RMT announced the result of their ballot yesterday, 299 voted for strike action, 221 voted against and there was one spoilt paper, hardly the overwhelming support they were hoping for.  I read somewhere that this was a 42% turnout which gives RMT about 1240 TOps on their books, rather more than had been suggested at the end of last year.  If Boris were around perhaps he’d point out that only 24% of RMT members support strike action but it appears that he’s given up any attempt of pretending to be Mayor and is currently on some sort of world tour trying to promote himself as future Prime Ministerial material.

There has been the predictable press outrage with the usual shoddy journalism, several inaccurately report that AMcG was driving a train while drunk or that he failed two tests on two separate dates.  Management are sticking to their version of the story, declaring that RMT are asking its members to “defend the indefensible” but still haven’t given a reason why they have rejected RMT’s offer to call of the strike if they agree to abide by the Employment Tribunals decision and give AMcG his job back if it is decided that he has been unfairly sacked.

Until they can offer up an explanation for refusing this option we are left with two possibilities; either they know that AMcG was unfairly dismissed and that they will lose at the Tribunal or they simply don’t care if there’s a strike, possibly they even welcome one.

Normally when there’s a dispute I have to scrabble around online trying to get information but while not many hours of work have been lost so far over the sacking of Alex McGuigan hundreds of trees have been sacrificed as we’ve been deluged with memos from both sides and here’s what I’ve managed to glean from them.

Let’s start with basics, random D&A testing happens all the time, AMcG wasn’t singled out because they thought he was drunk, it was just a regular thing, normally when someone fails a test they are sacked and nothing is ever heard.  LU’s drugs and alcohol policy states that a maximum of seven units can be consumed in the 24 hours before booking on for duty but none at all in the eight hours before.  AMcG has maintained that he’d stayed within LU’s limits, he was due to book on at 12:20, drank less than six units the previous evening and stopped well before the eight hour deadline making Nigel Holness’s claim that he’d admitted he’d been drinking before starting work deliberately misleading.

While it is true that certain types of diabetes can cause an excess of acetone which can give a false positive reading on old style semi-conductor breathalyzers the new fuel cell types are supposed to be immune from such problems and LU claims “the Lion Alcometer (breathalyser) we use in London Underground does not give false positive results“.  Having been the subject in a random D&A test last year I think I can identify the breathalyser used as the Lion Alcolmeter ® 400 – you’d think they could at least get the spelling right.  On Lion’s website the blurb tells us “the reading is very unlikely to be affected by anything in the subject’s breath other than alcohol” which isn’t quite as emphatic as LU’s claim.

http://www.lionlaboratories.com/product-details/?product_id=5

RMT claims that the test was carried out by “an unsupervised trainee”; in reply LU states that while trainees may be present they are always accompanied by an experienced and qualified testing supervisor who will conduct any secondary tests.  It has been stated that AMcG failed two tests and LU confirms that If the first test fails then a second one will be automatically be taken.  If the test was carried out by an unsupervised trainee then clearly LU breached its own procedures and inexperience could have led to a mistake

The obvious problem with LU admitting that there might be the slightest possibility of the Lion 400 giving an inaccurate reading or that the staff might not be sufficiently trained to take the tests is that it puts an element of doubt on all the previous test that have led to staff being dismissed and where the unions didn’t make a fuss.  RMT ask why the urine sample wasn’t tested when the breathalyser result was questioned and why a medical review wasn’t held.  LU says that the urine sample doesn’t reflect the level of alcohol in the blood stream at the time of the test and that medical reviews are held after a positive drugs test, not a failed alcohol test.

A very noticeable point is that RMT has offered to call off strike action if management agree to reinstate AMcG should his dismissal be deemed unfair by the Employment Tribunal but this was rejected and the obvious question is if LU are so sure of their case why would they not agree to this?  The implication is that there’s something they’re not telling us and sadly they have form, in the past evidence has emerged that proved that management weren’t telling the whole story.  At one tribunal a manager was described as “an unreliable witness”, as close as you can get in legal terms to saying someone is telling porkies.

Of course it could be that AMcG is the one not telling the truth but the strength of support from the other TOps, both RMT and ASLEF, in the limited strike at Morden depot last month suggests that his colleagues believe him.  Depots are small places, there’s plenty of gossip and if anyone there thought that AMcG was a boozer then when he failed the test there would have been a general shrugging of shoulders.  The decision to ballot all Lines rather than just the Northern came after Victoria and Piccadilly Line staff at Finsbury Park branch backed a motion to spread the dispute so rather than a strike imposed from the union’s leadership this seems to be coming from the members.


