Diary of a Tubeworker: Planning without enough workers

In a decently-sized London Underground station, especially one with more than one ticket hall, there are inevitable challenges running the station and keeping enough staff in the right places.

Plans for each day detail meticulously who is going to be where for which period, accounting for meal breaks, staff taken away for other duties like security checks (a full patrol of the station at regular intervals), and making sure that each ticket hall has enough people in it to, theoretically, evacuate the station at a moment’s notice, should an emergency occur.

But good plans on paper don’t always work out in practice. A plan can’t take into account that an elderly customer was unable to get up the escalator out of the station without assistance, so a member of staff had to go with them. Or that three people with visual or mobility impairments would arrive within 20 minutes of each other, each requiring a member of staff to accompany them from train to train, or out of the station. Or that several of the staff members on shift that day have long-term health issues, and are restricted from carrying out “safety critical” duties on the platform.

None of these makes me envious of the station supervisors, who are forced to resolve these issues in real time and keep things at an even keel. It’s also compounded by other, less directly urgent factors: staff members having preferences for particular bits of the station, not wanting to be in a ticket hall that regularly hits the high thirties during a heatwave, or wanting to talk to particular coworkers.

A regular subject of scorn from station staff is other members of staff who leave you on your own, or without enough people, to run a busy area of the station. It’s not at all uncommon to arrive back from a break, or dealing with a specific task, to find coworkers asking “who’s over the other side?” “how many they got over there?” “They’re taking the piss”, etc.

Sometimes it’s a fair point. More often, there actually aren’t loads of people “over the other side” either. Sometimes the same conversation is happening in multiple places at once, each picturing the other as lazing around, when in fact the station is running at a skeletal staffing level, struggling to stay open.

The burden this puts on the Customer Service Assistants would be relieved if some of the old jobs they’ve now absorbed still existed: customer queries about tickets and Oyster cards wouldn’t drag you away from helping at the gates if there were still staffed ticket offices. People wouldn’t be dragged away to do time-consuming security checks if the station still had staff on the platforms, and station supervisors would be able to help with more emergencies if there were enough of them around to fill the roster, instead of them being stuck in the control room on their own, trying to pass out instructions to us. And all of these at once would be relieved if the company simply hired more station staff than it does.

Each of these represents a series of losses for the unions and the workers over a period of decades. To reverse it would take a series of successful struggles by a rejuvenated and expanded activist layer. For the moment, it leaves us often more angry at each other than we need to be, and our days feeling longer and more stressful. §