Workers' Liberty

Management are spreading lots of propaganda around the job about how much they have ‘moved’ and how near we are to reaching agreement in the talks. So have management ‘moved’? Yes they have: they have backed off to a degree on some of their attacks, postponing some (eg. ticket office cuts) and reducing the extent of others (eg. cuts in station supervision). But there are lots of buts ...

But 1: This shows the effect of threatening, and organising, strike action. It suggests that by pursuing that strike action, we could expect to make them move even further.

But 2: There are still major planks of their attacks which we can not possibly accept – for example, the loss of 24/7 station supervision, and replacement of LUL staff with low-paid staff from agencies - about which more below.

But 3: Many of the ‘concessions’ which they appear to make in talks disappear when they put their position in writing. It’s what in black-and-white that counts.

But 4: If we base decisions on whether to pursue industrial action on considerations of how far management have ‘moved’, then we are inviting the employer to play a particular game – announcing a massive attack in order to get through a ‘smaller’, but still significant, attack. If, say, they wanted to get rid of 50 jobs, they could announce 500 job losses, then ‘move’ in the talks, go down to 50 and say “Look, we’ve moved 90% of the way – you must accept the 50 job losses”. And unions which buy into the idea of judging things on how far management have moved would feel forced to agree. And bingo: management would have got just what they wanted all along.

But 5: Yes, we can acknowledge when management move. But we must judge management’s proposals on what they are, not on how different they are from proposals they might have made earlier. Management’s proposals are now different from what they were a month ago. But if their current stance was what they had put on the table at the start, we would have rejected it. We should still reject it.

But 6: This dispute is, from the workers’ point of view, entirely defensive. Management have launched a set of attacks and the unions are resisting them. This means that any ‘concessions’ – short of a full climbdown – from management amount to changing the degree of their attack on us. It is still an attack; it still damages workers’ rights. The situation would be different if the unions had demanded a 10% pay rise and management had offered 9%; or if we had demanded ten improvements to workers’ rights and management had agreed to nine of them. Then yes, we might agree a deal! But a slightly less serious attack is still an attack.

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Defend 24/7 Supervision: No Replacement of LUL Staff With Cheap Alternatives

LUL has moved again on the issue of the supervision of the ex Silverlink stations. The company is now suggesting that it will have rostered station supervision throughout the traffic day on each of these stations. This is a welcome move from their original proposal of mobile supervision – and it proves the effectiveness of calling strike action. However, it still does away with the principle of round-the-clock station supervision. And because of that, the unions can not agree to it.

To add insult to injury, LUL plans to have private security guards patrolling the station at night. In other words, it is replacing skilled, OK-paid, securely-employed LUL station supervisors with £7.50-per-hour hired muscle with no railway training.

LUL can not be saving much money by digging in over this – there are only 8 stations involved, and they will need as many, or nearly as many, supervisors to supervise them through the traffic day as through the short period of night-time closure as well.

So why is the company digging in? Because it has a longer-term agenda. Because it wants to break the principle of 24/7 supervision so it can spread it across the system. LUL wants to do away with engineering-hours station supervision right across the job. That’s why the company scrapped loads of supervisors’ night-turn responsibilities under the new Rule Book last year – according to the new ‘rules’, you don’t have to check your station is safe before opening it, check the lifts work, or do much at all, really.

LUL would like a system where a dead-late supervisor closes up and hands over the keys to the infraco, and a dead-early supervisor takes the keys back first thing in the morning. Why? Because then they could scrap hundreds of supervisor jobs. And because LUL station supervisors have a nasty habit of turning away contractors who don’t have the right paperwork or otherwise don’t meet safety standards – and that costs LUL money.

If the unions agree to any loss of 24/7 station supervision now, they will regret it in the future.