In the end it comes down to who to believe, who to trust.  While LU’s statements are accepted by the media, the public and the politicians sadly they have little credibility with their employees.  The past has taught us that management will stick to their story no matter if it’s true or not, they simply refuse to compromise even when faced with inevitable defeat.  If it does come to strike action then even though ASLEF are not involved and won’t be balloted I will not be crossing the picket line

In addition to DLR being operated by a French/Spanish consortium it seems that subject to approval 28% of the UK’s passenger trains are now owned by the richest man in Asia.  Yesterday CK Investments aka Li Ka-shing, valued at $31.9bn by Bloomberg, agreed a deal to buy ROSCo Evershlot Rail which along with a large amount of freight trains leases rolling stock to various TOCs including those currently used on Southeastern’s Javelin service out of St Pancras, the soon to be privatised East Coast and Chiltern Rail Marylebone to Birmingham Snow Hill via High Wycombe and Banbury. 

Re-nationalisation isn’t going to be as straight forwards as some people might think.

Meanwhile over on the “driverless” DLR RMT members have voted overwhelmingly to strike for 48 hours over terms and conditions.  The DLR used to be run by SERCO, the UK “outsourcing” corporation that also runs the Woolwich Ferry, Boris’s bike hire scheme and is responsible for speed camera systems in the UK but in December the DLR was taken over by a joint venture between Keolis and Amey.


Keolis is mostly owned by French state railway SNCF and has a 35% stake in Thameslink, Southern, Southeastern and London Midland, most of which bump around the bottom end of the passenger satisfaction tables.  Amey was one half of the late, unlamented Tube Lines set up by PPP and is a subsidiary of Spanish conglomerate Ferrovial which also owns Heathrow airport.  All of which illustrates just how much of our supposedly public transport network is now run by private and non-UK operators.


Under SERCO a dispute would arise every other year or so, RMT members would vote for strike action but things would get sorted without too much disruption, whether the change of management at the top will means a less compromising attitude remains to be seen.  The one thing I will say is that whether or not DLR staff go on strike they are not, repeat not “Train Captains”, they are “Passenger Service Agents”.   The title “Train Captains” was adopted from the Far East where it is used in Hong Kong and Singapore but was dropped by DLR as it does sound a bit silly.

I’m not at work this week but it appears that there is a bulletin doing the rounds appealing to RMT members to vote against strike action in support of the Northern Line TOp Alex McGuigan and in a strange twist JNP operations director Nigel Holness is now claiming that McGuigan actually admitted that he had been drinking before he booked on for duty.  As yet I’ve not seen any response from RMT but if he had been drinking then surely the urine sample – discarded by LU without testing – would have provided a positive reading.  Curiouser and curioser……

I was talking to my good friend who works on London Overground yesterday and he told me that while he was at South Tottenham during the morning peak he’d been approached by an irate passenger wanting to complain.  The passenger was furious that for the third day in a row the pedestrian crossing outside the station wasn’t working, for the third day in a row it had made him ten minutes late as he’d been unable to cross the very busy road outside and he demanded to know what my friend was going to do about it.

While it is true that TfL are responsible for traffic signals in London exactly what an employee of a train operating company can do about them that an ordinary person could not is beyond me but I had similar complaints about the buses and mainline trains when I was working on stations.  It seems that if you’re wearing a uniform people assume that you have some sort of connection with everything transport related and feel that you are an appropriate target for their ire.

After the passenger had departed and my friend had a spare moment he went online to find where he could report the problem.  He finally found a telephone number tucked away on the TfL website and was rather perturbed to find that it was a premium line,  had he been able to get through he would have been charged for his act of civic consideration but for whatever reason no one was picking up.

With little other option he asked his controller to pass the message onwards although the controller was equally uncertain about who to contact.  This turned out to be a good idea as somehow the message reached the right person and a technician turned up to fix the traffic signal.  It seems that the traffic signal was supposed to send an indication to the control centre that it was malfunctioning but whatever bit of technology that sends this message was malfunctioning too.

Sadly the only conclusion to be drawn from this tale is if there’s something wrong with the roads go tell someone who works for the railways, who knows if you complain to Network Rail  you might get the potholes filled……

Last year I signed up to Twitter in order to get notification of developments during the ASLEF Central Line dispute in the summer but since then I’ve generally ignored it.  Today I got a notification that RMT are about to ballot all their TOps for strike action in support of Alex McGuigan, the Morden depot TOp dismissed for failing a random breath test.  As has been mentioned on numerous occasions he has Type 2 diabetes which can give a false positive reading on the rather simplistic breath testers that LU use.  There were other procedural errors committed by LU in this particular case all of which they’ve chosen to ignore.

RMT hailed the last strike as “rock solid” albeit in a limited way as it was only Morden depot that was affected.  13 out of 50 TOps booked on which while somewhat less than “rock solid” supports RMT’s claim that some ASLEF TOps supported the action.  Choosing to spread the strike across the whole Tube rather than balloting the three depots at the northern end of the line seems a little ambitious, especially as a recent article suggested that RMTs membership among TOps has dwindled from around 1200 to somewhere around 800-900.

Oh and Happy New Year to you all.