Solidarity with Striking Firefighters

Posted in Tubeworker's blog on ,

Today, firefighters walked out for four hours as part of their fight against attacks on their pension rights. According to the employers, it seems that you have to walk into burning buildings until the age of 60 to earn a full pension! And that's despite paying 11 per cent of their wages in pension contributions throughout their working lives.

Firefighters keep us safe at work every day. So if they are not there, we are not safe. Hats off to the Tube workers who refused to work on safety grounds today, although it is a shame that more did not do so. We had a bigger turnout for refusal to work in the FBU's 2002 dispute and more recently a couple of years ago. If the unions could disseminate information and ammunition more thoroughly and promptly, that would help.

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Comments

Submitted by Tubeworker on Fri, 27/09/2013 - 16:00

The part of London Underground's Change Assurance Plan that related to staff was laughable.

It told us 'the risk to an individual member of LU staff from fire....rises from around 1 in 371,900 per year to 1 in 371,062 per year for 4 hours without a fire service'.

It then continued, 'To put this into context, the annual risk of death to employees from accidents at work averaged across the various industry sectors in this country is 1 in 200,000 per year and is as high as 1 in 11,000 for agriculture workers'.

The 'context' here is that far too many workers die as a result of industrial injuries and accidents, commemorated every year on Workers' Memorial Day.

And in any case, this argument in no way addresses the actual risks involved. Small comfort to us that workers in other industries are working in unacceptable, dangerous conditions. That knowledge will not in itself keep us safe.

It felt like this bit of information was just thrown in out of utter insensitivity, or to downright rub in our faces how little they actually care about our safety at work. This is why we have to take matters into our own hands.

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