The train drivers’ trade union is claiming victory after Labour handed it a bumper pay rise without demanding an end to so-called Spanish practices – including the right to re-start one’s lunch break if spoken to by a manager.
Members of Aslef have been granted a 14.25 per cent pay rise, covering the last three years, after the Government agreed a “no strings” deal with union negotiators.
Yet the agreement, described by Mick Whelan, the Aslef general secretary, as a “clean deal”, failed to secure any reforms to outdated, costly and restrictive working practices, colloquially known as Spanish practices.
Last year it was revealed that one of these costly working practices includes the right to paid time off for medical checks if staff use microwaves.
The policy, dating from the 1980s, and first reported by The Sun, read: “All staff working with microwave ovens shall be permitted to take time off from work, with pay, for a medical check of any effects on them from the microwave ovens.”
Another practice consists of re-starting scheduled breaks whenever passing bosses greet staff on their downtime.
“Imagine your line manager stopping to say ‘hello’ when you are on a formal break,” said Huw Merriman, the former rail minister, in 2022. “In the office or on-site, that’s a positive sign of teamwork. Ludicrously, in the rail industry the rule book decrees that the break has to restart from the beginning.”
Paid for walking to and from trains
The Telegraph revealed in the same year that teams of nine people were being sent to jobs such as changing a plug socket.
An industry source explained at the time: “Let’s imagine you want to change a single socket to a double in your kitchen. Potentially you’d need an electrician, a tiler and a plumber as your dishwasher waste pipe will need adjusting too.
“In Network Rail we can’t roster individuals, only teams and we can’t multi-skill those teams so we’d need to send a team of three electricians, three tilers and three plumbers – nine people to do a job one person could do.”
Yet another one of the pejoratively-named Spanish practices includes rail staff being paid for walking to and from their trains.
Staff moving from offices or mess rooms to trains insist on being paid for the time it takes to walk between rest area and place of work.
Unions have faced accusations that these “walking allowances”, which in some cases were reportedly set at 12 minutes for journeys by foot that would take 60 seconds, squander millions of pounds every year by paying wages to people for time when they are not actually working.
Elsewhere on the railways, Network Rail, the infrastructure company, tried to launch Blink, a mobile messaging app, in 2023 to communicate with its employees. It reportedly took almost a year to roll out because of union resistance.
In a letter to members of the RMT last April, Mick Lynch, the union’s boss, said that it had entered a formal dispute with the company over the app.
He wrote: “The use of the Blink app with the analytical data it provides to management could potentially be used to mitigate the impact of any industrial action members may be called on to take via the data made available to management from the Blink app.”