Station staff at Heathrow are gearing up to defend Harvinder Billing, a colleague sacked after two ticket office discrepancies.
Anyone who works in a ticket office knows how unreliable LU’s machines can be. We can’t stand by and watch our colleagues sacked for human error on an unreliable system on which we’re not properly trained.
It’s good to see Harvinder’s colleagues rally round.
Many grades in many locations are suffering under the destaffing over recent years, or are facing imminent cuts to jobs.
The unions - primarily RMT - are fighting back on several fronts. RMT has scored some successes, including on Bakerloo South stations groups and the cleaning contractor, ABM.
Station staff across the job are facing discipline, and even the sack, for minor ticket office discrepancies.
We’re rapidly losing faith in the technology we’re working with, and in LU’s ability to train us on it.
If you don’t feel confident, insist on further training.
Arnos Grove station staff are shocked and angry that management have suspended a workmate for a minor ticket office discrepancy. The staff member concerned has more than fifteen years on the job and six years doing ticket office duties without any problems, and yet the company has thrown the book at him over a shortfall that may not even be his fault.
Management appear to have accepted that stopping passengers leaving the station with a code 36 until staff intervene is not working. Gates at 15 stations have been modified to have a lower exit threshold, meaning someone with “insufficient PAYG” can exit. If this trial is successful it will be made standard.
Following in London Underground's footsteps, London Overground now plans to close nearly all its ticket offices.
LU says too many customers are having too much money refunded to their Oyster cards. LU is now monitoring station staff. It has produced a league table to help management identify whether "the same people" are "always" doing refunds.
What is this meant to prove? That some staff like to help when customers have been over-charged?
It's a slap in the face. LU closes ticket offices and pressures us to do ticket selling duties without proper training, then watches to see if we do the new practises "wrong".
London Underground has not provided enough training to station staff on how to handle cash from the ticket machines since ticket offices closed.
Money piles up in the machines because too few staff are trained on how to take it out. LU brought in new snazzy Cash Handling Devices (CHD), and barely trained us on them, saying they were "easy to use".
A rather dystopian, if garishly-coloured, vision of TfL/LU's corporate, semi-privatised future at Oxford Circus today, as wealthy sugar merchants Lucozade ran a promotion offering free bottles with a contactless chip worth one free Tube journey embedded in the bottom.
It has long been an ambition of LU bosses, and some politicians, to boost private sector involvement in the Tube — from selling off former ticket office space to retailers like Amazon, Tesco, and Argos, to flirting with procuring corporate sponsorship for station names ("Lucozade Oxford Circus", anyone?).
Revenue Control Inspectors (RCIs) have increasingly been working in full uniform, whereas many operations were previously undertaken in plain clothes. LU's aim is clear: by putting more uniformed staff on stations, they're attempting to mask the impact of their job cuts. It makes it more difficult for the RCIs to do their job.
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