Yesterday ASLEF’s Finn Brennan described negotiations as “a bit like the first half of a duty at Edgware Road, 4 hours of going round in circles!”  So things are not going well and what does LUL do when they can’t get their way?  They turn to their sympathetic friends at the Evening Delevingne who helpfully provided their usual anti-union hatchet job, resurrecting ASLEF’s wish list from December and presenting it as our current “demands”.  Even then they couldn’t get it right, claiming we’d asked for the £500 lump sum payment that LUL are offering for Night Tube but that didn’t stop ITV, the Mirror and others repeating it all as fact.

No mention that it was LUL who insisted on combining our latest pay deal with Night Tube which the unions had wanted to discuss separately, no mention that our current agreement is only three days of 24 hour working per year, no mention that in order to have enough staff we should have started training new TOps in January and no mention that over a week ago ASLEF offered fresh proposals for working Night Tube:-

- Additional rest days off on weeks following the working of nights on Friday and Saturday; a real reduction in the average working week.

- Additional shift enhancements for working Night Tube on Friday and Saturday

- A freeze on weekend working for existing train operators, following the introduction of Night Tube with an agreement to a reduction

- A recruitment process for new train operators; to alleviate the increase in unsocial weekend working for existing train operators

- A process for existing train operators to work 1, 2 or 3 days less per week

- A consolidated lump sum payment for all train operators for fundamental changes in terms, conditions and agreements.

These are proposals not demands, they are open for negotiation, concepts that LUL management and their right wing friends seem unable or simply unwilling to comprehend.  One thing to bear in mind is that when we agreed to temporarily run trains later during the Olympics LUL offered us the same £500 one-off lump sum they are now offering to permanently run overnight two nights every week.