Andy Ford spoke to North West RMT organiser
Low paid railway station and accommodation cleaners on the Merseyrail contract have been striking for better pay, proper holiday pay and against imposed rosters. I spoke to Daren Ireland, RMT Organiser in the North West about the strike.
Daren set the scene: “Negotiations opened in July 2020 and progress was slow, so strike action was discussed. In March 2021 the company offered a rise to £9.21 per hour, well short of the living wage. Our member rightly rejected the offer”.
The workers also want meaningful holiday pay. Under the Working Time Directive, the principle was that workers should not suffer financial loss by going on holiday. ”It is quite simple. If they go on holiday, they want to see the same in their wage slip as they would have earned at work”. MITIE seem unable to grasp this simple idea. They agreed to do it at one point but then simply did not implement it and reverted from their own agreement to the rock-bottom legal minimum.
No regard to the welfare of staff
The company are behaving with no regard for the welfare of their staff. “The imposed rosters at Liverpool parkway will result in 78 fewer rest days a year. No wonder they are resisting them,” says Daren.
It is not lost on the cleaners that to take them to £10 an hour would only cost £40 per week for each worker, and there are only 30 of them left now. Ten have left since that start of negotiations, just giving up on the company, and the job. So the total cost would be £1,200 per week for the whole workforce. To get to the real living wage of £9.50 would cost half of that. In contrast, Mitie’s Chief Executive, Phil Bentley, earns £2.6 million a year. That is £51,000 a week!
This dispute shows everything that is wrong in modern Britain. Working class people who have worked through the pandemic are battered down to bare subsistence, treated with disrespect and now even punished for standing up for themselves. Mitie have withdrawn even the pitiful offer they did make because of the strike. Meanwhile the elite are invisible, and their biggest problem is how to spend their extortionate wealth. Well done to the RMT for picking up the gauntlet for these low paid workers. Victory to the Merseyrail cleaners!
Messages of solidarity to Daren Ireland, RMT, 2 Temple Square, Liverpool, L2 5BB
