The following letter has been sent to all RMT drivers from Dean O'Hanlon, secretary of the RMT train grades committee:

Dear Colleague,

You may be aware that following our agreement at ACAS for the Olympics and a subsequent newsletter produced by RMT there has been a furious response from ASLEF which met at a senior level with LUL and produced a response from the Director of HR, Gerry Duffy.

LUL and ASLEF signed off an agreement at Trains Functional Council Level last September and at the time pretended that there this was a staff side agreement and tried to ignore the independent position of the RMT which never consented to it.

This resulted in long and protracted negotiations at ACAS which were severely hampered by the interference of that other organisation as the RMT sought to reach agreement on the basis that none of our members would sign up to an agreement that consented to breaches of their framework agreements.

This finally resulted in the breakthrough last week which effectively meant we would work with LUL to staff the Olympics through volunteers on shifts that lay outside normal working hours. It is explicit in the ACAS agreement that where there are insufficient volunteers then level one committees would convene to deal with any problems. At no stage did we agree that payments were conditional on breaching framework agreements and as stated this was the reason that negotiations were protracted at ACAS.

The letter sent from Gerry Duffy to Bob Crow which was evidently produced at the behest of ASLEF appears to try to pretend that the payments are conditional on framework breaches and to undermine our principled and independent stance.

We can clearly state that this is not the case and in fact our head office have already passed a resolution for our members to be balloted in the event that any of our members are asked to work past current driving parameters without their consent.

A full response to Mr Duffy's letter will be forthcoming from Head Office shortly.

You can see from the full wording of the agreement reached between LU and RMT below that the letter sent from Gerry Duffy has no bearing on reality whatsoever:

“For the period of the Olympics and Paralympics, London Underground and RMT are prepared to work in cooperation to ensure that the Olympics are successful and to demonstrate to the world a successful model of public sector service. London Underground will attempt to staff all relevant Olympic duties on a voluntary basis. In the unlikely event that any of these duties remain uncovered, level 1 committees, where they operate, or their equivalent (but where not, functional councils) will as a matter of urgency, address these issues in order to resolve them satisfactorily.
Both parties confirm there are no remaining issues relating to Olympics reward and recognition between them.
In conclusion, LU has now reached agreement, or agreement in principle, with ASLEF, RMT, TSSA and Unite, and will honour the commitments within them.”

ANNEXURE 1
1. Where an employee falls within any of the groups set out in Appendix 1, the employee will be entitled to the corresponding payment referred to in the Appendix;
2. All London Underground employees (excluding Business Managers (Band 4) and above) shall be eligible to receive:-

a. A CSS bonus payment of £100, subject to London Underground meeting a CSS target of 78 for the relevant period;

b. A CSS attendance payment of £20 for each shift worked during the period of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (between 27 July and 12 August and 29 August and 9 September respectively);

In applying the above, LU will abide by commitments entered into with all recognised trade unions.”

Yours sincerely,

Dean O’Hanlon