Tube drivers’ £72,000 salary ‘not enough’, says RMT union boss

23 comments

1. 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. 

   *Edit because I’m getting a thousand same replies* 

   TFL is a *nationalised* public service, if there is spare money it should go on lower fairs, not to pay for a 4 day week for drivers. Everyone wants a 4 day week, but it’s a luxury not a right. This is about putting the good of all workers above just a small handful.

2. I know driving a train isn’t as easy as people think but how the hell isn’t £72,000 enough?

3. 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.

4. It’s funny cos I see a lot of threads claiming that’s a basic salary in London.  

5. 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.

6. I can only dream of having to scrape by on a measly £72,000.

7. 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

8. “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.

9. 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?

10. 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.

11. *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….

12. **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!**

13. 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

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. Sorry but sod off. They aren’t fighting some billionaire for this money, it’s the customers who will foot this bill.

17. Might be cheaper to automate the trains like most countries in Asia do.

18. 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

19. Somehow you never see articles about CEO or politicians wages being implied to be too high.

20. 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. 

21. This is the power of a unionised workforce. Yet it’s portrayed as a negative by billionaire backed media? Funny that.

22. 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.

23. Wonderful, another piece of black propaganda trying to convince people earning £30K that people earning £72K are the enemy and not the oligarchs stealing trillions from the other 99.999% of us.

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