Tube drivers’ £72,000 salary ‘not enough’, says RMT union boss
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/london/article/tube-strikes-drivers-salary-not-enough-rmt-general-secretary-0wkxzfgpp
Posted by GnolRevilo
Tube drivers’ £72,000 salary ‘not enough’, says RMT union boss
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/london/article/tube-strikes-drivers-salary-not-enough-rmt-general-secretary-0wkxzfgpp
Posted by GnolRevilo
39 Comments
As part of this strike action they turned down a 3.4% pay rise and are also demanding a 4 day week.
They also want their 75% discount on commute travel costs to apply to all their rail fairs, even when travelling for leisure.
I know driving a train isn’t as easy as people think but how the hell isn’t £72,000 enough?
It was enough last year, it’s not enough this year that’s how inflation works. I think part of the problem is how we measure inflation, if you live and work in London your cost of living is always going to go up above the national average figure for inflation. It also doesn’t help that when deciding pay rises companies try and use CPI which doesn’t include housing costs, which in London is probably your biggest expense.
It’s funny cos I see a lot of threads claiming that’s a basic salary in London.
Since it is not financially sustainable to raise driver salaries to the telephone numbers they think is enough, let us automate the tube driving as quickly as possible, reducing the operating costs and allowing the Tube drivers to seek better paid jobs elsewhere.
I can only dream of having to scrape by on a measly £72,000.
Hmm. Well, I know next to nothing about train driving. So perhaps I should withhold an opinion on this.
On the other hand, 72000 seems like a large number.
So anyway – bloody train drivers! Who do they think they are? etc etc
“If it’s so cushy being a tube driver why don’t you apply then?”
Because you can’t, tube driver training applications are not open to the public as part of a protectionist part of the job. It is an internal process to select tube driver trainees.
I agree that is not enough, but it is also not affordable. As with other industries there should be some productivity rise to support salary growth. We need to re-build the system based on automated lines and all investements should go there.
I visit Nuremberg a few times a year. It has a fantastic, modern tube system that works really well.
The trains have no drivers.
Just saying. If they are going to go on strike anyway then now would be a good time to bring in stuff like that and start testing it, right?
Friendly reminder: it’s not that tube drivers are asking for too much. It’s that the remainder of the country is asking for too little.
Engineers, accountants, consultants, HR, literally every civil service worker ect should be unionising and striking too. A 5 day working week is unnecessary.
*The union boss leading the London Underground strike has complained that his members earning £72,000 a year were not being paid enough to buy a home in the capital.*
*Eddie Dempsey, general secretary of the RMT Union, told Times Radio that he made “no apologies” for the industrial action and that at £72,000 a year, his members “can’t afford to buy a house in London”.*
Way to bury the lead Times. Used to be such a good paper….
**Of course it’s not enough. £46,500 in 2010 is equivalent to £72,256 today. If £72k shocks you, maybe ask why all other jobs’ wages haven’t kept up. £45k used to be a normal career salary not long ago. .. £73k should be regarded as unremarkable today!**
If every sector had strong unions I promise people on less than £72k wouldn’t complain because we’d all be closer to earning it ourselves. Workers are not the enemy
This is Eddie Dempsey, the RMT union boss who visited and supported Aleksey Mozgovoy, the misogynist ultra-nationalist Russian warlord in Donbass:
https://southlondonsocialist.wordpress.com/2025/01/09/aleksey-mozgovoy-and-eddie-dempsey/
This is what Mozgovoy said about women, and Dempsey’s support of him after he was killed:
> “If I see even just one girl in a café or a pub tomorrow, she will be arrested. A woman must be the guardian of the hearth, a mother. But what kind of mothers are they after going to pubs? How can they bring up their children? What example are they giving?
> “If you want to remain an honest person and devoted to your husband, stay at home and do embroidery. All pubs are full of the female population, all night clubs. What kind of female population do we have here? Are they all prostitutes, or what?”
…
> Dempsey’s obituary for Mozgovoy has been approvingly republished on the far-right Russian website Russia Insider. (I do mean far-right, as shown by its content on “The Jewish Question”, “The Christian-Zionist Complex”, adverts for books doubting the Holocaust, and praise for American slavery). The piece was originally published in the Morning Star but they have now taken it down from the website. [And it no longer seems to be on Russia Insider either.]
