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London - Workers on London's underground train system will strike for 48 hours next week over plans to close ticket offices and cut jobs, union officials said.
The walkout on the busy Tube network, from 22:00 on Tuesday next week to 22:00 on Thursday, will coincide with another planned strike by some public sector workers.
The reductions would make the underground less safe, said the General Secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) union Mick Cash.
"The cuts, currently being bulldozed through, would de-staff whole areas of the Tube system at a time of surging passenger demand and would make evacuation and other basic safety procedures a physical impossibility," he added.
Transport for London, which runs the capital's transit system, said that the plans to close ticket offices would let it get more staff out helping customers on train platforms. There would be no compulsory redundancies, it added.
The strike "is cynical in the extreme. It will only lose RMT members pay and disrupt Londoners," the organisation said.
Londoners were forced to cram onto overcrowded buses and skeletal train services during the last major underground strike over the dispute in April.
Meanwhile, a union for German train drivers called on its members to
stage a nine-hour walkout on Tuesday to turn up pressure on national
rail operator Deutsche Bahn over gridlocked wage talks.
The GDL union said it was calling a strike from 9:00 on Tuesday until 6:00 on Wednesday.
In addition to drivers, conductors, catering staff, dispatchers and other staff were also invited to take part in the industrial action, the union said.
GDL is calling for a 5% wage hike and shorter working week of 37 hours and it complained that there had been no substantial negotiations with management so far on those demands.
More than 90% of the GDL union voted last week to take strike action following two days of stoppages in September.
Late on Monday, pilots of Germany's biggest airline Lufthansa announced their fifth strike since the end of August, this time grounding freight flights over a dispute surrounding retirement benefits.
Pilots of Lufthansa Cargo will stage a walkout from 03:00 on Wednesday to 22:30 on Thursday and will "not operate any flight departing from German airports", their union Cockpit said in a statement.
