AROUND 2,500 Tube infrastructure workers at Metronet are to be balloted for industrial action over breakdowns in industrial relations following the victimisation of an RMT safety rep, dangerous plans to reduce signals maintenance and attempts to impose rosters.
 
The safety rep is Andy Littlechild. Managers are picking out RMT representatives and activists right across the underground. It doesn’t matter if you are a driver station staff controller cleaner or engineer.

Andy has achieved wonders for permanent and contract staff making sure safety is paramount whatever the cost to management. Andy is a workplace leader, who chaired the Metronet strike committee that stopped massive job cuts, won pay rises, got free travel and a Tfl pension for all Metronet staff. Unable to attack Metronet workers as a group because of their strong organisation, managers are attempting to destroy the union by making an example of one of its best organisers. 

“Andy Littlechild has been fitted up on a bogus charge that would embarrass the Spanish Inquisition, and to add insult to injury he was thrown out of his depot at 3am with no means of getting home,” RMT general secretary Bob Crow commented. 

For more than two years management has ignored a central plank of Metronet’s health and safety policy, based on the ‘hierarchy of control’, under which the first principle is to eliminate a particular hazard, failing which attempts should be made to change the way in which a job is carried out or the tools with which it is done, while the use of personal protective equipment (PPE), including hard hats, is regarded under the policy as a last resort – indeed ‘PPE is the last resort’ is a Metronet slogan.
 
Despite this Metronet management insist on workers always wearing a hard hat. A manager unilaterally rewrote a risk assessment to demand that hard hats are worn - breaking all the procedures which say he has to do this together with Andy the RMT rep. Management then carried out an 'audit' when Andy was working asking him where his hat was. Andy explained that he didn’t need one as management can’t change an assessment on their own without a union rep. A belligerent manager ordered Andy to get off the site.
 
The list of victimised RMT members grows daily:

Sarah Hutchings - sacked while on sick leave after being assaulted while pregnant,

Jerome Bowes - sacked for defending himself against a drunk on New Year’s Eve (See Tube:action against harassment )

and many others bullied by power crazed little Hitlers who have no regard for their own agreed attendance and sickness procedures.
 
Enough is enough. Management are aware that without our activists the workers become weak, disorganised and easily defeated. The RMT needs to stand up for us, stand up for our activists and stand up for our union’s future.