessment to demand that hard hats are
worn - breaking all the procedures which say he has to do this
together with Andy the RMT rep. Management then carried out an
‘audit’ when Andy was working asking him where his hat was. Andy explained that
he didn’t need one as management can’t change an assessment on their own without
a union rep. A belligerent manager ordered Andy to get off the site.
The list of victimised RMT members grows daily:
Sarah Hutchings – sacked while on sick leave
after being assaulted while pregnant,
Jerome Bowes
– sacked for defending himself against a drunk on New Year’s Eve (See Tube:action against harassment )
and many
others bullied by power crazed little Hitlers who have no regard for their own
agreed attendance and sickness procedures.
Enough is enough. Management are aware that without our activists the workers
become weak, disorganised and easily defeated. The RMT needs to stand up for us,
stand up for our activists and stand up for our union’s future.
