Management’s draft new ‘Attendance, Performance and Conduct at Work’ Procedures signal their intentions to strip down our rights to the bare legal minimum.
Disciplinary hearings will be conducted by just one manager. For issues less serious than those that go to Company Disciplinary Interviews (DBs as was), that manager will have to be only one grade higher than the accused. That will see DSMs disciplining Station Supervisors, or DMTs putting drivers on trial.
That manager will be investigator, prosecution, judge and jury. And during his/her investigation, you will have no right to a union rep. Most people who have been through an LDI will testify that the manager has usually made up his or her mind before they sit down to go through the formalities of the ‘interview’. So the right to union representation will only kick in when it is too late!
The list of what constitutes “gross misconduct” has grown so long that there will be queues forming at the doors of CDIs. No wonder LUL wants them conducted by only one manager, as otherwise they won’t have enough to go round!
But while the number of offences gets bigger, the list of grounds for appeal gets smaller. Worse still, an appeal could give you a worse punishment than the original hearing. Anyone would think this was designed to dissuade people from appealing against their punishment.
Finally (for now), the company reckons it can make you sit through a disciplinary hearing before or after a full day’s work. Hang on, that would be in our own time then? But even if not, it hardly allows us to be fresh and alert to put our case. And it’s hardly conducive to safe conduct at work during the day in question.
Let’s chuck this rubbish in the bin – where it belongs.