Workers' Liberty

We at Tubeworker are always saying that our unions should do more to get the public on our side.

• “You’ve only got £2.50 on you.”

• “You only need £2.50 to make the journey you want to make.”
  
  

It’s all fun in Travel Information land because we are getting very interesting calls about the minimum £5 top up charge at booking offices.

Tubeworker is happy to recommend readers sign RMT's online petition against job cuts and ticket office closures.

Click here.

Across the job, staff are happily ignoring London Underground's £5 minimum Oyster top-up policy. After all, who wants grief from understandably-annoyed cusomters?

Since January 2nd, if you fail to touch in or out with your Oyster, you will be stung for £6! TfL says it's because Oyster is now on national rail. But they must be hearing the cash roll in already.

The £5 minimum Oyster top-up policy came into force on Saturday, and staff have been getting spadeloads of grief.

We've all seen the new tube maps. The zones and the river have been taken away. Richard Parry assures us it was no mistake; it is designed to return to the original simplicity of the first tube map.

Avid readers of On The Move will have noticed that the latest trick up management's sleeve for pressuring ticket office staff is a range of attractive posters.

Edgware group staff have discovered to their great alarm that the ticket office safe (SLS) is not, erm, safe.

In LUL's latest effort to drive its own customers away, company management called Cubic to the Pentonville Road side of King's Cross station today to disable the ticket-issuing facility on the Queue Busting Machine (QBM).

As Tubeworker has reported previously, LUL's ridiculous £5 minmum Oyster trial has gone off like a damp squib, with most staff quite rightly ignoring it and selling customers what they ask for.

LUL's appalling £5 minimum Oyster top-up trial is up and running - or up and stumbling, more like.

LUL is about to run two 'trials' on stations, both of which are bad news for staff.

Readers may remember LUL's daft idea of introducing a minimum £5 Oyster top-up at the ticket office window.

In the recent fare rises, some child fares went up from 50p to 55p.

It seems that the fantastic shiny new ticket office kit that management installed in the Jubilee Line Extension ticket offices is not all it is cracked up to be.

As of yesterday, Tube fares went up by an average 6% - way above inflation, and at a time when our passengers, like us, are feeling the bite of economic crisis.

The Department of Daft Ideas is certainly having a busy festive season.

The Department of Daft Ideas is at it again. Yes, LUL wants to get CSAs to collect fares from passengers who arrive without a ticket.

'Auto-completion' seemed to be playing some kind of joke on passengers over the bank holiday weekend - which of course made life more difficult for staff too.

At start of traffic on Saturday all Oyster readers clapped out. The whole lot of them - Underground, Overground, DLR, buses, national rail. Why?

Tubeworker has reported previously on management's decidedly unhelpful hints to ticket sellers. Here's another one ...

Management have a handy hint for ticket sellers. If someone asks for a quid's credit to be added to their Oyster card and tenders a twenty pound note, ask them "Are you sure you wouldn't like more credit than that?".

Management reckon the Ticket Office Procedures Handbook is a wee bit bulky; a tad old-fashioned; and perhaps as not as user-friendly as it could be.

Wide Aisle Gates (WAGs) were recently been installed at Euston.

LUL management seem to be on a frenzy of getting us to fill in forms.

One of the (many) problems with the way Oyster is set up is that when visitors leave the country, they often miss out on claiming back their £3 deposit or unused pre-pay because they can't find an open ticket office with a short enough queue to make it worthwhile cashing in their chips.

Bank holiday Monday, and the BBMS advises us that auto-completion/continuation is in operation, but will only work if customers do NOT touch out.

So we've spent the whole year up til now telling punters that they absolutely MUST touch in and out on pain of losing chunks of money off their Oyster credit, but today we have to tell them to do the exact opposite?!

Noticed how all the choccy machines on the platforms have been taken out of service? Apparently, not only does LUL want to squeeze more passengers onto the platform, it also wants to move away from retail provision at platform level!