The whole London Underground network will be “substantially disrupted” next Thursday by a planned strike by train drivers, Transport for London has warned.
The Aslef union, representing the majority of all Tube drivers, will be walking out in a dispute over working conditions, including demands for a four-day week.
The strike will officially begin at 12.01am on Thursday 5 October and will last all day. It is also the day England will play Slovenia at Wembley.
The London Overground and the DLR will be unaffected as they are operated separately.
TfL said it was currently exploring options to help get supporters to the football match at Wembley on Thursday evening and that extra buses and Santander Cycle hubs will be provided should the strike go ahead. It added a trial of four-day weeks had recently concluded and that analysis was ongoing as to how successful it had been.
Nigel Holness, Director of Network Operations for London Underground, said: “Should the planned strike action go ahead there will be substantial disruption. We will do everything possible to ensure customers can get around on alternative transport services and have the right information to help them do this.
“We are committed to ensuring that our employees are able to maintain a good balance between their work and personal lives and we have been working closely with the unions on new ways to achieve this. I encourage the Aslef leadership to continue working with us constructively rather than moving towards unnecessary strike action.”
A spokesman for Aslef told HuffPost UK: “Aslef members have voted by a 93% margin to take strike action in our dispute over the failure of the London Underground (LU) to deliver on the commitments they made to improve work life balance as part of the 2015 pay settlement.
“As part of the settlement of the dispute over the introduction of Night Tube, LU agreed to introduce a mechanism to allow drivers to reduce the number of shifts they work, on a pro-rata basis, and ‘new ways of working’ to reduce the percentage of weekend shifts worked by July this year. They have repeatedly refused to make any detailed proposals to do so.
“For more than 18 months management have prevaricated, stalled and delayed. Deadlines have repeatedly been missed and promises broken while our detailed proposals to resolve these issues have been ignored.
“Our members’ patience has finally been exhausted and our executive committee has announced strike action. As always, we are ready to meet at any time to try to find a solution, but it is long past time that LU management started to act to resolve this long running dispute.”
TfL says it has met its commitments in the discussions with Aslef and that further talks are scheduled early next week.