Tube drivers are to vote on industrial action over what the unions call a "breakdown in industrial relations" - and what most people at work call "management taking the piss".

The central issues are:

• SPADs [1] - the company is not implementing its own procedures properly or fairly, with the result that several drivers have faced over-the-top penalties.

• LUL's proposed new attendance and discipline policy. Well, for a start, why are attendance and discipline being put together in the same policy? Being off sick is not misconduct, you know. And for a second, the new policy is more draconian than the existing one, and that is quite bad enough, thank you very much.
• LUL's proposed new machinery of negotiation, which seeks to marginalise trade union representation through the creation of staff councils [2].

ASLEF announced it would ballot its members. RMT then announced that it would also ballot drivers. In doing so, RMT is carrying out its policy that whenever ASLEF ballots, it will also ballot, so that train drivers can stand united and take legal industrial action together.

But, for now at least, RMT is not balloting other grades, despite two of these three issues affecting all grades.

Read ASLEF's press release here [3] and RMT's here [4].