RMT asked for a one-year deal, a substantial pay rise, a minimum of £26k, and improvements to conditions.

LUL has offered a real-terms pay cut of 1% for 2009 and RPI+0.5% for the next four years. LUL is using the recession as a smokescreen to get the Olympics on the cheap. TfL has not even made an offer!

Both employers have refused to even consider our other claims, on issues such as medical redeployment, shorter working hours and family-friendly policies.

London Underground is shedding 1,000 jobs. TfL may cut 3,000 jobs over the next 18 months. Neither will rule out compulsory redundancies.

LUL says that these are ‘only’ admin jobs. But transport needs administrators as well as frontline staff. Some job cuts are in SQE, the department that looks after our safety! Unlike your employer, RMT values all our members’ jobs.

LUL/TfL are pushing through an ‘Organisational Change Process’ which allows for compulsory redundancies, in breach of an agreement it signed with RMT (and ASLEF) in 2001.

If LUL gets away with tearing it up, then no job is safe – including engineering and operational grades.

LUL admits to implementing its attendance and discipline policies ‘more rigorously’. For staff, this means: sick pay stopped; pay docked for emergency domestic leave; endless contact when you are sick; over-the-top disciplinary punishments; warnings given with no discretion; managers spotting fictitious ‘patterns’ of non-attendance; union representation denied; sickness treated like a crime.

Many actions by managers are aggressive and punitive, and many are outside the company’s policies and agreements. Management have created a regime of fear, where people even come to work when they are sick.

We all know a workmate who has suffered under this harsh regime – or perhaps you have suffered yourself. So many staff have complained that managers have denied their rights that these abuses appear co-ordinated.