As many are aware, ASLEF are currently negotiating a pay deal that was due in April 2019 for SWR drivers. Whilst I fully expect the drivers to take a pay deal to take full door control on 701s (and future compatible stock), is there a chance the union (or its members) might sacrifice a small part of that pay rise to negotiate the agreement to state they’ll do the doors but not move a train without the guard on board?
I’m very much aware everyone is bored of the whys and why not of DOO, and to avoid getting my collar felt by the admins I want to make it specifically clear I’m only interested in how the union works in terms of its driver members and if this would be something they’d be interested in and how they would feed this back up to the boardroom.
EDIT: date corrected after information from
@theironroad
From my understanding ASLEF haven’t spoken to it members or discussed in an open forum about what they are hoping to achieve in this pay deal. One district council member saying ‘the new stock is coming there’s no stopping it, drivers will be operating doors’ and also said it down to company to tell ASLEF what they expect & how much they are willing to pay for it.
I think ASLEF are happy for drivers to go without a second ‘safety critical’ person. Son it’s going to left to drivers to vote yes or no
A quote from the divisional update:
‘As you're all aware we have been engaged with pay negotiations for around 8-months, and those talks are now reaching a conclusion. We had a ‘final’ set of meetings planned for late January, but they have now been moved to mid-February. The primary reason for this was the recent industrial action as the management team were ‘distracted’ from their day jobs throughout December, thus not finalising the offer. We’ve also had a change of MD which has a knock-on effect to people’s diaries, but rest assured we will be concluding the talks fairly soon, hopefully at the meetings in February in all honesty.
Once we have an agreement in principle, we will furnish the EC with the details, meet all our local reps, prior to the offer going out to our Driver members for referendum.
What we can say, at this moment in time, is that we are reasonably happy with the negotiations so far and we don’t believe the recent franchise announcement will affect the outcome of those discussions. Nor will it result in Driver redundancies on SWR, in fact the complete opposite as we physically can’t recruit and train Drivers quick enough to support the advertised WTT.’