Tube drivers are to vote on industrial action over what the unions call a "breakdown in industrial relations" - and what most people at work call "management taking the piss".
The central issues are:
- SPADs - the company is not implementing its own procedures properly or fairly, with the result that several drivers have faced over-the-top penalties.
- LUL's proposed new attendance and discipline policy. Well, for a start, why are attendance and discipline being put together in the same policy? Being off sick is not misconduct, you know. And for a second, the new policy is more draconian than the existing one, and that is quite bad enough, thank you very much.
- LUL's proposed new machinery of negotiation, which seeks to marginalise trade union representation through the creation of staff councils.
ASLEF announced it would ballot its members. RMT then announced that it would also ballot drivers. In doing so, RMT is carrying out its policy that whenever ASLEF ballots, it will also ballot, so that train drivers can stand united and take legal industrial action together.
But, for now at least, RMT is not balloting other grades, despite two of these three issues affecting all grades.
MACHINERY-ATTENDANCE-DISCIPLINE-SECTION 12..WHERE NEXT COLOMBUS?
I have seen these draconian proposed policies, and to see that talking to the press could mean gross misconduct, going sick for 8 days a year could mean gross misconduct, I could go on its farcical, and so ASLEF ballot, while we tag along behind, again refusing to unite grades, because we appear afraid after copping out with the Shorter Working Week that station side won't strike.
I hope we will not be hearing the old chestnut about "building up a head of steam", as we have sat there over the last year and let management do the very same thing. They have a straightforward policy, attack us in as many ways as possible, and while we bicker over the best way forward they organise more attacks. This will get worse before it gets better.
We are living in the age of the internet, yet we are still organising at a snails pace, we are becoming a dinosaur. In some areas we are crying out for reorganisation. This is obvious in the step change to the website. We have many many tools at our disposal, and yet we do not use them. We still work on the principal of you come to me when you want to know something, not communicating is our big weakness, and when we do we blame others as in the recent put down on TSSA, this DOES NOT GAIN US MEMBERS IT LOSES THEM please stop doing it. We must think carefully in this media political correct climate, and think how we are saying things, psychology is totally overlooked, and yet management are training heavily in it, why aren't we?
If we continue to live on the basis of past glories, we will become the past.