Friday 24 July 2015


Things are not looking good, it seems that management have no intention of negotiating and have taken to threatening legal action to stop the strikes which has used in the past as a tactic successfully …..errrrrr….. never.  What doesn’t help is that there are four unions representing every area of LU with numerous grievances so there’s just not enough time to cover all the issues.  Remember it was LU who insisted on negotiating the pay rise and Night Tube together, the unions wanted to look at these as separate issues.

To further complicate matters as a result of the overtime ban it seems that when working their normal hours there aren’t enough depot staff to do everything that’s needed.  In order to get round this LU have been instructing managers to fill in and RMT are questioning whether they have the appropriate licences to do whatever it is they’re doing.  Rather than sit down at ACAS on Monday RMT went off to raise this issue with the ORR although we’ve not heard what the result was.

Meanwhile since Clive shuffled off this mortal coil Slick has been looking decidedly lonely in the fish tank so on Sunday I went to the aquarium shop in Bethnal Green to get him some new playmates.  Initially when I put them in the tank he looked quite smug swimming around, finally the biggest fish in the tank after years of being the smallest.  However when I went back the next day I found that the new arrivals had decided the best way to introduce themselves was to chew lumps out his tail which is still large but now rather ragged.  The worst offender was the Blue Shubunkin, now known as Sid (Vicious) while the two common goldfish will be Doug and Dinsdale.

9 comments:

  1. You sure you have not got some Siamese fighters in your tank?

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  2. Are the fish a metaphor for the ACAS negotiations?

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    1. No, they're real goldfish at the Leytonstone train crew accommodation building.

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  3. But they have better fish in the West Ruislip TCA :)

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  4. Does anyone have the official procedure re the 24 hr prep to hand? There seems to be some debate as to whether LU can officially get us to bring trains into service that has much as 72 hrs in prepped time on the book. Anyone know?

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  5. There are "engineering concessions" which are generally used for things like new years eve. It's kind of like a waiver granted by the IDO (infrastructure duty officer).
    The threat however to stop the whole shifts pay seems questionable legally.
    Imagine you're 5 hours into a duty and your train goes defective and you're sent to depot for a changeover. The briefing says if you were offered a train a week out of prep and refused to take it you wouldn't be offered a different train and would forfeit the whole shift's money.
    I can see a few people of principle pushing this on Tuesday just to see what happens. I don't think the employment tribunal would look kindly on LUL.

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  6. Hidden away on the intranet is a memo to District line train ops from their GM.
    As I understand it:
    1) Trains should be prepped within 24 hours of entering service from a depot.
    2) Their is a current engineering concession for a number of trains on that line (10 of each stock) to have their prep window extended to 48 hours.
    3) Once a train has entered service it can stay in service for its booked working.

    This means that the responsibility is on the T/Op bringing the train into service from depot or stabling sidings should check the train has been prepped within 24 hours (or 48 hours - but quite how you know which are the 10 trains of each stock to have the current concession is beyond me.....)
    Once the train is in service and on the running line the prep remains good until the train stables.

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  7. you have that right except it is 10 trains in total, and not the same train twice in succession. A train not prepped wont be on the TAS sheet.
    The risk in 1 is of a fault developing not being picked up since the trains will be unattended (although S Stocks do tell Derby about the health status every hour or so...they are the exception). Faults would be picked up on the pre-service check so this is a service risk, not a safety risk. The risk in 3 is different since any faults would be picked up in the usual way and dealt with via the DISI etc. Again this is a service risk, the main safety risks would be dealt with via exam or casualty work.
    Strange how there is so much BS around on something as straightforward as this, but then the first sentence in the original post contains two rather large untruths as well!

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