10 months after LU announced Night Tube, 6 months after negotiations started, 23 days after the biggest strike on the Tube since 2002 and just 5 days before the next one LU management have presented us with its second “full and final offer”.  Or is it third?  I think the record was four “final” offers, someone should really buy a dictionary at 55 so they can look up the definition of the word “final”.

The pay offer is a 2% rise but confusingly that is made up of 1% pay rise and a £500 consolidated (i.e. counting towards our pensions) increase for running a 24 hour service.  In fact this actually means that some grades get less than 2% (Service Managers and Power Control Room Operators 1.7%) while others get more (CSA 2.7% and Technical Grade 1 3.3%).  Why not just a 2% rise?  For the next two years management are offering RPI or 1% whichever is greater which is less than we’d hoped for so room for improvement on that.

For Night Tube all grades working on lines and stations affected are offered a £500 non-consolidated bonus (not counting towards our pensions) which means that TOps at depots not working Night Tube will get it.  That in turn begs the question why not spread the shifts over all the depots that are touched by Night Tube, as it currently stands only WHC and LES will be working them on the Central Line while LOU and HAI get the bonus plus WER get the bonus without even being included on the route.

The good news is that TOps will get an extra £200 per Night Tube shift which is a step in the right direction but still does nothing to help ease the body-clock nightmare of working three lates, two nights, finishing early on Sunday morning, having the rest of Sunday as a Rest Day and back to work on Monday.  This payment will only apply during the “Transition Period” which will start when Night Tube is introduced and end with the introduction of a new timetable with either part-time TOps doing the night shifts or “fixed links” which I believe means separate rosters for TOps working Night Tube and those that don’t.

The plain fact is that few of us believe that there will ever be part time nights or fixed links and we will be stuck with these shifts for the rest of our working lives.  If management had any intention of introducing either of those then why did they not start recruiting at the end of last year when there would have been time to get them trained up for the start of Night Tube?  They’ve recruited part time CSAs to cover stations over night, they could just have easily done so with TOps.  Instead we’ve have been sent an extra 137 TOps across the five lines affected, just enough to expand the roster to cover Night Tube and if we were to get more TOps for part time nights or fixed links then we’ll be overstaffed.

And then tucked away at the end of the announcement, a little nugget that has the alarm bells well and truly ringing.  Under the current agreement LU are allowed three “Special Events” per year, we run trains overnight, the shifts are voluntary and at double pay.  Usually this only happens once at New Year’s Eve although we did run overnight for the Queen’s Jubilee in 2012 but part of the pay offer is an increase to seven Special Events per year.    Now if we only ever run overnight one day a year and we’ve already got three why on earth would management want seven?  Say hello to overnight running every Sunday on a bank holiday weekend and maybe even Christmas Eve with staff staggering home around 7am Christmas morning.  Ho, ho, ho, management’s gift to staff came early and it’s bloody socks again.

Even though these Special Events are supposedly voluntary we know that if there aren’t enough volunteers then staff with the least amount of time in the grade are required to work.  After all the kerfuffle between 2010 and 2012 it was agreed that the Boxing Day service would be voluntary with anything up to a Sunday service and in 2013 we had about a quarter of TOps working, almost all volunteers.  Last year management pushed it to the limit, running what was effectively a Sunday service minus one, unsurprisingly there was nowhere near enough volunteers and despite being in the grade for 12 years I found myself on a train Boxing Day rather than watching West Ham’s traditional annual humiliation on TV with the solace of Brodie’s London Fields Pale Ale.

All this comes with vague promises to consult with the unions over our “work/life balance” after we've agreed to sign a blank cheque but this is still “jam tomorrow” and from previous experience we know that with LU its usually a case of “jam permanently postponed”.  LU can’t seem to get their heads around the concept that no matter how much money they offer us it doesn’t address our key concerns about the terms and conditions we are being asked to accept, that the whole introduction of Night Tube has been poorly planned and that if they wanted this to start in September they should have started negotiations before they announced it last year.


The offer will be rejected and with good reason, expect another strike next week.  On a lighter note a couple of Saturdays ago while waiting for the signal to clear at ROV on the inner I saw a squirrel balancing on top of the cable run lift its front leg and scratch it’s armpit with its back leg.  That was the highlight of my shift, driving a train can be very boring…….