Station Supervisors are being sent on workshops to encourage all staff to care more about the SIS scorecard (what used to be the mystery shopper scores).
Instinctively, most staff pay no regard to the primary school-like coloured magnets on the whiteboard. While management's worst fear is a 'red scorecard', we just get on with doing our jobs.
So management have decided to be a bit clever to make us care. They have used supervisor workshops to explain that SIS scores determine how much funding LU receives from central government. LU needs government funding to plug the 25% shortfall that LU does not make through revenue.
So they are basically trying to make staff feel responsible for how well-funded the Tube is. Unable to convince us to care using any other means, they are now using the ultimate bribe: get green scorecards and your job will be safe.
This is missing two major points:
1. The biggest thing jeopardising green scorecards is management's recent staff cuts. An unstaffed platform flags up instantly with senior managers. They don't care that we have no staff! They expect supervisors to abandon the control room and run the station from the platform, repeating the mantra that green scorecards will secure future funding. But it's flawed logic: funding and staff will continue to be cut if green scorecards give the false impression that there are enough staff to do every job on the station.
2.Public transport SHOULD be publicly funded. We should not have to jump through meaningless hoops to get the cash. It's surprising that the government only need to plug a 25% hole. You'd expect a much higher government contribution to what is, sadly, Britain's only remaining publicly-run railway. It shows how far the trend of running on revenue rather than public money has extended over recent years, one of the reasons for yearly exhorbitant fare rises.
The union needs to make a political case to us, its members, about the importance of public funding. The way to secure it is through political campaigning, not massaging the figures of an artificial points system. We should only do the job we are paid to do: let management see the grim reality of how stations are struggling since the cuts. Giving them green scorecards when they won't give us staff is only paving the way for future job cuts.
