The Big Bang

So we now know what the changes are, and they are as fundamentally important to the way that we do things on London Underground as I suspected they would be. LU finds itself in something of a tight spot: the seven year business plan was written just as the good times were coming to an end, and the seven year budget that has been given to us from on high is not as big as they told us it would be. Something to do with some kind of economic downturn I think, I didn’t catch the details.

What is happening?
Operations, the bit of LU that actually runs the stations and trains, is being restructured. This will involve changes to line management and job losses. Senior managers are saying that they “plan to deliver these reductions with no compulsory redundancies”; the sharp-eyed among you may notice that that sentence does not include a promise of any kind.

LU stations are organised for management purposes in to “groups”. The number of groups across LU, currently 44, will be reduced by seven. This means that the number of Group Station Manager positions will fall by seven, and the number of Duty Station Manager positions (the grade beneath GSM) will fall too, I’m guessing by about 35, which is a big hit at middle management. GSM admin staff will also be reduced – since every group tends to have an average of two, that is probably a fall of 14. Every group will have no more than five DSMs, meaning more middle management reductions even in those groups which are not facing amalgamation into others. These changes should have been made by late 2010.

The reason that middle management can be cut is that staff are also being cut. 450 ticket office positions will be cut across LU, along with between 150 and 200 CSAs – the people on the gateline who you ask questions of/are polite to/are rude to/moan about etc. These changes should be made by Feb 2011 at the latest.

In my sphere, the way that trains staff are managed is also changing. The train-side GSM equivalent, known as a Train Operations Manager or TOM, is also facing cuts. The exact way this will work is unclear to me at the moment, but it seems that they may halve the number of TOMs there are on the network. They will certainly amalgamate small depots which are close to each other, which makes sense. What does not make so much sense is if they make the current two-TOM locations, the so-called “super-depots”, into one-TOM locations. The super-depots have about 240 drivers, and 240 direct reports is a lot of direct reports! My grade, Duty Manager Trains or DMT, will be rejigged. The DMT role is currently made up of two jobs which were originally separate grades, you cycle through each role during a shift pattern, and the restructuring makes them separate once again. The current “mobile” DMT, who is a kind of roving incident manager and who also investigates all delays of over two minutes, will become a “Duty Reliability Manager”. The desk DMT, who signs in drivers and ensures that drivers and trains go to the right places during service disruptions, will become a “Duty Train Staff Manager”. There will also be a deputy TOM role in the current DMT grade, which may be a way of getting round some of the impracticalities of reducing TOMs at super-depots, but still seems unsatisfactory.

Why is this happening?
There is an eyewateringly large gap between our aspirations and our reality, and that needs to be closed. Back office departments have already faced budget and job cuts, and now it is the turn of the operational side of LU to tighten its belt – despite the promises made by senior management at the time of the 2008 strike that operations would not be affected. In addition to this, the way that people are using the Tube is changing. LU has traditionally needed more staff than other metros because things go wrong a lot more – other metros are either newer or get more money than LU has traditionally been given. The recent investment, while nowhere near finished, has already brought up reliability, which must have made senior managers think they no longer need so many staff.

In another twist, in my opinion duty managers are often seen to be dead weight, sometimes with good reason. There are a lot of people here in my grade on both stations and trains side who are either lazy or incompetent, and the time has come to have a spring clean. The problem with this is that locations with good duty managers always perform very well, and I would think that performance managing duty managers and getting rid of people who are bad at their jobs is a better idea for productivity than cutting the posts themselves, but I digress.

How will it affect you, dear reader?
Well, if you are a commuter, in the long term you will notice that there are fewer staff members around during your commute. LU has noticed that commuters tend not to ask questions, what you do instead is switch on autopilot and go from A to B as quickly as possible. When there are service disruptions, you still don’t ask questions. You might complain, but generally you just switch to your back-up route, which you have done before and know just as well as your normal route.

So commuters don’t need so many staff as leisure users, and the staffing will be shifted to reflect this. Instead of beefing up in the peaks, we will beef up staffing at the weekend, when there are tonnes of closures and when, even if there weren’t, there are loads of first-time or infrequent Tube users about. These people, tourists or Home Counties dwellers, ask a lot of questions, and consequently need more staff.

Ticket offices which are currently in existence will not close for good, but their hours will be truncated. LU management has trotted out a statistic which says that only 1 in 20 journeys begins with a trip to the ticket office. In future, you will be forced to use the machines, Ticket Stops or the TfL Oyster website to top-up or renew season tickets. You may as well start getting used to it.

How will it affect me?
A good question. Unless I lose my job, which I hope won’t happen, I think this will be good for me and others like me. I hate, hate, HATE the desk role of my job and wish that I could be mobile all the time – a wish that I will get if I manage to move from old-world DMT to new-world Duty Reliability Manager. It may be that I am moved from this depot to another on another line, or even over to station side. That would be unfortunate, since I like it here, but at least I would have a job, and an enforced sideways move like that would only give me more experience to carry on moving up the chain.

Will there be strikes?
Yes. I am 100% sure there will be strikes. Some people are talking about long ones, say a week or more, but I am not sure it will come to this. If depth of feeling was the only thing that counted, then those people would be right, but it isn’t. Most people could not afford to strike for a week – that’s one quarter of your earnings gone. So my tip is that there will be at least one network wide strike, but that they will follow the pattern of two days per pay period, as they have done recently, rather than a massive week or two week walkout. There may even be no network strike and only local strikes - call me a cynic, but since Train Operators aren't affected, would they really walk out for the sake of "solidarity"? Well, regardless, I'd still lay money on at least one network-wide strike.

PS: It's called the "Big Bang" because that is the LU term for this kind of confrontation with the unions. Normally LU deals with things through the normal collective bargaining machinery, but today's announcement was a bolt from the blue, and contained several controversial issues at one time. A big bang. We can only wait to see what the fall out is.