The result of the ASLEF ballot is in, 1810 (98.7%) voted for industrial action, 24 (1.3%) voted against with an 81% turnout.  Including those that didn't vote that is 80% of ASLEF members at LUL supporting the union's decision, not even Boris can complain that it's a minority dictating to the rest.  Perhaps now management will start negotiating seriously so we can get this sorted out without us having to lose a day's pay or causing any disruption to the punters.


We're not alone, drivers up at ScotRail have rejected their pay offer of 1.1% plus it seems there are ballots going on at TransPennine Express and Tyne & Wear Metro; the train drivers are revolting (said in a Kenneth Williams type voice).

A rather petulant memo from management appeared last week saying that they were “surprised and disappointed” that the unions were balloting for strikes over Night Tube while negations were in progress.   According to the latest memo from ALSEF during the last negotiations management barely spoke, simply repeating that the unions’ position was “noted" to every issue that was raised which I don’t think anyone can regard as remotely “meaningful”.

It’s pretty obvious to all that LU are simply waiting to see how the ballots turn out, down here we are all pretty sure what the outcome will be and I can’t believe management imagine that the result will be anything other than overwhelmingly for a strike.   The ASLEF ballot closes on Thursday so we should know the result soon while RMT and TSSA started balloting today and will deliver the result in two weeks.

While looking at what train drivers on the mainline were getting as a pay rise I noticed there were two pay levels on the Overground, the basic is £54071 but there’s also a “Sunday exempt driver” salary of £50317.  Sadly I suspect that last one only applies to drivers who’ve transferred over from Silverlink and chose to keep their old terms, Sundays used to be voluntary at double time.  If you could walk into job with Sundays off for about the same as I’m earning now I could be tempted to switch…..

The envelope containing my ballot paper has been returned and in two weeks’ time we should get the result although if it turns out to be anything other a resounding vote in favour of a strike I think everybody will be shocked.  TSSA have joined the other two unions in balloting their members so we could have all three unions in dispute on the Tube for the first time since 1926; at last Boris can claim to have achieved something during his time as Mayor of London!

Despite this dispute being purely about terms and conditions there’s always someone who wants to believe it is something it’s not and a load of “Tubeworker” leaflets have appeared around the depots inciting us to “TAKE ON THE TORIES”.  These are produced by Workers Liberty, a handful of Trots who still think the proletariat are on the threshold of rising up against the running dogs of capitalism and seizing the means of production rather than sat at home watching “Britain’s got talent”.

I could well believe that management would love to depict our strike as political, there were some who accused RMT of calling a strike on Network Rail because the Tories had won the election even though the dispute had been running for months and they’d started balloting in April.  Regardless of the motivation the threat of a strike was enough to get a revised pay offer and the same worked for our ASLEF colleagues on Southern where they’ve been offered 3.2% after rejecting 2.6%.  If our fellow railway workers can get a decent pay rise through threatening to go on strike it seems highly unlikely we’re going to accept 0.75% especially when we are also being asked to work even more unsociable hours than we do already for an insultingly small amount.

In other news after over 60 years of reading the Daily Torygraph (because she’s ex-Foreign Office and it used to have the best foreign news coverage) Old Mother shugged is no longer prepared to endure it’s right wing bias and has switched to the Grauniad.  Which I suppose proves that it’s never too late to change.

And so it goes, both ASLEF and RMT have announced they will be holding strike ballots after management declared that there would be no pay rise at all unless we accepted Night Tube.  Rather than negotiating management have invited the unions to attend “workshops” where they can discuss how to implement the Night Tube rosters and unsurprisingly the unions have told them where to stick their “workshops”.  Unless management are struck by a Damascene conversion then sometime in the next few weeks an envelope containing a ballot paper will come through my letter box, I will duly put my X in the “yes” box and there will be a strike or two.  Sadly I have to conclude that either a) management actually want a strike or b) they really believe that we’re going to accept this deal.  So which is it, duplicitous or deranged?

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.

We have engineering works on the Central Line this weekend, track replacement and drainage works at WHC, nothing unusual about that but what has raised eyebrows is that rather than terminating services at MAA on the WB every second or third train will be running through to QUE.  The QUE crossover, to the east of the station going from the WB approach to the EB platform, was out of service for ages and only came back into service a few years ago but it is very rarely used.  In my whole 12 years as a TOp I’ve only ever gone over it once, an event I recorded on this blog back in April 2013.

The general opinion around the mess rooms as to why the QUE crossover is so rarely used is that it can be a little “unreliable”, as its hardly been used I have no idea if this is the case or not  but if it is then sending five or six trains over it every hour seems a little optimistic.  What also seems a little optimistic are the lifts at QUE which also have a reputation for being “temperamental”, one of the two lifts is invariably out of service and should both fail the only way out is by the 109-step spiral staircase. 

Tomorrow could be interesting.......

On Thursday LU upped their initial “fair and affordable” pay offer to 0.75% for Year 1 and RPI for Year 2 but on condition that we accepted the changes to our agreements for the introduction of Night Tube and dropped all our other requests.  In addition to the two £250 bonuses for accepting Night Tube they are now offering an extra £250 specifically for TOps on the lines that will be running overnight.  Management have made reassuring noise about permanent “fixed links” and/or part-time TOps covering the extra night shifts at some vague point in the future but initially they want to put additional night duties at weekends into our roster and somehow I suspect that is how it would stay

Obviously this is less than satisfactory with us but according to an RMT memo from two weeks ago it seems that management share the unions’ opinion that this will never be acceptable.  It seems that Boris has put restrictions on how much Night Tube will cost so rather than management being stubborn and unreasonable they’re having to negotiate with their hands tied.  If this is true then I actually feel quite sorry for our management which in itself is disturbing.

In January TSSA claimed they’d seen minutes from an LU meeting which estimated that Night Tube will lose £19.6m in the first year and not break even until 2033.  Presuming that calculation was based on staff accepting the paltry offer initially presented then Boris is either going to have to accept that it’s going to cost him a lot more or he’s going to have to scrap Night Tube and go back on his promise, something he’s had plenty of practice doing while mayor.