Make Bob Crow & the RMT listen to Londoners and stop their unreasonable strikes

Bob Crow and the RMT are a disgrace to London.

They have just organised yet another strike on London’s tube network, bringing almost all of it to a halt for another 2 working days.. This has brought inconvenience, stress, hassle, and misery to millions of tube users, both workers and visitors. I, like the millions of other normal hard working Londoners who use the tube every day, am completely exasperated by their flagrant and frequent disregard for everyone outside the membership of the RMT.

These strikes come when the national economy is in its worst recession for 60 years, when there are over 2 million people out of work and hundreds more unemployed every week, when the majority of workers are facing pay freezes, pay cuts, and cuts to working hours just to keep their jobs. For Bob Crow and the RMT to then reject a perfectly reasonable above-inflation, pay rise deal is frankly disgusting and an insult to the rest of us. Even the other unions regard it as reasonable and have accepted this deal. The RMT also claim concern about redundancies, which is understandable, but they must be realistic. This is a recession, and if redundancies are necessary to keep an enterprise afloat then their policy of simply burying their heads in the sand and refusing to accept them is quite simply a childish response.

Bob Crow has the gall to state that the RMT does not take industrial action lightly. Quite apart from the sheer frequency of the strikes they organise, there are a number of contradictions to this. This strike is estimated to cost the economy of London around £100,000,000 - at a time of deep recession. How can they possibly justify such consequences as being a necessary sacrifice for the rest of London to make for the sake of their cause? Let’s face it, we weren’t given a voice in deciding! Why should an entire city be effectively held to ransom every time they decide they are not getting what they want? They are already ridiculously well paid for the job they do.

Secondly, when the management believed they were close to a deal the RMT suddenly change their demands to include the reinstatement of two RMT members who, by all accounts, it seems are fully justified in losing their jobs. The sudden demand to have them reinstated is entirely unwarranted, unreasonable, and unjustified.

Bob Crow has also tried to elicit sympathy for alleged bullying at the hands of London Underground management. But from the point of view of the average Londoner these are entirely outweighed by the bullying they so regularly force the rest of the city to endure at their hands for the sake of their relatively petty grievances.

Frankly, we are fed up of being treated like this!