Tube Lines

Tube Lines' 'performance' and workers' demands for better conditions

Saturday Night's Not Alright

Management want to impose a vastly anti-social roster for fleet staff at Northfields, making them work on Saturday nights when they have not done before. Social life?! Humbug!

After months of negotiation, RMT and TubeLines reached a stalemate. So management bypassed the local rep and union head...

Big Brother is Back

Metronet and Tubelines have revived their plan to make their staff book on duty using a 'smartcard'. This would carry biometric data with a capacity to include everything from fingerprints to credit records.

LUL has no plans to foist this on its own staff - yet, but station supervisors will be...

Ultrasonic Boom

Specialist P-way workers who use ultrasonic kit to check for cracked rails are employed by TubeLines but also provide the service to Metronet. That was, until Metronet got the hump about the prices TubeLines was charging them.

TubeLines ultrasonic staff then became much in demand with mysterious...

Defend Our Cleaners' Rep

Alex Ansah, for many years the night cleaner at Caledonian Road and also an RMT representative, has been forced to move work locations. Why? Because he stood up to a Tubelines Manager, who was trying to intimidate him into using unsafe working practices. We want Alex back at Caledonian Road and we...

Pull the pay fights together

Meanwhile, TubeLines have settled for a two-year deal with a 4% rise this year. Metronet seem to think that 4% should be OK for their workforce too, conveniently ignoring the fact that their pay is already lower than TubeLines, so we will need at least 5% to play catch-up.

And it's full steam ahead...

Fingerprints please

Believe it or not, Metronet and TubeLines are proposing to make workers sign in and out using their fingerprints. We can not confirm rumours that we will also have our rights read to us, hold up a card with our staff number on it, wear a suit with arrows on, eat porridge and be allowed only one...

TubeLines pay claim

RMT has submitted its pay claim to TubeLines, and TubeLines has responded. So the opening skirmishes will begin.

RMT has asked for a one-year deal and a 'substantial' pay rise for staff. It is the general practice of the union not to put a figure on its pay claims. Tubeworker tends to think that it...

Northern Line: Unity and Action Protects Safety

The last few weeks’ events on the Northern line have shown three important things: PPP is a safety disaster; it is Tube workers, not management, who care about safety; and that if we stand firm, we can win.

PPP = Disaster for Safety

PPP was supposed to deliver improvements and an effective...

Northern line braking system fails again

Flippin' 'eck, it's happened again. Last night, the Northern Line's emergency braking system failed for the fourth time in fourth weeks.

When the braking system failed on 9 September, the company introduced double-crewing of trains. But for who-knows-what reason (surely not cost? or fear of...

It's official: the Infracos are rubbish

Well, you could knock us down with a feather. TfL's second annual report on the PPP has stated that the Infracos' performance is "not good enough".

Now, why could they possibly think that? Perhaps because:

  • the track renewals programme is 31% lower than the Infracos promised in their PPP bids
  • ov...

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