On Tuesday, RMT, ASLEF and TSSA union leaders announced that they had signed up to an "Enabling Framework Agreement" which means they are talking with train operators and Network Rail about severe and wide-ranging cuts in jobs, conditions and pensions. But worse, this also amounts to signing a no-strike deal; they've tied their hands in advance!

    This "agreement" was formulated by the Rail Industry Delivery Group, a new body set up specifically to propose cost-cutting, using the pretext of the fall in passenger numbers due to the pandemic. It already announced a pay and recruitment freeze. 

    Of course the aim of making cuts dates back long before the pandemic. The privatisation of the railways in the mid-1990s was never a success. The launching of (not so) "Great British Railways" is the Tories' half-hearted way of acknowledging this. It's not renationalisation, but still an admission of failure.

    From day one of privatisation, the government paid out huge subsidies to private operators, who had a free hand to screw workers' conditions, subcontract and charge sky-high fares. After only 8 years the bankrupt track and signals company had to be taken back into public hands. East Coast mainline landed back in government control twice - and so it remains.

    Modernisation was done on the cheap: new Azuma trains already have chassis cracks and the "digital" railway’s safer signalling isn't even half-completed. And don’t mention the HS2 cost over-run!

    Yet the reality is that even with falling passenger numbers, more trains are needed to allow social distancing inside these enclosed spaces, which act as Covid-propagators. What is more, worker numbers were already at an all-time low before the pandemic. So post-Covid, more hands, not fewer, will be needed in every job - whether on-board, in depots, in stations or on tracks, for safe and effective working.

    Union leaders claim they'll refuse "compulsory redundancies". The RMT adds that it will be "pursuing pay awards, coupled with a framework that allows the union to pursue long standing objectives such as a reduction in the working week, travel facilities for all rail workers and bringing catering and cleaning work in-house". Cutting working hours, sharing work and bringing jobs in-house, yes, who would disagree? But the starting point, especially now with pandemic unemployment, has to be no job cuts whatsoever, plus the unfreezing of recruitment. And the only way to achieve this, will be to strike for it - against this duplicitous "Agreement".