Where is the room in London Underground's brave new world for disabled people, poor people and non-English speakers?
Where is the room in London Underground’s brave new world for disabled people, poor people and non-English speakers? asks John Leach
Last June, the government cut funding to Transport for London by 12.5 per cent. Last November, London Underground Ltd (LU) announced its intention to close all its ticket offices, cut 953 jobs and restructure its station staffing to create more managers but cut the pay of station staff.
London Underground knows very well that passengers do not want these cuts, that staff do not want these cuts, that Londoners do not want these cuts. It is not making these cuts and closures in order to improve and ‘modernise’ its service, as it claims: it is making them to save money and damn the consequences.
Transport for London – which owns London Underground – has refused proposals from RMT that it ask the government to reverse the funding cut and that it trim the salaries of the 328 people that TfL paid more than £100,000 in 2012/13. LU bosses claim that only 3 per cent of journeys involve a visit to a ticket office.
But the percentage disguises the hard fact that this is well over 100,000 people per day. LU claims that ticket office staff are ‘invisible’: how does it think that all these people manage to find them?!
LU’s vision is of an Underground where no-one needs ticket offices and no-one needs help: an Underground where everyone has topped up their payment card online and moves confidently and seamlessly through the system.
But where is the room in this brave new world for visitors to London unfamiliar with the system, disabled people, poor people who struggle to keep their card in credit, non-English speakers, people visiting hospitals, elderly people, people who fear assault or harassment while travelling, or anyone else who does not measure up to their ideal customer?
Moreover, these cuts represent only 6 per cent of the total savings that TfL needs to make. So if the company steamrollers these plans through, then the hard-pressed passengers can also look forward to at least several of the following: higher fares, abandoned improvements, more staff cuts, less frequent services, less regular maintenance and thus lower safety standards.
LU bosses have claimed in the media that RMT has made no alternative proposals – or that the union has made no ‘constructive’ or ‘credible’ proposals.
This is a sleight of hand in which the company dismisses the well-thought-through, detailed alternative proposals that we made as being neither constructive nor credible, when in fact they are both.
RMT has proposed that TfL/LU: undertake a major programme of making the Tube accessible to disabled people; ask the government for more money; cap salaries at £100,000; bring all contracted-out services in-house; promote its own ticket offices rather than rival outlets; and abandon costly preparations for further cuts, such as driverless trains.
These measures would both improve services and save money, but were all rejected by top Tube bosses, who even had the cheek to claim that if anything, they are not paid enough.
So that is why we are on strike. We have talked and talked and it has got us nowhere. When we took strike action in February, it won us and Londoners a promise from the company of a ‘station-by-station review’ which ‘may lead to some ticket offices staying open’.
Eight weeks later, that station-by-station review has not taken place, and LU bosses openly state that even when it does, it will not lead to any ticket offices staying open.
This is deeply shocking and disappointing – but perhaps not surprising when the puppet-master is Boris Johnson, elected Mayor on a promise of keeping a ticket office open at every station, a promise that now lies in tatters.
London Underground Ltd has shown emphatically that when we stop taking action, it stops backing down. The company could not have made it clearer that if we want to stop these cuts and closures, we have to strike.
On the eve of the strike, RMT offered to Tube bosses that we would suspend our strike if they suspended their cuts to allow a full public consultation. They refused.
That tells you who is to blame for the strike going ahead. And it makes you wonder what they fear from a public consultation – presumably, that the public disagree with their plans.
John Leach is RMT London transport regional organiser
49 Responses to “Tube strike: Dear Londoners, this is why we are on strike”
Ben
Well just because we may be over-paying for TFL management (and I’d need some evidence for that) doesn’t mean we also want to be over-paying for ticket offices that are used by only 3% of tube users! You can’t use one unacceptable cost as justification to carry on with another unjustifiable cost – that’s not how the world works.
RicardoRed
are tube staff overpaid?!
Elsie
Please do enlighten me on how to use a ticket machine! I am registered blind and have always relied on talking to people at the ticket offices. As far as I am aware the ticket machines do not use braille!
Red Robb
Ok what’s not been said here is that this is clearly the result of what many people have voted for. People wanted change & got bored of Labour, now you have what you asked for a tory government. It was always inevitable that once in power strikes would happen they always do go check your history books. I digress, now London Underground was initially set up by privateers and has always been run so. It was the GLC under Ken Livingstone that merged the separate companies into one business unit of London Transport. Now if it weren’t for Maggie illegally closing down the GLC, the underground would’ve been government or at least run centrally. Now it is because the government are to thrifty and tight to recognise it’s importance as part of Londons infrastructure, that we are in this mess today.
So there’s no point in pointing the accusatory finger at the union & staff members for what is a stressful & testing time. As I don’t imagine for a second that any of you would voluntarily swap places to do the shift work that they do. Leaving home or coming home at two or three in the morning. Regularly missing bedtime & dinner time with your family. Dealing with big shot city bod’s vomiting & being abusive on a Friday night. Cleaning up missing teeth & broken limbs at the weekend. That’s the nasty side of the job, then you get the indignant ones that think rules don’t apply to them.
Also if staff are cut, who’s going to be there to pick up the pieces should another 7/7 happen?
Security will be sacrificed along with cuts, that for sure is inevitable. It’s happening already, you just don’t know it.
Rogue
Ben,
That’s cute do you really think that cutting staff will make travel any cheaper? Now the ONLY reason that prices go up EVERY year is to limit numbers of people using the system. TfL get the majority of their revenue NOT through ticket sales, but through advertising and properties (the biggest landlord in the capital). Now if you take your poisonous venous personal vendetta elsewhere because it seem to have narrowed your perspective somewhat.