Includes fleet maintenance staff employed by Metronet and TubeLines
Official circular - MAINTENANCE OPTIMISATION - LONDON UNDERGROUND (LUL/15/4/)
Dear Colleagues,
A resolution was received from LU Fleet about an alarming policy change by management over the maintenance regime on trains. This was placed before the General Grade Committee who have made the following decision:-
Click '1 attachment' / file name to download this as a 2-page leaflet containing other articles too.
1. London Underground management propose to cut around 800 station staff. This means that they are looking to get maintenance staff who work out on the operational railway attending and assisting in emergency situations eg. If a train gets stalled in a tunnel, with no station staff available, they will send out a callpoint maintainer or technical officer.
From Steve Hedley, Regional Organiser ...
Maintenance “optimisation” is an attempt to move the vast majority of the 14day exam out to 28 days endangering the public and our members jobs
This resolution, submitted as an emergency resolution by LU Fleet and seconded by Jubilee South & East London Line, was carried unanimously by the April meeting of the Regional Council:
1. We note with concern the pre-election commitment of the leaders of all three major parties that public services will be cut in order to fund the public budget deficit.
2. We deplore the attacks made by David Cameron, Gordon Brown and Lord Adonis together with the right wing media on those workers, such as the BA cabin crew, trying to defend their rights, conditions and pay.
The Regional Council Secretary wrote to all branches, asking for their assessment of their branch’s work during 2009, and suggesting that they might address the following points:
- whether your membership grew or shrunk during 2009, and why you think this is
- any problems you have had filling reps’ positions within the branch’s area
- how effective your branch was during any industrial action in your area last year
- what recruitment activities you have organised
This is an official RMT circular - IR/32/10 dated 26th of January 2010, from General Secretary Bob Crow.
You would have heard that agreement was reached with Alstom late on 26th January which enabled the Union to call off all industrial action as previously advised. Members have been asked to now work normally.
We now have a sound pay structure that brings significant improvements in pay with immediate effect.
Tube Lines, whose late completion of upgrade work on the Jubilee Line has resulted in numerous weekend closures, has had a claim for £327m in compensation to complete the work rejected by an independent adjudicator. Tube Lines attempted to claim the money from London Underground. It felt LU was to blame for the work not being completed on time as access to the track was not sufficient.
I've written the following article for 'Solidarity' newspaper ...
A decision by the PPP Arbiter in December may prove to be a fatal punch to private infrastructure company Tube Lines and the whole ‘Public-Private Partnership’ set-up on London Underground.
The New Labour government imposed the PPP at the very end of 2002, despite widespread opposition. PPP organised the Underground’s infrastructure into three groups of lines, and transferred them to private consortia known as Infracos, two to now-defunct Metronet, one – the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines – to Tube Lines.
On 17 December, the PPP Arbiter published an important document, which may turn out to be a staging post in the collapse of Tube Lines and – following 2007’s similar collapse of Metronet – of the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) itself.
It also contains information about issues of great concern to London Underground and TubeLines staff - including problems with the Jubilee line upgrade, pensions, the London Living Wage, cuts in stations refurbishments, "machine-room-less escalators", and engineering staff working across all lines.
As it is a very long and technical document, I have attempted to summarise and explain it here.
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| photo by Paul Mattsson |
TUBE UNION RMT today called for PPP contractor Tube Lines to be stripped of their contract with immediate effect and without compensation, and their work brought back under direct public control, as it emerged that their operations on the Piccadilly, Northern and Jubilee Lines have collapsed into chaos and recrimination.
RMT have no doubt that the poisoned relationship between TfL and Tube Lines has now broken down irretrievably with a sequence of events in the run up to Thursdays decision by the arbiter on the value of the next phase of their contract fuelling the case for the company to be dumped.