Latest Rail News

31.01.18

DLR faces industrial action after talks with contractor fail

A 48 hour strike on London’s Docklands Light Railway (DLR) will commence tomorrow, the RMT has confirmed.

The union says that the industrial action is over a “comprehensive breakdown in industrial relations” after talks failed earlier this week, with failure to provide “a proper response to the union’s pay claim and the failure to resolve long standing issues.”

Members of the union, including cleaners, security staff and travel safe officers, working for ISS on the KAD contract, will down tools from 05:30am tomorrow, until Saturday morning.

They have also been instructed to not deviate from the current valid approved risk assessments between Monday 5 February and Saturday 10 February.

RMT general secretary, Mick Cash, explained: “We are supporting our members’ further strike action in a bid to force management to honour agreements, pay staff their contractual hours and give their staff proper respect and dignity at work.”

He added: “We are expecting further and continuing solid support from our members in this dispute. The union remains available for meaningful talks.”

A spokesperson for ISS said that the company is “disappointed” by the planned industrial action.

“We continue to meet with the RMT in an attempt to resolve the dispute and welcome positive and transparent discussions to resolve the perceived issues.

Our priority now is to minimise the disruption to the travelling public and we will achieve this through using additional resources from other qualified Transport teams.”

Mark Davis, interim general manager of the DLR, also added: “This issue is between the RMT Union and ISS, the KeolisAmey Docklands contractor which provides cleaning and security staff on the DLR. 

“We have been assured this will not have an impact on our customers or the DLR service.

“We urge all parties to sit down and talk through the issues to try and resolve them as soon as possible.”

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Comments

Ian Watkins   31/01/2018 at 17:46

Assess If the number of strikes the RMT call is an indication of how awful working in the rail industry is, I'm surprised anybody wants to work there. Here's a challenge for the RTM staff. Find a story about the RMT that doesn't involve them calling a strike. Unfortunately I'm not holding my breath....

Jason   02/02/2018 at 05:11

Hope the companies start treating their employees more respectfully. Without them no one would want to travel on the service

Jerry Alderson   02/02/2018 at 12:37

Having travelled on two excellent GoA4 metro systems Copenhagen [all lines] and Paris [lines 1 and 14]) and about to go on my third system (Nuremberg), I wonder whether TfL are considering a study into converting the DLR (or at least one line) from GoA3 to GoA4. With the luxury of having modern stations it doesn't seem too difficult to me.

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