GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

wonderful Chris Grayling that it is us, the trade unionists, that are demanding

higher wages for our staff and for our members and that is why now people

cannot afford to travel. It is ridiculous. Privateers are now monopolising these

vital systems and services, knowing full well that most have no other means to

get to work, to get to hospital appointments, to do leisure, to meet family and

friends and with many areas have no intercompany working means you

generally have to pay many standardised fares across many different

companies to get from A to B which costs a huge amount. To give a small

example, with the privatisation of ScotRail, most weekends their services do

not run. My best friend lives in Glasgow. In order to go and visit her partner

she has to take three different buses to get from one end to the other to see

him. It costs her £10 for a single journey just to do that, but she has no option

other than to do so.

Communities are being left isolated. Women and those with disabilities are

now seeing parts of the railway as a no go area. This is not right. This is not

correct. This should be accessible to all with no fear of coming on to our

services or feeling like you are going to be stranded or you simply cannot afford

to get from A to B. For someone such as myself working for South Eastern, it

has led to a lack of job security and uncertainty for most of us within the

transport industry. Just to put a little bit of a personal point on this, in 2014 my

company’s franchise finished and five years later we are still without certainty

on who is going to take us on next. I cannot even explain to you the distress

that has caused myself and my colleagues knowing that come this October if

nothing is agreed by Christmas I could very well not have a job and no means

of possibly being employed within the transport industry if we become

privatised by another company who with Chris Grayling’s brilliant ideas about

closing ticket offices and stuff and closing those vital services. We will have

nowhere to go.

As I said, this is very personal to me, but it does affect everybody. Any of you

that works within what was once, and should be, a public company which has

now been privatised, it does affect us all. I do, please, ask you to support my

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