Every week, Railway Expertise’s journalists choose high tweets that summarise the social media buzz in our sector, underpinned by GlobalData’s analytics. These social media indicators assist us perceive model sentiments and the themes driving conversations on social platforms.
This new, thematic protection is pushed by our underlying Disruptor knowledge, which tracks all main offers, patents, firm filings, hiring patterns and social media buzz throughout our sectors.
Twitter has been inundated with issues from the British public, incapacity teams and railway unions round proposals to close virtually 1,000 ticket workplaces.
Members of the Nationwide Union of Rail, Maritime, and Transport Staff (RMT) have been protesting outdoors stations throughout the nation for weeks, pointing to enforced redundancies and decreased accessibility assist.
The dispute reached a boiling level on Tuesday (25 July) when the RMT alleged that railway workers have been being threatened with disciplinary motion by state-owned prepare operator LNER for carrying stickers supporting the marketing campaign.
“Threatening workers who’re combating for his or her very futures and for the companies they supply on this means is a fairly disgraceful tactic to make use of,” mentioned Mick Lynch, RMT Basic Secretary. “I can advise you that any strikes to self-discipline any RMT member for having a easy assertion on a sticker will probably be met with a full industrial response.”
Lynch additionally pointed to the “100,000 session responses” – which has now reached 170,000, in accordance with watchdogs Transport Focus and London TravelWatch.
The Rail Supply Group’s (RDG) proposals – constructed on claims that solely 12% of tickets have been purchased from workplaces final yr – have been initially launched with a three-week session interval to gather passengers’ views.
This was attributable to finish on Wednesday (26 July), however has been prolonged till 1 September following industrial strain and court docket challenges by 5 Labour mayors, led by Larger Manchester’s Andy Burnham.
“These closures will have an effect on over 2,000 jobs,” mentioned Burnham. “It’s simply not the case that that is about redeploying workers. This will probably be a critical discount within the stage of assist accessible to folks when they’re travelling.”
Incapacity equality charity Scope has closely criticised the affect of the proposals on the 16 million disabled folks within the UK. Scope has launched a sequence of movies on Twitter demonstrating the significance of human-operated ticket workplaces for the visually impaired.
At the side of charities together with Scope, the Nationwide Autistic Society, and Incapacity Rights UK, disabled-led marketing campaign group Transport for All has issued a letter objecting to the RDG’s proposals within the “strongest potential phrases” as a result of the plan would “severely curtail disabled passengers’ means to journey”.
