The TSSA union has announced that employees from nine train companies would participate in a 24-hour strike starting at noon on September 26.
The strike is over salary and working conditions and also involves Network Rail, but efforts are ongoing to avert the strike.
The union announced that Network Rail, the owner of Britain’s train infrastructure, will also be affected by strike action over salary and working conditions.
TSSA stated that it was still in talks with National Rail over the potential of a strike-averting deal.
Manuel Cortes, however, criticized Transport Secretary Grant Shapps on Wednesday morning, stating that he was impeding genuine progress.
Mr. Cortes stated, “The dead hand of Grant Shapps prevents DfT train operating businesses from presenting an updated, significant offer.”
He must either sit across from our union at the negotiation table or step aside to allow railway executives to talk with us openly, as they did in the past.
TransPennine Express, West Midlands Trains, Avanti West Coast, c2c, CrossCountry, East Midlands Railway, Great Western Railway, LNER, and Southeastern are likely to participate in this strike.
TSSA stated that these train operators, together with Network Rail, would be at the center of the September strike.
Workers protesting low pay, job losses, and bad working conditions, which they claim are a hangover from the pandemic, have sparked a wave of strikes across different industries this summer.
An RMT strike became the greatest British rail industrial action in 30 years earlier this summer.
This was immediately followed by a TSSA strike, which the union claimed was the first rail industry-wide action it has taken in more than a decade.
Now that TSSA plans to strike again in September, Mr. Cortes has urged the government to enable train operators to return to the negotiation table with a “new proposal that improves upon the disrespectful 2% offer that was rejected earlier this summer.”
Unions around the nation are attempting to negotiate pay raises for their members that are commensurate with rising inflation.
In August, the rate of inflation in the United Kingdom reached a new 40-year high, generating greater hardship for cash-strapped people as the cost of living crisis intensifies.
In the 12 months to July, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) climbed to 10.1%, up from 9.4% in June, and remained at its highest level since February 1982, according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS).
