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 get the early trains, which often had revellers traipsing back from central London. As we approached East Croydon, we got up, and one of the other passengers got up too.

At that time in the morning the station staff were very low in numbers, but they still had to check tickets of everybody disembarking.

Ticket

We followed this character up the slope. The lone station worker approached him. “Ticket, please”. No response. “Ticket please”. Still no response.

The guy said something which sounded like “fuck off’. We were pretty close behind, and it was clear this guy either didn’t have a ticket or was unwilling to get his hands out of his pockets to find it. Third time of asking, and the guy started to push past the ticket collector. Since we were good trade unionists and didn’t want to see a brother get in a fight, one of our group said “Oi. There’s three more of us back here”.

Unfortunately, the ticket collector took it that we were threatening him and advised us accordingly. We reassured him that we were all railworkers and trying to help. By that time, the guy had pushed past and legged it out of the station.

The station member thanked us but advised us not to “help” again in the future.

I was never sure if we helped or hindered, so take from this any moral you like.