> The tenor of the article is summed up by how Dempsey approvingly quotes one of Mozgovoy’s “comrades”: “A man can be murdered, but not his ideas”. It concludes, in Dempsey’s own words: “Towards this precious goal his comrades will continue their late commander’s struggle.”
And of course [the RMT under Dempsey calls for military aid to Ukraine to be cut](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/29/cancel-military-aid-to-ukraine-says-tube-driver-union/). For some reason the transport union has a position on a Russian invasion in Europe.
Look how much you could have earned had you unionised in every job you were in. Don’t be mad they get paid more, get mad you’re paid less!
Everyone in here bitching when the one thing that holds this country back is how everything is advantageous toward the asset owning class and poor toward everyone else. Wages are dismal here as a worker of any type doctor, lawyer, tradesman, engineer, nurse whatever it is, if you earn money through work and not assets you’re taxed more proportionally and you have far less advantages tax or otherwise.
Higher salaries for everyone is how we build more equality and a stronger economy.
Sorry but sod off. They aren’t fighting some billionaire for this money, it’s the customers who will foot this bill.
It depends tbh. I think overall everyone who works in a skilled industry just needs a bump up in salary. Then 70k+ doesn’t seemed so bad.
I don’t want to be in a crab in a bucket mentality. Everyone should get paid what they paid for.
Might be cheaper to automate the trains like most countries in Asia do.
Imagine working people complaining that other workers want to maximize the value of their labour.
This is what happens when you have a union with large numbers of members. There’s possibly a lesson for all of us here
They do not have my support in this matter unless I can be convinced otherwise.
Somehow you never see articles about CEO or politicians wages being implied to be too high.
Damn, wish we all had this kind of bargaining power. Wouldn’t be such a bad cost of living situation if we stood up together and demanded our bosses fork out instead of starving us all.
This shows you the power of a union. This is why the governments cracked down on them. This is why they don’t have to pay you well but have to subsede to the RMT union. You should have the right to do this too. You should be able to fight a fair wage in this day and age in this country rather than suffer with wage stagnation and increasing cost of living crisis that we currently live in.
We need more union in other industries to help us get what we all deserve
You know how else you can get paid “too much”? Join a fucking union.
This is the power of a unionised workforce. Yet it’s portrayed as a negative by billionaire backed media? Funny that.
They’re on decent money, they want more. Of course they do!
Fair play to em. There’s a few jobs like this where fortunately you earn a cushy wage whilst doing a relatively easy job.
I don’t know why we can’t be happy for them. 72k a year isn’t the reason others can’t afford homes.
Right
What about healthcare workers like nurses? And the lack of staff and how unsafe it is for patients and staff out there? Their 3.6% for sure wasn’t enough.
There are NHS staff using food banks !
Wake up
I used to get so pissed off at tube drivers striking despite being well paid.
Since realised they’re so well paid *because* they strike.
On the one hand £72,000 is higher than most mainline train drivers, on the other, regardless of zone, it’s in London so there should be an uplift for that (compared to a train driver based in parts of Scotland as an example)
I’d argue the day to day conditions on the tube are worse than the mainline too – amount of time underground, stop start constantly (which in turn increases the need for levels of concentration) vs the ability to be “outside”, driving at 90mph+ for extended periods of time.
So if the average train driver is on around £55-60k pa, add on the factors I’ve mentioned, I think £70k is a good starting point.
Plus, let’s be honest, most of you would kill for a Union that got you an equivalent package, and there’s nothing really stopping you from joining the railway regardless.
Please remember that a key tactic in suppressing the average wage going up is to try and turn people en-masse against successful union efforts. Your response shouldn’t be “Train drivers get HOW MUCH, they don’t deserve that!?” it should be “They’re getting their share, why aren’t I?”.
It’s not only tube drivers that work in TFL you know …
They want more than doctors who are not consulants, funny – i am sure their job is not as stressful or hard.
Man, I can’t imagine having such a high salary. Like, do you just not worry about money? But i guess in London it doesn’t go as far
It’s funny how the same people that support this are the same that are happy to say that someone working in a lowly middle management banking job on £72k is a ‘greedy banker’…
We really need driverless automated trains & stop this shit show altogether, £72000 is a joke , and they want more ? Whole thing is a fucking bad joke .
Controversial, but true: your abject poverty doesn’t justify beating down someone else’s salary. Can you drive a tube train? No? Then you don’t get to make derogatory comments about someone that has your life in his hands while you scratch your crotch and post demeaning comments on Reddit. £72K salary in London is barely lavish.