Three days to go...

Well done! We're over 1000 signatures. Please post, email/share the petition around again and see how many we can get before 18th May (the next strike day) so that the company can't get away with press releases and station announcements suggesting no-one agrees with the guards. The situation has got worse since the petition started. The latest move from the company was to send out a letter telling all Southern guards they will be dismissed and offered the options of (a reduced number of) conductor jobs, new 'on board supervisor' jobs or redundancy - then a few days later they declared they had all the conductors they wanted *before* the deadline stated in the letter so it would appear that anyone who paused for thought has lost their job. They've been telling us all through this dispute that we are making a fuss over nothing, that there will still be staff on the trains, so why are the managers being so cheerful about trained and experienced staff taking up redundancy offers? Why do they want a reduced number of staff? Personally, I can think of two possible reasons: either they are going to be running some trains as driver-only immediately or they want to employ new staff on lower wages and/or with less training. Either way, the passenger gets a reduced service and the driver's job has got harder - on one of the busiest and most overcrowded lines in the country. What we have is a French company running Southern on a short term basis in order to take profit out of the country, and tearing the system apart along the way. All I can say to that is... Bring Back British Rail!