Ambassador, you are spoiling us...

Posted in Tubeworker's blog on ,

A post on Yammer has announced the rates-of-pay for “Ambassadors” working on stations.

We’ve all seen this merry bunch, sporting their pink hi-vis, taking a day off from their office-based, usually managerial, jobs to put in a shift on a station.

Undoubtedly most of them are motivated by a sense of public spiritedness, but it’s not hard to see why station staff often resent their presence.

Ambassadors with the “ICSA” license (a Mickey Mouse accreditation given to them after a crash course, which scandalously allows them to be counted as part of legal minimum numbers) get £160 for a Monday-Friday shift, and £240 for a weekend or Bank Holiday shift.

That’s substantially more than the per-shift rate for CSA1s and CSA2s. Is LU really saying that a manager with cursory training is worth more than a fully-trained CSA who does the job day in, day out?

Very few “Ambassadors” are senior bosses, so not exactly what we’d call the class enemy; a lot of them are just office workers trying to help out. But we’d appeal to them to consider whether taking these shifts might not, in fact, be undermining their operational colleagues.

If extra work needs doing on stations, why doesn’t the company hire and train more station staff rather than plugging gaps with “Ambassadors”?

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