Scotrail On Call Industrial Action Ballot

Yesterday TSSA served notice of our intention to proceed with two industrial action ballots within Scotrail regarding the on-call dispute. 

An industrial action ballot for “first line” on call will include TSSA members in the CTM, DTM, STM and OTTM groups. A second industrial action ballot for members participating in other forms of on call* will run concurrently for the ODM and SODM groups. 

Both ballots will commence on the 21st of November 2022 and will run for a period of three weeks ahead of the Christmas period with the intention to withdraw our members from out of hours on call by Christmas. 

While withdrawing from out of hours on call would be classed as “action short of strike” we are urging our members vote YES to both questions on the ballot to offer maximum protection against any potential legal challenges which could disrupt the planned action. 

This decision has not been taken lightly and comes a year after agreeing to address on call via the 2021 pay negotiations and, despite repeated attempts by TSSA to move this forward, very little progress has been made; it took until July 2022 to agree to TSSA drafted terms of reference, which the company had initially rejected, and since then further discussions have completely stalled. 

To put it bluntly, our patience with the company to act in good faith to resolve our members concerns has run out. It seems that Scotrail are playing for time by dragging out the process and repeatedly rebuffing our initial constructive approach to resolving these issues. Our response must therefore be to withdraw our members from out of hours on call until such time as a fit for purpose policy and improved terms and conditions are on the table. We are scheduled to meet with Scotrail on Thursday and will see what, if anything, they offer but suspect it will end up being a day late and a dollar short as usual. 

TSSA have spent the last few years organising and building membership in the CTM, DTM and STM grade towards resolving the issues before us and your union is prepared fight until we win. Vote Yes to both questions on the ballot and give us the mandate to make it happen. 

*Due to the opaque nature of the current on call arrangements (which we are trying to resolve) it has been more difficult to clearly establish whether any group of staff other than those listed above currently participates in out of hours on call, but the option remains open to ballot further groups where they can be identified as participating in out of hours on call arrangements.