ScotRail – TSSA members vote for Industrial Action

TSSA members in ScotRail have voted overwhelmingly in favour of industrial action leaving management scrambling to cover out of hours on-call shifts.

Dozens of members working in vital roles across Scotland’s railway will now withdraw from out of hours “on call duties” for six months from 00:01 on Christmas Eve, impacting the company’s ability to deal with incidents during out of hours periods and potentially causing train delays as a result.

Industrial action will be taken by Conductor Team Managers, Driver Team Managers, On Train Team Managers and Station Team Managers working at stations across Scotland including Aberdeen, Ayr, Dundee, Dumfries, Edinburgh Waverly, Glasgow Central and Queen Street, Inverness, Kirkcaldy, Motherwell, Perth and Stirling, as well as Operations Delivery And Senior Ops Delivery Managers.

During on-call duties members are required to stay close to their workplace, and to remain ready for work at all times. TSSA members are aggrieved that over Christmas and New Year this means they are unable to visit family elsewhere, or to celebrate with a drink, with no consistency over compensation from ScotRail due to the lack of a formal agreement.

Commenting, TSSA Organising Gary Kelly said, “This result shows that ScotRail’s on call system is broken. They have relied on our members’ goodwill and given nothing back in return for far too long.

“The current on-call system can barely be called that. There’s no formal agreement, no policy and without guidelines managers are making it up as they go along. It’s this that has caused the problems, and members have had enough.

“ScotRail have had a year to engage with us to fix these problems. We signed up to a Joint Working Group in good faith but ScotRail have refused to engage with it and our members’ goodwill has run out.

“The results of this ballot are clear and overwhelming. Scotrail needs to urgently work with TSSA to develop an on-call system that's fit for purpose and addresses our members issues.”

Notes to editors

ScotRail offered a one-year one-off deal of triple pay for the Christmas and New Year period this year. However, this offer failed to address any of the long-term issues our members have with existing arrangements, or any of the long-term issues around public holiday arrangements while on call  which our members had, and as the pay was just a one-time offer it was not sufficient to settle the dispute.

Withdrawing from on call duties does not constitute strike action, it is action short of strike.

Strike results can be seen below.