RMT members are voting on a 21.3% pay increase for guards at Transport for Wales.
Crucially, it will bring Sundays into the existing 35-hour working week from May 2025. Currently operated as voluntary overtime (on double time), it means that Sunday working will be pensionable, with the bonus of additional rest days.
A further change is that ‘New Days’ will be part of the working week, implemented on January 1 2025.
The three-year deal, backdated to April 2023, takes the full-time salary from £38,440 to £47,035 in April 2024. A further (yet to be determined) increase will be paid at the rate of RPI-inflation from April 2025, covering year three.
Included in the increase, 2.15% payable from April 2024, is a restructuring premium which the RMT says is “significantly better than the three-year pay agreement for train drivers earlier this year”.
The salary negotiations are part of a ‘buy-out’ package in which the existing guard and conductor roles are renamed to train managers, although the old names will remain for Rule Book and contractual reasons.
An unspecified number of additional train managers will be employed by TfW, leading to an increase in its total employees.
The RMT had asked for ‘no redundancy’ guarante
