Britain’s rail networks are at a standstill once again as more than 40,000 members of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) across Network Rail and 14 train operating companies start a 48-hour walkout on Tuesday in a dispute over pay and conditions.
Train bosses who want to cut 1,900 jobs argue that the railway has not recovered from the coronavirus pandemic, is currently losing millions of pounds a day and is in desperate need of modernisation and hence cannot grant the wage rises demanded by the RMT, despite the hardship that means for its staff.
The first strike runs from Tuesday to Wednesday, followed by a second from Friday to Saturday, with others pencilled in for Christmas Eve and early January, threatening to disrupt travel over the festive period.
According to UK law, employers do not have to pay employees who take part in industrial action.
“If workers take action short of a strike, and refuse to carry out part of their contractual work, this is called ‘partial performance’,” the UK government states.
“If you refuse to accept partial performance, you must tell employees that they should only attend work if they fulfil their contractual duties and if they do not fulfil the terms of their employment contract, you do not have to pay them.
“If you do accept partial performance, you must still pay employees for any work that they have done.”
On the possibility of pay deductions, the government says employers “should only deduct the amount that the employee would have earned” and “cannot deduct an employee’s pay if they were not supposed to be working on the day of the strike”.
In preparation for this eventuality, most unions keep a war chest in order to issue strikers with a small amount of “strike pay” to live on while they occupy picket lines.
The RMT’s is known as the National Dispute Fund and is supported by union membership payments but is also open to donations from members of the general public who are sympathetic to the strikers’ cause.
During previous walkouts in November, The Independent reported that thousands of rail staff who were still at work manning signal boxes and ticket offices, empty because of the absence of trains, nevertheless received full pay for turning up just to sit idle.
Precisely how much UK rail workers earn has been a matter of some dispute.
Speaking during a parliamentary debate on 15 June this summer, then-transport secretary Grant Shapps claimed the rail sector median salary stood at £44,000, which he said was “significantly above the median salary in the country”.
He repeated the claim in an interview with Sky at the time and it was also trotted out by his fellow Conservative MPs Nick Fletcher, Jonathan Gullis and Chris Philp during media appearances.
They appeared to be citing data from the Office for National Statistics, which placed the median figure at £43,747 in 2021 across five worker categories, well above the national median, which was £25,971 last year.
However, the RMT disputed the claim by saying that the figure cited did not paint a true picture because it included drivers and failed to take into account station cleaners on minimum wage, arguing instead that the median wage of its members was more like £31,000, placing it in line with that of full-time nurses.
