Members of the RMT on London Underground are taking five days of rolling strike action in a dispute over pay and working hours.
Socialist Party members visited picket lines around London on Monday 8 September and heard from strikers how they felt about their hours of work and the lack of any work-life balance, including getting hardly any weekends off work.
Jared Wood, London Transport regional organiser, spoke to BCC Radio London ahead of the strike:
Fundamentally, what our members are saying is that they want a fair share of the success that they have generated on the London Underground.
These are the people that kept the tube running during Covid. And since then we’ve got passenger numbers back to pre-Covid levels. We’ve done that with 2,000 fewer staff overall, and by working around the clock: 1am finishes, 4am starts.
The transport commissioner himself has referred to an extraordinary chapter, where London Underground has generated three years of consecutive financial surplus. Our members are saying that with all of that success delivered, they just deserve to have previous commitments that have been made by London Underground delivered.
And they deserve some recognition of the damage that long-term shift work does, and a little bit more quality time away from the job to recover from that.
Transport for London (TfL) is well aware that our policy is for a 32-hour, four-day week, and we think there’s nothing wrong with workers aspiring to that at this time. But we’re prepared to talk to TfL about any meaningful step towards that objective.
They say there’s no money around, and yet there’s a surplus forecast for this year of £166 million. They’ve just saved £100 million on pension contributions. A tiny fraction of that money would resolve this dispute, and we would go back to generating £50 million a day for the London economy.
Our members keep this system running, and go to extraordinary lengths to do that, day after day after day.
We were ready to keep talking to London Underground all of this week and the weekend, if necessary, to try and resolve this. But we went to see them on Wednesday, and left after just 40 minutes, and then received a letter stating that London Underground has taken its final position, and they are not prepared to entertain discussions around the points that we’re putting.
London tube strike over working hours
◴ 3rd September 2025
by Socialist Party RMT members
Strikes by transport union RMT members will take place in different parts of the London Underground workforce from Sunday 7 to Thursday 11 September.
Senior managers have received pay rises this year of up to 22%, while telling workers there is no money to address our demands. RMT union members on London Underground will not accept this. We are saying that it is time to deal with the demand for a shorter working week, as well as holding management to account for former promises yet to be delivered on.
Tube workers have delivered ridership back to pre-Covid levels, in spite of jobs being cut from 18,500 to 16,500. The reduction in jobs has contributed to ever more extreme shift working and more demands on each worker.
In 2023, strike action by tube workers forced an additional £30 million for our pay deal. That was an important win but the overall award was still below inflation, which was then at the peak of the cost-of-living crisis and over 12%. The offer was sweetened by a commitment to seek the reintroduction of concessionary fares on the mainline railways, a scheme that was curtailed after privatisation.
In 2024, we defeated an attempt by management to fragment our pay negotiations by dividing workers into different ‘job families’, which would have led, in the longer term, to different pay awards for workers playing different roles. After a ballot for action, management eventually agreed that everyone covered by the negotiation would get an RPI pay rise.
Now in 2025, we are still waiting for the extension of concessionary rail travel, and London Underground management has failed to properly implement the changes to pay structures to ensure everyone gets their full pay award every year.
Moreover, RMT members want to see real improvements that give more time away from work to recover from the demands of shift work. As well as giving themselves massive pay rises, the tube bosses have added insult to injury by imposing a plan for train drivers to work a more flexible roster pattern, with longer shifts and many drivers not knowing what their shifts will be until 24 hours beforehand. Management has cynically presented this as a four-day week, but the majority of drivers have rejected the proposal and understand that fatigue cannot be addressed by making people work longer days and cutting jobs. RMT demands real progress on working hours across all job roles.
RMT members on the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) will also be striking during the same period in a separate dispute over pay and conditions, which together with the rolling London Underground action, will have a huge impact on London’s transport network.