TUBE UNION RMT revealed today that senior reps have been informed that LUL are to recruit a further 600 Customer Service Advisors (CSA’s), coming on top of the 300 employed earlier this year and following the deletion of 800 station staff posts by the company last year.

RMT says that the recruitment of the latest wave of additional staff is an outright admission that they got their station staffing cuts programme wrong and that if they had listened to the union in the first place they could have saved themselves a huge amount of disruption and embarrassment.

RMT General Secretary Bob Crow said:

“Tube bosses were warned repeatedly that their job cuts programme would come back to haunt them and so it has proved.

“The axing of station staff has been a massive blunder that has left stations unstaffed, created safety problems and led to disruption from the moment it was introduced.

“Instead of listening to the union warnings tube bosses, under the leadership of Boris Johnson, ploughed on regardless and have now been forced into this massive U-turn.

“RMT remains deeply concerned that the legacy of this whole botched staffing cuts process will be a shortage of trained, safety-critical staff to cope with the massive pressure that will be thrown at the system throughout the Olympics period.

“Tube bosses owe Londoners an apology for this wholly avoidable fiasco and a cast-iron assurance that there will be no repeat of this kind of staffing blunder in the future.”