Transport for London has announced a plan to cut 1,400 jobs as part of its "transformation" programme, a bid to save up to £5 billion as the Tories' slash TfL's central government subsidy. These jobs will come from engineering, admin, managerial, and other departments.
TfL/LU has announced the latest wave of its "Transformation" programme, and is briefing staff about them today (7 November).
Unions say they expect the announcements to include job cuts in numerous departments, including Skills Development, Establishment Planning, Network Operational Administration, Renewals and Enhancement, Asset Operations, Senior Management Administration, and Performance Analysis and Improvement.
Over 1,500 workers face being shuffled around like pieces on a chessboard from 30 April, as LU proposes to transfer the employment of all workers involved in engineering, major projects, change delivery and PMO activity to Transport for London.
The relationship between TfL and its subsidiary companies is something of a movable feast, with the level of integration seeming to magically increase or decrease depending on what happens to suit the bosses at a given moment.
As our overtime ban keeps forcing station closures, here's LU's latest wheeze: begging "TfL Ambassadors" (aka "the pink hi-vi brigade") who hold limited stations licenses, to work shifts. Scandalously, they're offering them more money than CSAs get paid, including uplifts for night shifts which Night Tube staff don't get.
RMT is preparing to ballot its members in the Lillie Bridge engineering depot for strikes, as Boris Johnson and TfL/LU attempt to accelerate the process of moving work out of the depot so it can be demolished to make way for luxury flats.
This article was originally published on the Off The Rails blog, Tubeworker's sister blog for mainline railway workers, here.
Between 2010 and 2015, the Tories cut government funding to TfL by over a third. In November last year, they announced that from 2016 they would cut up to £700 million a year from TfL’s grant for running costs with a view to stopping government subsidy of TfL altogether by 2021.
TfL has devised a new editorial guide for a unified "tone of voice". It covers how to sound "proud", "honest", "trustworthy" and "warm". The guide suggests: instead of "utilise", try "use"; instead of "notify" use "tell"; and instead of "commence" say "start." How helpful.
In the spirit of this, Tubeworker has identified a few more curious synonyms that we've noticed LUL using in recent months and years.
Five days before the deadline, TfL reported that only 29% of employees had filled out 'Viewpoint', TfL's staff survey.
The survey has the subheading 'Your Opinion Matters' but one reason for the low response rate must be that most of us have realised that TfL and LUL do not really care what we think.
"Penny for London" is a charity scheme which adds 1p to each journey made on TfL and the money is then split between London charities. Tubeworker recognises the good work charities do.
However, a better way to redistribute money is to tax the wealthy. Then the government can distribute this money, and we have democratic control over where it goes - rather than it being a commuter-funded PR exercise for Boris Johnson and TfL.
3000 people took part in the new TfL staff satisfaction survey, Viewpoint Pulse. The results are out.
They show that, in LUL, surface transport and TfL overall, 82% of us say we're 'proud' to work for TfL. Management can't take too much credit for this positive result. The 'pride' for working for TfL is probably more to do with the satisfaction that comes from working for a public organisation that delivers public transport.
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