General secretary Eddie Dempsey has said the union is prepared to negotiate a timescale for a cut in hours rather than achieve it immediately.He said last week that industrial relations on the Underground had "totally collapsed".LU has responded that cutting hours is unaffordable and has denied there are fewer staff on the Underground.
00:00Listen, we're creative people. This is what we do. We make deals. We make deals day in, day out.
00:06You only see us when we don't, when things go wrong.
00:08So I am quietly optimistic that it's going to require TfL to move towards us.
00:15We're always prepared to compromise. We're not hardliners in the sense that we just put a little bit of the arms up and never move.
00:22We will make a reasonable settlement with TfL if they're in the market for a deal.
00:26And we'll know that pretty soon, I think, today, once we check the temperature of those negotiations.
00:31We're seeing our members not making it to retirement. They're going into ill health as a direct result of the shift work, the shift patterns they're undertaking.
00:38We've got a duty to our people to address that and we take it very serious and so should TfL.
00:42So we're going into the talks completely unconditionally. We're making no prior conditions on how they go.
00:50We're going open-minded and positive. We'll do our best to make a reasonable settlement.
00:53If we get some movement, we'll come back to our people, ask them to look at it, see if we're in a place where we can settle.
01:00If they don't make any progress, we'll have to report that back to our people.
01:04And I'm pretty sure if you get 500 RMT members in a town or meeting and telling them the employer's made no movement,
01:10their move's going to be for further strike action.
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