Workers' Diaries

Articles and interviews recounting people's experiences at work. The "My life at work" series of interviews with workers; and the "Diary of an Engineer/a Tubeworker/a DWP worker"; and similar.

A strange sort of Big Bang

After privatisation of the railway in the mid-1990s, we were all expecting an almighty bang. That failed to materialise. Or, rather, it did not come in the way we expected. First there was an almighty shake up of who was in charge day to day. Previously, each section of track work had its own line of management. Permanent Way would have supervisors and managers with a Permanent Way background, Signals and Telecommunications likewise, and so on. Now we had managers and supervisors from different departments with little or no experience of what we did but expecting us to help them run the...

Cohorts on the railway

As I’ve said in another column, when I started on the railway in the 1970s, jobs tended to be poorly paid but you had to practically murder someone to get sacked. So the workforce included quite a lot of old established guys who had been on the job since the end of the Second World War, so ossified in their ways that it would have taken a chisel to move them. That started to alter with the intake which I was part of. We were younger, and not so blind about how badly we were paid and the conditions we had to endure. Back then there was a sort of split in the workforce. With some exceptions in...

Coming to see how to fight for a future

When I joined the railway industry in 1979 I had already experienced some of the more obvious problems with capitalism. A childhood in the east end of Sheffield in the 1960s was full of almost stereotypical images: steel works, lack of open green spaces, pollution from the furnaces, and chemical pollution in the local canal. There was a strike at the nearest engineering firm, with meetings taking place at the entrance and the occasional speaker from what I can only assume was the Communist Party (CP). My mates and I took the piss as young kids do, but after a while I started listening to what...

Training in hit-and-miss mode

Training on the railway was always a hit and miss affair. “Basic track safety” and “lookout duties” were given a high priority, but then you were left to almost beg for the more technical courses which were needed to progress up the promotion ladder. In my early days on the track, promotion was quite hard to come by as it was basically “dead men’s shoes”. People had to literally die before any vacancies came up and the attitude from management was why bother, we’ll give you the training when the need arises. Not being a careerist myself, I started at the bottom and retired at the bottom, but...

Helping fellow workers? Or not?

It’s not often that violence at work affects workers in the engineering side of the railway. We don’t have a lot of contact with the public, and I’ve not ever seen sober disputes between workers descending to that level. Only once have I been directly involved with the public being aggressive with staff. We’d been working late into the night just outside Victoria station, and were returning to our hotel in Croydon. We were all very tired. It was the end of a weekend night engineering renewal, and it had been a bit of a bastard by anybody’s standards. None of our team could drive, so we had to...

Christmas on the tracks

Most places of work look forward to Christmas and New Year as a brief respite from the grind of the rest of the year. The rail industry is not like many others, in that the only time it shuts down completely is Christmas Day morning 06.00 to 22.00 on Boxing Day. Usually the last passenger train has been about 21.00 on Christmas Eve, with the network putting everything to bed by midnight. At that point most people went home, including trackworkers, unless there was a problem. If there was indeed a problem, then you cursed your luck and got on with it. Over the years that pattern has changed...

Diary of a railworker: A day’s work and nothing happening

In my new job on the Elizabeth Line, it’s a good day’s work when nothing happens. Such is the life of working in the control room at a train station. My job is essentially to ensure the station is operating safely. When the trains are on-time and equipment is functional, I’m usually left to my own devices. Once the delays start and stuff starts breaking, of course, it’s all hands to the pump. On top of that I’m expected to book in all visitors, complete paperwork and keep an eye on the CCTV. It can be too much sometimes. If a duty manager is on-site, they can deal with some of the public...

Twists and turns on workplace safety

After the privatisation of rail was announced in 1993, the whole attitude to Health and Safety started to change as the costs of failing to meet legal requirements were astronomical. But as long as your management had something in place and you had signed for it, the buck fell on your shoulders. Working outside of what was considered safe became a number one crime, if spotted by the management health and safety rep. There was no thought given as to how this might affect your ability to do your job. This led to much talk of “health and safety gone mad”. Take one example: working at heights. No...

Diary of a trackworker: A long and winding road

To continue my reminiscences of decades as a railway trackworker, the development of Health and Safety law on the railway has been a bit of a double-edged sword. It has generally been to the benefit of workers. Legislation has enabled us to stop the more egregious practices. But it has also made us a bit lazy, with workers looking to legislation rather than taking direct action and sometimes being fobbed off despite being in the right. In the early days of my job there were no health and safety reps as such. The job was usually done by one of the staff reps as a secondary role. The supervisor...

Story hour at the fire station

More than fires, or poles, or food, stories and gossiping are the absolute essence of the fire brigade. Without them, every fire and rescue service would be on its knees in days. They can travel to every corner of the brigade in a matter of hours. After two and a half years at station I have heard certain stories repeated over a dozen times. Sometimes, if you don’t have a decent job for a while, it’s only storytelling and gossiping that takes the edge off firefighters living on top of each other for long shifts. Here are the rules as I understand them, honed by generations of tea drinking and...

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