Passengers on busy rail routes will suffer fresh disruption on Thursday because of another strike by train managers.Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) at Avanti West Coast will walk out for the second time this week in a dispute over rest-day working.The intercity operator will run one train an hour between Euston and each of Wolverhampton (via Birmingham), Crewe and Manchester on Thursday.
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NewsTranscript
00:00what's the problem with being asked to work overtime? Well there's no problem
00:05whatsoever but our members are continuously asked to work overtime and
00:09they would like an incentive payment to do that. At the moment Avanti pay their
00:14managers their management grades, premium rates so that they work those shifts
00:20instead of our members. Our members are meant to be doing that work we would
00:23like an agreement with the company they pay them they're up they pay
00:27themselves in effect as managers double what our members will earn on those
00:32shifts so we'd simply like an agreement with that. We have an agreement with some
00:36companies on it but the problem is that under the previous government the train
00:41operating companies were allowed to run down the amount of staff so Avanti
00:45simply don't have enough people to run the service that they're committed to in
00:49the timetable and in the contract they've got with the Department of
00:53Transport so they've allowed these vacancies to exist inside their
00:58network which means they cannot run the trains so if we can get an agreement
01:02with Avanti we'll look forward to discussing that with them.