The Olympic deal or at least as I understand it, I may be wrong.

Every TOp gets £500 regardless of what shifts they work or if they work while the games are on. This is paid to us for temporarily working outside our "contract".

Anyone working past 01:30, the normal end of traffic hours, will get paid at overtime rate for every hour of the duty.

Anyone working longer than 8 hours (plus our 30 minutes meal relief) will get paid at a higher rate, I think double time, for each hour of the duty.

I doubt very much if more than a few shifts will go beyond 01:30 and it looks as if the only shifts lasting longer than 8.5 hours will be at the weekend.

The claims that we will be pocketing £1800 or £1200 or some other huge figure depending on where you read it would appear to be based on all of us working 9 hour shifts and finishing after 01:30 each and every day which obviously isn’t going to happen.

RMT are sulking as they seem to have planned on using the TOps as a lever to get a better deal for all staff but will now have to negotiate for stations, signals and engineers separately. As far as I know none of them are being asked to work longer hours but you’d think they should get something on stations for finishing later and for the extra passengers they are going to have to deal with.

Yes, LUL are exploiting the division between the various grades, no doubt RMT will accuse ASLEF of selfishly ignoring non-train drivers and this will be held up as an example of why there should be one union covering the whole of LUL, that union naturally being RMT.

Bob Crow has no grounds to complain, he has said time and time again that his job is to get the best deal for his members and that is exactly what ASLEF have done. I’m sure the RMT TOps will be more than happy to accept the offer and if Bob tries to bring them out in order to support the claim for the other LUL workers I suspect we could see another run on ASLEF membership forms.

Back to my summer hols.