Sunday 12 April 2015


On Thursday LU upped their initial “fair and affordable” pay offer to 0.75% for Year 1 and RPI for Year 2 but on condition that we accepted the changes to our agreements for the introduction of Night Tube and dropped all our other requests.  In addition to the two £250 bonuses for accepting Night Tube they are now offering an extra £250 specifically for TOps on the lines that will be running overnight.  Management have made reassuring noise about permanent “fixed links” and/or part-time TOps covering the extra night shifts at some vague point in the future but initially they want to put additional night duties at weekends into our roster and somehow I suspect that is how it would stay

Obviously this is less than satisfactory with us but according to an RMT memo from two weeks ago it seems that management share the unions’ opinion that this will never be acceptable.  It seems that Boris has put restrictions on how much Night Tube will cost so rather than management being stubborn and unreasonable they’re having to negotiate with their hands tied.  If this is true then I actually feel quite sorry for our management which in itself is disturbing.

In January TSSA claimed they’d seen minutes from an LU meeting which estimated that Night Tube will lose £19.6m in the first year and not break even until 2033.  Presuming that calculation was based on staff accepting the paltry offer initially presented then Boris is either going to have to accept that it’s going to cost him a lot more or he’s going to have to scrap Night Tube and go back on his promise, something he’s had plenty of practice doing while mayor.

6 comments:

  1. We all know promises are only for tricking people's votes.

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  2. No way will they go back on the Night Tube now, even if Boris and Mike Brown have to manually push night-time revelers back and forth along the Northern line in a pushcart.

    Besides Boris will be off soon, what does he care about the finances for the future?

    My biggest concern is the staff who may have to do safety critical procedures surrounded by drunken passengers on their last night of seven in a row? It's hard enough doing 7 or 8 nights in a row now just dealing with last trains and contractors. God knows what it will be like when passenger service is added to the mix

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  3. If they argue for higher and higher fares when the system is operating with full loading at peaks, I fail to see how extending the operating hours to the point where you'll get maybe 5% loading at best is going to be viable. There is an argument that extending operating hours assists London's night time economy by allowing bars and clubs to open later, but are they going to be taxed on this additional income, if, indeed, there is any?

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  4. Another flawed reason for promoting the Night Tube operation is the myth that it will generate 'new' revenue. Oh really, people will pay new cash fares to use the late and night tubes and not use existing Travelcards / time-based Oysters? Operating costs don't go up that much (looking at the Underground as a whole) but the income to justify that doesn't accrue to LU/TfL - its the leisure industries and the organisations using night workers who benefit. Nothing wrong with that (or not much) but let's have some honesty from TfL over how it's really costed and what the real income will be, not 'facts' designed to blind the ignorant (and the media).

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  5. I was talking to a LOROL driver yesterday and was amazed to hear that 5 years ago they were on £37,000 and now are on £55,000! Plus, they just organised a pay rise for this year of over 2% on top of that! Without any all night running! And, he said they already have a 4 day week!

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    1. An edit to the last post. I think they're on a 4 day week.

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