Workers' Liberty

On Greenford group - and maybe elsewhere - management have altered the targets for revenue activity, taking the emphasis off actually selling tickets and shifting it towards encouraging customers not

Some wag on the Central line has produced a spoof Tubeworker under the title TubeDriver.

The chickens are finally coming home to roost for the Central line's 92 stock, as the motors begin to give up the ghost.

Remember the scandal of the less than adequate train prep on the Central Line when the Metronet strike was called off?

Note to Buckhurst Hill group management. If one of your staff has a motorbike crash on the way to work, in uniform, and has to be taken to hospital in an ambulance for emergency treatment, then you should offer them sympathy and support - not an attendance warning.

Wednesday on the Central line saw more evidence of the failures of Metronet - but also an inspiring example of Tube workers acting to defend their own and passengers' safety.

At 9am, an eastbound train became defective at Holland Park. After initially fearing a possible derailment, it then became clear what had actually happened: the negative shoe gear had fallen off, caused by split pins, which lock the nuts in place, not being replaced properly during Tuesday's maintenance. The ERU later found the EPBU cover and negative shoe lying on the track.

Drivers arrived at work on Wednesday and rightly insisted on proof that the trains had been prepared properly after the absence of fleet staff during the Metronet strike.

LUL's savage ticket office cuts will even wipe out some of the jobs they created under the stations 35-hour week! Staff who transferred to a location they had been waiting for will now be forced out, and staff who were displaced into them will be displaced out again!

At Ealing Broadway station, the cleaners have no mess room. They have to hide in the toilets to rest and eat their meals.

And yet their management, rather than sort them out some decent facilities, prefer to clamp down. When the toilets have been busy, cleaners have been seen resting on trains or around the station during their breaks, and management are disciplining them – in one case photographing someone taking a breather and snitching them up.

Refurb work at Loughton station involves resurfacing the platforms. A tip to Metronet: make sure the new surface has actually set before you let passengers stand on it. One particular passenger was aggrieved to find her bag covered in black sticky stuff ...

Yesterday's derailment on the Central line was in the same place as another incident just six weeks ago.

We were recently telling you about under-staffing causing problems with getting drivers re-licensed. Seems this affects other grades too.

Out on the Barkingside group, managers have been trying it on with staff, telling them that the company has "done away with" the requirement for 28 days' notice of ATOR and claiming that now you only need 5 days'.

Note to LUL management ... the word 'upgrade' suggests that a station's facilities are to be improved. Hence, removing the Omniscan cameras from Bank/Monument - that's the ones you can spin around in all directions and zoom in on anything in view - is a bad idea.

OK, so a station undergoing a refurb is never going to be the most comfortable place to work, but St Pauls became a nightmare. A mess room unfit to eat in, toilets unfit to use, staff feeling vulnerable on the gateline late at night cos the Supervisors' office has been temporarily relocated away from the ticket hall.

Ever get that feeling you're being followed? Well, if you're a Central Line driver, it might be true.

At both White City and Leytonstone, drivers taking a PNR have been followed to the khazi by certain DMTs, keen to minimise the hold-up by ensuring you are not loitering.

During refurb work at Epping, Metronet has employed a security guard to protect its worksite. But the guard has been getting rather too close to the ticket barrier, on occasion looking like a substitute member of station staff.

Management seem to think it is OK for Central Line drivers to learn about the new White City sidings in the classroom. That is, just in the classroom. No need to actually, erm, drive a train. We don't think so.

Contractor ISS is still trying to sneak in biometric booking-on systems for cleaners - but it is coming up against the power of all-grades trade unionism.

When the snow fell on Wednesday morning, 90 points on the Central line failed, resulting in total chaos on the service.

The reason? Metronet, knowing there were freezing temperatures, had decided not to de-ice the points that night in order to save money. This money-saving measure ended up costing it £40,000 in fines to TfL. Obviously, that £40,000 could have been better spent on the upkeep of the lines - but the Infracos sometimes calculate that the fines are cheaper than doing the work.

Night cleaners have been removed on the Central line and District line. These cleaners work for ISS, the same company that is trying to lay off 200 cleaners on TubeLines contracts at the moment - a move that RMT is fighting.

The new sidings at White City are now in use. Shame about the walkways being dangerous. Oh, and as for the ready-to-start plungers ...

If management are serious about Airwave Radios being an essential safety system, maybe they should stop being so slapdash about their use. Turning up with thousands of quids worth of equipment in a Sainsbury's carrier bag, giving it to station staff with the most cursory of briefings, and then getting on your toes and leaving them to it (as happened recently when train radio failed between Debden and Epping) - well, that's not really the most professional way to go, is it?!

Last night at Bank, call point operation triggered an evacuation ... and the P.A. failed. No Inspector Sands, no P.A. from the control room, nothing.

With superhuman effort, the staff evacuated the complex in twenty minutes. Fortunately, it was a false alarm. Had it been a fire, people would have died.

Note to Central Line management ... If you justify slashing SAMF jobs at the largest station on your line (Bank) by closing one of its ticket offices, then it stands to reason that when you finally see sense and reopen the office, you have to bring back at least a couple of the jobs you cut.

A Supervisor at Snaresbrook took a trip to the khazi when something unexpected happened ... a light fitting fell on his head, knocking him out and necessitating a stay in hospital. Apparently, the contractors had used the wrong shaped fixing.

Late one Sunday evening at the start of this month, a driver pulled into West Ruislip and let his passengers off. He noticed that the train in the opposite platform was closed up and asked its driver why. The answer? There was a suspect suitcase on the train and they were waiting for the bomb squad to arrive and investigate.

Note to NOC ... The purpose of introducing a new staff taxi timetable is to enable more staff to get to work with speed and convenience. It is therefore not a good idea for your new timetable to dispense with a useful connection at Leytonstone and thus leave several Central Line station staff unable to get to work in time for start of traffic.

The job was up the wall on the District, Circle and Central Lines this morning, due to yet more late surrenders by Metronet. Severe delays are continuing through the morning.

Sorry, were we just saying that Metronet is crap?

Cowboy cleaning contractor GBM have withdrawn night cleaners from stations on the Barkingside, Buckhurst Hill and Greenford groups.

While the cleaners' union(s) need to be fighting over this issue, station staff can help too. If your station has an overnight build-up of rubbish, or a spillage, that makes it unsafe to open in the morning, then don't open it. Keep either the whole station, or at least the affected part, closed, report it to the FRC, and don't open until they clean up.

Refurbishment at Woodford has meant that the station's public toilets have been closed. The temporary replacement is portaloos in the car park. But it seems that they are only cleaned twice a week, meaning that they really are a vile, reeking hole.