Campaigning for better pay
If you want to keep up with the latest statistics on pay settlements, inflation and other employment-related facts, you could try looking at the IDS website.
One fact it will tell you is that median pay settlements are currently running at 2% - a full 0.5% higher than LUL and TfL's current offers. ['Median' is one type of average, found by arranging the values in order and then selecting the one in the middle.]
Bob Crow, RMT General Secretary, said:
“Transport workers in London will look at Boris Johnson’s claim that £250,000 a year for moonlighting in a second job is “chickenfeed” and wonder just what planet he’s living on.
“Our members working as cleaners on London Underground, who have been denied the London Living Wage that was promised them by Boris Johnson, will be especially angry when they are out there doing dirty jobs for little more than six pounds an hour.
This link shows Boris Johnson describe his quarter of a million payment for a second job as a journalist as “chicken feed”.
It makes me wonder not only about our Mayor's judgement but also his hypocrisy in opposing the RMT pay claim. Why is it that millionaires so strongly oppose people on just over twenty thousand per annum getting a pay rise that keeps up with the real rate of inflation?!
Here are some recent pay settlements, which may help put London Underground's and TfL's current offers in perspective:
London Underground has today tabled a revised pay offer:
The latest figures from the Office of National Statistics (attached) prove once again that LUL/TfL's pay offers lag well behind rising prices - in other words will cut your pay in real terms.
In the year to May, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose by 2.2%. The Retail Price index - acknowledged as seriously underestimating real inflation - stood at -1.1%. RPIX (RPI, excluding mortgage interest payments) was +1.6%.
Here are some price rises for particular areas of your spending:
Click '1 attachment' / file name to download this important leaflet.
The attached leaflet has been jointly issued by RMT and other TfL unions PCS, Prospect, TSSA, Unison and Unite.
It explains why the unions have unanimously agreed to reject TfL's pay offer.
RMT representatives again attended talks aimed at resolving our 'jobs, pay and justice' dispute at ACAS on Wednesday 24 June.
Most of the day's discussion centred around management's difficulty with accepting that the settlement of the 2001 dispute (the so-called 'Jobs for Life' deal) means what it actually says! The agreement clearly states that:
On Wednesday 17 June, RMT protested outside Mayor's Question Time against Tube cleaners' poverty pay. Protesters demanded that Mayor Boris Johnson keep his promise that everyone working for the GLA or in its areas of responsibility would receive the London Living Wage, recently uprated to £7.60 an hour.