Paul Corfield wrote:
On Monday, 9 January 2017 08:30:37 UTC, Recliner wrote:
Does anyone know what the latest strike us about? Is it another political
one, or do they have a legitimate case? If it's about the closed ticket
offices, surely it's a bit late for that?

It seems to be less well supported than expected, as LU is running many
more services than predicted.

Just because a station may be open does not mean lots of staff have
broken the strike. May be other HQ staff and managers drafted in temporarily.

The strike has metamorphosed somewhat. The dispute goes back to Boris's
decision to close all ticket offices. That policy was implemented without
agreement with the RMT and TSSA. £135m was spent on closing offices. I am
sure that Boris knew he was leaving a potential mess for whoever
succeeded him but he didn't care. Whether you agree with this strike or
not it's a bit ridiculous to just plough on without agreement of staff
members. It's always going to rebound.

The rebound has now happened because it's evident that LU got the numbers
wrong and assumed vast amounts of overtime would be worked. The unions
implemented an overtime ban and hey presto - station closures have
multiplied. My local station has been closed umpteen times and people are
(rightly) livid at being mucked around. It would be even worse if the
GOBLIN service was actually running. The Mayor then implemented a
"review" which didn't recommend reopening offices (it was never going to)
but did point out a load of flaws and issues. We are now in a situation
where LU accept they have to recruit more staff while the unions are
pointing out that there is natural turnover of 300 a year plus 100
current vacancies. LU propose 200 new posts - the unions are clearly
arguing for far more to cover the turnover and vacancies and then raise
the staffing complement. There are other issues such as loads of stations
staffed with just one person plus a new grade with lower wages. I
suspect they are all part of the debate but the main one is numbers. You
have to ask why 800+ people were allowed to leave and now there is an
acceptance that 200 more people are needed. Someone got their numbers and
assumptions badly wrong somewhere.

I suspect there is a tiny bit of politics here too. The Mayor said "no
strikes" which is just an encouragement to the unions to force a broken
promise. Regrettably there will always be some sort of industrial action
on LU or buses or DLR sometime in a 4 year period. It's therefore stupid
for Mayors / candidates to set themselves up for a fall as Mayor Khan has
done. Worse he's created the impression there is something better within
reach "if only people sit round a table". They did that again over the
weekend and got nowhere but the Mayor is still saying the same thing
today. All this does is raise false hopes and run the risk of more
strikes to push more concessions given the Mayor's opponents will now be
slagging him off at every opportunity. Therefore the Mayor will want a
settlement but will he settle at any cost? Hopefully not as the budget
will be screwed even more in consequence if loads more staff are
recruited again. This also sets a very poor precedent for future pay
negotiations. The TUs are great at spotting weakness - as you would expect them to be.

Yup, and he's also being slagged off thus week for his 'broken' frozen
fares promise. Technically, he didn't break his promise, but you needed to
have read the legal fine print to know that he was only able to freeze the
TfL component of any fares basket, such as Travelcards. So, despite the
technically honest promise, lots of Londoners are seeing the fare rise they
thought he'd promised wouldn't happen.