An item on LU's intranet entitled "Are we getting enough sleep?" has prompted responses from many of us.
The Intranet tells us LU will use a "Readiband" watch-type tool, which "detects the wearer's quality of sleep and wake periods", to measure the impact of fatigue on the team working on the Bank tunnelling project.
A 70% reading on the Readiband equates to the same physical condition as being at the drink-driving limit. Hopefully this monitoring will expose the contradiction of LU policing drugs and alcohol consumption yet imposing rosters that actively deprive us of sleep and cause the same physical effects!
Many staff beyond the Bank tunnelling project have responded by saying that we would like this monitoring too, as we're permanently in a state of fatigue. Night shifts every four weeks, 12-hour shifts at weekends, short turnarounds from lates to earlies, and a disproportionate number of extreme shifts are just some of the observations.
This stuff impacts not only on the quality but the length of our lives. As one driver who has been reading up on the long-term health effects of shift work recently commented, "Doing the shifts we're doing, we're not likely to see sixty."
It's good that this discussion has prompted Stations Tier Two safety reps to tell us that they have pushed LU to set up a fatigue forum, which is yet to meet. This work of this forum needs to be open to all of us, and integrated with some campaigning about reducing fatigue. We need LU to wake up to our lack of sleep and its negative impact on the quality of our work and the quality of our lives.
"Fit For the Future - Stations" will increase fatigue. There will be fewer of us covering 24/7 rosters, including night running. Our bodies will be pushed and pulled in all directions, we won't know when to sleep or eat. That's the physical reality of the "flexibility" LU wants from us.
We need a major campaign about fatigue to protect our health, not just from current punishing work conditions, but from the even worse future that awaits us unless we defeat LU's planned cuts.
