Hate To Say We Told You So...

Posted in Tubeworker's blog on ,

"Fit for the Future" has been combine-wide for less than two days. Here's a balance sheet so far:

  • Aldgate East station was closed due to staff shortage.
  • Euston Square station had no step-free access due to a shortage of lift-trained staff.
  • Tottenham Hale had no step-free access due to a shortage of lift-trained staff.
  • Hounslow East had no step-free access due to a shortage of lift-trained staff.
  • Wood Lane had no step-free access due to a shortage of lift-trained staff.
  • Various stations had no ticket-office trained staff on duty so were not able to float or service ticket machines.
  • Mass IT failures, including a blanket outage of various new apps on the "go live" day itself.
  • This is undoubtedly just the tip of the iceberg. There have been many more incidents, network-wide, that are less easily definable, resulting from the chaos of forcibly displacing hundreds of staff to new and unfamiliar locations, including needlessly sacrificing years of accumulated local knowledge and forcing staff from smaller station environments to displace to central London.

    None of us will take any pleasure in having predicted this mess. To anyone with an ounce of common sense, it was obvious that the result of cutting hundreds of jobs and forcibly regrading and displacing staff would be chaos for both workers and passengers. But for LU, cost cutting and efficiency savings trounce common sense every time.

    It's time to start planning campaigns, and industrial disputes, against the chaotic consequences of "Fit for the Future", and fighting for our own vision of the future - a properly staffed Tube network with properly trained staff, whose skills and rights are respected, rather than being treated like numbers on a spreadsheet to be crunched at management's whim.

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