At last! After almost 50 days of drastically reduced services or worse still, on many rural lines, none at all, the RMT union has agreed to suspend its strike action and recommence talks about the role of the conductor on Northern trains, allegedly because Northern and the Department for Transport have abandoned their previous insistence on driver-only operation and now agreed to retain a conductor on all trains. In fact, both parties had agreed this weeks before at the turn of the year, but instead of celebrating its victory and calling offthe strike, the RMT then centred the dispute on who ultimately controls the doors on trains, the driver or what the union previously referred to as the guard but now seems to accept is a conductor.
Many, possibly the majority (and certainly the majority among women and the elderly), supported the concept of keeping a second person on trains to assist passengers, although the union ludicrously overplayed its safety role in its attempt to get them to do so. But most want conductors to be visible, not hiding in their cabs, and couldn’t care less who works the doors. For many, the union’s insistence on prolonging the dispute and thus continuing to inflict disruption …
