Tens of thousands of London Underground workers and 40,000 national railway workers joined the strike on Tuesday morning.
The layoffs began by RMT, Britain’s largest trade union representing transport workers, after a last meeting with employers on Monday night ended without success, according to MTI.
RMT is calling for a wage increase of at least 7 percent for public transportation workers, arguing that even that would partially cover expected inflation this year. The union is also protesting against hundreds of millions of pounds of savings the UK government has put into the public transport company’s budget in London, which RMT says will lead to mass layoffs.
Workers at Network Rail, a British rail infrastructure company, and thirteen rail companies in England, Wales and Scotland are set to strike again on Thursday and Saturday after a national rail strike on Tuesday.
Network Rail estimates that no more than 60 percent of scheduled flights will operate on intermediate days other than the strike.
Affects almost every line
The National Rail and London Underground services have not been completely halted, but TfL said on Tuesday morning that the strike would affect all of London’s 400km network of 12 main and countless branch lines, and that there were a few in the lines. The situation is similar on Network Rail on Tuesday on the National Rail Network.
Few trains leave from London’s main railway stations on the main lines, but in Scotland, for example, traffic is stuck at 90 per cent of the network.
The strike affects the London Overground Network and the United Kingdom, named after the British monarch. Just a few weeks ago, Queen Elizabeth opened traffic to the Queen Elizabeth Line, the capital’s new high-speed rail line. More recently, in 1989, there was an example of a simultaneous National Rail and Underground strike in London in Britain.
Transport for London has drawn the attention of commuters to the fact that after the London Underground strike on Tuesday, traffic can only recover on Wednesday morning, and even then delays are to be expected.
The blow is different sectors: Kate Nichols, CEO of UK Hospitality, said in a statement broadcast by the BBC’s Public Service Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on Tuesday) that she was lost due to the strikes, MTI writes.
