All quiet on the
pay talks/Night Tube front with absolutely no movement from either side since
LUL slightly upped their offer a month ago.
On the issue of pay they are sticking to the line that we’ve had above inflation
pay rises while others have had pay freezes but in that respect we are no
different to our fellow ASLEF members working for the mainline TOCs. You could
argue that they are private sector while we are public sector but the amount of
taxpayers’ money pumped into the TOCs makes any difference between us and them
debatable.
On Night Tube they
are offering us far less to permanently change our agreements in order to run
24 hours twice a week than they did to temporarily run an hour or two later during
the Olympics. LUL did suggest getting ACAS involved but the unions didn’t see
the point of simply changing the venue, the offer is derisory and if our union
reps were to recommend accepting the deal as it stands the members would
reject it.
As far as
staffing goes we are still being told that at some point in the future depots
will get to choose either part-timers or “fixed links” but as that isn't going to be possible to arrange by September we will have Friday and
Saturday night shifts tacked onto the end of a week of dead lates every
10-12 weeks in the roster. While they say this will only be a temporary
measure the suspicion among TOps is that this will become a permanent fixture. From listening to talk around the mess room
these night shifts are already highly unpopular, no one is going to want to
swap those weeks and some people who currently work earlies are going to be
stuck with them which won’t help if your household arrangements are based around
a set work pattern.
Needless to say
there are several theories floating around to explain LUL’s intransigence, a
popular one is that management were waiting to see who won the election in the
hope that the Tories would stay in power and bring in a change to the law
regarding strike ballots or even make strikes on the Tube illegal. While it sounds plausible I somehow suspect
that Cameron & Co have far more pressing matters to deal with than a bit of
trouble on the Tube and the same applies to the idea that management are trying
to provoke a strike in order to get legislation pushed through.
Another explanation
is that having seen off RMT and TSSA over “ticket office closures” with comparative
ease management are brimming with confidence and think that they can
steamroller TOps just as easily. If that
is the case then they weren’t paying attention last summer when the ASLEF
strike effectively closed the Central Line, spread that to the whole combine,
throw in a joint strike with RMT who are itching to get some pay back and there
would be no service at all.
As I mentioned in
a previous post there’s also a suggestion that LUL have been given a strict
budget and are being told from above that they can’t offer us any more than
they are; they are simply obeying orders.
A final possibility doing the rounds is that LUL don’t want Night
Tube and are going through the motions in order to placate Boris ahead
of his imminent departure. They have deliberately
made an offer the unions cannot accept in order to stall things so when the
start date rolls around they can blame us for the failure and wash their hands
of the whole sorry affair.
Whatever the explanation
the talks drag on, we get no closer to settling things, Friday 11th September
is now less than four months away and should LUL try to impose the new
timetable upon us without an agreement in place then a strike will be unavoidable. While we don’t want to go on strike we know
we will win this one, if LUL really want Night Tube then they are going to have
to make us a reasonable offer sometime between now and the beginning of August,
in the meantime let’s hope we have a nice summer before it all kicks off.