As a week of disruption and strikes starts on the national railways, the ASLEF union has announced it will repeat its overtime ban again at the end of this month.
The action, short of a strike, will see train drivers refusing to work overtime, which is expected to lead to short-notice cancellations across England’s railways as many of the train companies rely on staff wanting to work overtime to fill gaps in the schedules.
They are carrying out the same action this week, and ASLEF says that it will be repeated between Monday 31 July to Saturday 5 August 2023.
The overtime ban is the latest move in their long-running national pay dispute and will affect train drivers on the following services.
- Avanti West Coast
- Chiltern Railways
- Cross Country
- East Midlands Railway
- Gatwick Express
- Greater Anglia
- Great Western Railway (GWR)
- Great Northern
- Thameslink
- Island Line
- LNER
- Northern Trains
- Southeastern
- Southern
- South Western Railway main line
- Thameslink
- TransPennine Express
- West Midlands Trains.
Mick Whelan, ASLEF’s general secretary, said: “We don’t want to take this action. We don’t want people to be inconvenienced. But the blame lies with the train companies, and the government which stands behind them, which refuse to sit down and talk to us and have not made a fair and sensible pay offer to train drivers who have not had one for four years – since 2019 – while prices have soared in that time by more than 12%.”
Unrelated to this, there’s an ongoing RMT strike across the train companies on Thursday 20th July, Saturday 22nd July and Saturday 29th July.
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