Leeds strike: no-one to blame
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NOBODY has been blamed for a five-week bus strike in Leeds this spring, but a committee of inquiry says it need not have happened, and West Yorkshire PTE has been criticised.
The committee was investigating the official strike which led to the suspension of all Leeds city services of the Passenger Transport Executive from April 16 to May 22 in protest against proposed service revisions in west Leeds.
The committee said: "Our central problem has been to discover the event or set of events which could justify a stoppage of this magnitude.
"We did not find it in the written submissions of the parties, and we were unable to discover it when we listened to the parties and questioned them at the hearing."
The ACAS committee recommends that both parties clarify their main procedure agreement and ensure that trade union participation in bus service development is undertaken at an early stage.
It believes that there should also be a renegotiation of the undertaking's one-man bus agreement as soon as possible.
The hearing followed the parties' agreement to enlist the services of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service — proposed at the onset by the Transport and General Workers' Union.
TGWU officials claimed WYPTE management had broken established agreements by not disclosing sufficient information to negotiate the new schedules.
But management said the union did receive all the information required and added that, in any case, no redundancies or loss of earnings would result from the decision to restructure west Leeds bus services.
One provocation, in the committee's view, was a WYPTE announcement that the new schedules would be introduced on April 16, come what may. It felt this amounted to an ultimatum for the union to choose between working on management's terms or not at all.
It asks: "Why did the West Yorkshire PTE not allow more time for discussion?"
For the five weeks of the strike, 1,600 TGWU members withdrew labour, and many bus passengers changed permanently to other forms of transport for regular travel.
WYPTE has welcomed the report which, it says, vindicates its handling of the matter and upholds it view from the outset that there was no justification for the strike.
"But we recognise that there can be improvements which will be discussed with the union," it says, and adds that it is discussing one-man operation with TGWU officials and that further discussions on o-m-o will be held next week.