LT Health & safety

It has emerged that the London Fire Brigade issued London Bridge station with a notice on 10 April for breaching fire safety regulations.

Ultimately it is management’s job to oversee that our workplaces comply with these vital regulations. How many other corners are they cutting, and where?

Workers need to feel empowered to blow the whistle. If your local management is cutting corners with safety, let a union health and safety rep know immediately.

You can almost hear the grinding of gritted teeth...

Industrial action by LU Fleet workers, and the threat of a three-day strike from 17-20 May, has forced LU bosses into an embarrassing climb-down over their plans to extend train prep schedules. An Employee Bulletin announced the bosses' defeat on 14 May, with the company saying it had "decided not to change the frequencies" of train checks.

Fleet maintainers have voted overwhelming for industrial action against LUL management's plan to cut the frequency of train preparation. A combination of strength of feeling about the issue and a solid organising effort by RMT activists saw nearly two-thirds of ballot papers returned, nearly ninety per cent of them voting Yes to strikes and even more than that for action short.

Station staff on the District East group, and drivers at Upminster and Barking depots on the District and Hammersmith and City Lines, are planning ballots for industrial action to protest lone working.

MTR - which has the contract to run Crossrail - has come a-cropper in Hong Kong, as its trial of new signalling systems came off the rails.

Two subway tains collided between Central and Admiralty stations during an early morning test run on Monday before start of traffic. Both drivers were taken to hospital, with one suffering leg injuries.

It looks like the fault was in the software, which is supplied by another name familiar to Tube workers: Thales.

Management's plan to cut the frequency of train preparation from every 24 hours to every 96 hours will be disastrous for jobs, for safety, and for reliability.

Driven solely by penny-pinching, the cut - if it goes ahead - will see trains going into passenger service which have not been check for up to three days. Given the mileage that a train will have covered during that time, and the range of hazards and stresses it faces over that time, the likelihood of a fault is significant. That's why we check them every day, and why it is vital that we keep checking them every day.

LU's risible red tabards have been officially launched, but if the response at many stations is anything to go by, the launch is something of a damp squib.

Recent studies have once again confirmed how poor the air quality in our workplaces is. Other studies have also reconfirmed that our workplaces are incubators for bacteria and disease.

Zahra Tirmazi, a station worker at Walthamstow Central, was violently assaulted (including being put in a headlock), and racially abused, by a fare-evading passenger. In typically supportive fashion, LU is disciplining her for her role in an incident in which she is obviously the victim.

So much for all those posters on our stations about how LU won’t tolerate abuse of its staff. Turns out, not only will they tolerate it, they’ll blame us for it, throw the book at us, and threaten us with the sack.

Scientific reports confirming the shockingly bad quality of air on London Underground are becoming an annual tradition.

The latest report, from the Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants, reported last week that the air on the platforms at Hampstead was around 31 times more polluted than the average in London, taken from a roadside monitoring point.