the business ladder

London’s transport system has been crippled following a 24-hour strike by employees of the tube, causing many journeys to become either much more time-consuming, or impossible to complete at all.  

Proposed job losses on the network motivated the second strike action in a month, with a walkout scheduled to proceed until 1830 this evening.

The strikes have been condemned by a number of business groups, as it has left many areas of central London close to immobile. Howard Collins, the Chief operating office of the London Underground, was quoted saying the strike action was ‘pointless’.

The introduction of new legislation to allow companies to intervene in strikes with the help of agency workers has been requested by the CBI. The current law allows employers to take on temporary workers when full-time staff are on strike, but they are prevented from using agencies to find the replacements.

The director general of the CBI, John Cridland, has said: “While workers have a legal right to withdraw their labour, employers have a responsibility to run their business.

“The public increasingly expects it to be business as usual, even during a strike, so firms must be allowed to hire temps directly from an agency to provide emergency cover for striking workers.”
Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, has also suggested the need for new legislation to halt industrial strike action unless a ballot undertaken by the workers is taken by more than 50% of the total number of them.

There has been angry responses made by the unions, who say that such a move would undercut the legal rights of employees.

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