The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport workers have announced that cleaners on London's transport networks will be staging a 48 hour strike from Friday over several Olympics bonus disputes.
The strike is a result of five separate disputes over Olympics payments, and what RMT describes as the need for ‘implementation of recognition and reward agreements’ and opposition to the use of under-trained volunteers.
RMT general secretary Bob Crow said:
“While the likes of Jeremy Hunt, and the rest of the government, are sitting in the well-padded VIP seats in the Olympics stadium as a nice little bonus our cleaners on the tube and DLR, who work round the clock in appalling conditions, are being treated like dirt over recognition for the extra workload they will carry from the millions of extra passenger journeys associated with the Games.
If rich Tories like Hunt, who is still up to his neck in the fall-out from his role as a cheerleader for Rupert Murdoch, wants to threaten low paid cleaners with the sack for fighting for an Olympics fair deal then he should have the guts to come down and meet them on the picket lines on Friday at Stratford.”
With the Olympic Games officially starting on Friday and London's transport system already under extreme strain with an estimated 2.5m extra tourists in the capital, the industrial action is sure to cause disruption.
