Chief Operating Officer, Steve Griffiths, belittled our Night Tube concerns when he said, "train staff [...] are being asked to work around an additional seven nights each year on average".
But Steve Griffiths won’t have to work these shifts! Seven might not sound like many extra nights to him, but it sounds a lot more to those of us who will have to work them. Even if Night Tube meant working just one extra night shift a year, we would still have a valid cause to fight, because our bodies were not built to work at night!
The human body has evolved to follow a circadian rhythm; we’re programmed to sleep when it’s dark. Low light levels trigger our brains to release a chemical, melatonin, so our heart rate and body temperature drops. Anyone who has worked nights will know the drowsy feeling at about 4am when you don’t really feel alert and your body and brain is effectively shutting down. This is our body trying to tell us that we should not be at work! More workplace accidents occur at this time of day than any other. The Health and Safety Executive says, "the incidence of accidents and injuries has been found to be higher on night shifts".
Night shifts go against nature and they are bad for our health. They contribute to digestive complaints, sleep trouble and heart problems, which ultimately shorten our lives. It takes up to a week to restore your body clock after just one night shift. An extra night shift might not look much on paper to LU’s Steve Griffiths, but seven extra night shifts could easily wreck seven weeks of our life a year – nearly two months!
As it stands, LU’s offer of a bonus for implementing Night Tube is not good enough, primarily because it’s a one-off payment. It’s unacceptable that LU is using Night Tube to rip up agreements that safeguard our working conditions. But the main flaw in the way LU is implementing Night Tube is that it is offering no additional rest periods to compensate for the additional strain on our bodies.
Tubeworker isn't opposed to Night Tube. More public transport, more of the time, is a good thing. But given the obviously detrimental health impacts of night working, we need more time off to recuperate. That’s why we're arguing for the unions' demand for a four-day, 32-hour week to be central to this dispute. A shorter working week, with no loss of pay, is one challenge to the increased levels of fatigue that we will face. Yes, we want a bonus, consolidated, into our pay but we cannot put a price tag on our health.
More than anything else, in return for delivering Night Tube, we demand the chance to rest, to recover, to minimise the health impacts of night work. Tubeworker also wants our unions to demand for LU to recruit more staff and abandon its job cuts plans so we can work fewer - not more - night shifts.
