Below is a summary of the items discussed at the most recent Staions and Revenue functional council meeting.

Adverse weather

Following 2 referrals from Kings X and Harrow we discussed at great length the punitive measures used by LU, with the treatment of deducting 1 day’s pay or 1 day’s annual leave from staff who couldn’t get into work due to February’s bad weather.

This despite a statement from the Mayor's office that no one would be penalised for not getting into work where it was shown adequate action was taken to get in. Also a collective grievance went into the Director of Employee Relations Gerry Duffy who stated at the time that local mangers should deal with this and use their discretion where necessary.

The guidelines sent out to Managers were ambiguous and performance managers have been getting involved and overturning the more reasonable GSMs who took a common sense approach and used their discretion in dealing with their staff.

The issue has been referred back to Gerry Duffy and we seek a response formally in writing to the original grievance that went in.

Canteen at Kings Cross

Station staff at Kings Cross have requested a staff canteen as they have more staff than some train depots and deserve to have parity as they feel and rightly so, all LU staff should be treated equally.

The expected manager’s excuse of pleading poverty was trawled out and the fact there is no room at Kings Cross to accommodate it even if they had the money! Also they said that T/Ops don’t all have the use of canteen facilities so they are not discriminating against Station staff.

Your Functional reps have said that we will go away and investigate all facilities afforded to T/Ops and will seek parity with whatever is given to them by LU to be also given to Station staff.

Refusal to hold emergency level 1 meetings when requested

Your reps argued that if a new working practice is to be introduced on a group that consultation should take place in the form of an ad-hoc, and if the new practice isn’t urgent then it should wait until the next Level 1. If the GSM decides to introduce a new working practice and the reps request a level 1 it should be arranged to discuss this and not flatly refused with no explanation.

LU came back with various explanations but wouldn’t give a definite answer: this will be given in 14 days.

Blackhorse Road - holding up promotions?

There were concerns from this group surrounding the accusations that an individual was holding up the training and promotion process for a group of staff by delaying their re-sit of a training course. When your reps tried to get clarification on this issue, Resourcing at LU was blaming local managers and local managers were blaming Resourcing.

We finally got clarification at the meeting and it was made clear no individual could possibly hold up the process for the amount of time being argued about and a letter will be sent out to all concerned explaining the process and why they have waited so long for the training.

Individuals who work at SS1 only groups who can not get Higher grade working to complete the necessary 60 shifts working on other groups on their line.

There is an agreement at one of last year's functional councils that where possible staff who hold an SS licence can be given an opportunity to work on another group as a development to gain the required amount of duties to go for further SS promotion. It came to our attention that this system was being abused and staffs that were getting this development were being used to cover not only SS positions but all other grades as well.

We got it confirmed that if no duties existed to accommodate this the individual would be sent back to their own group or other groups on the line would be explored.

This will be sent out in a management bulletin but our local reps who advised us of this will be keeping an eye on it for future failings.

Security of SLS safes in ticket offices

A trial with the authority of the GSM took place recently where it was proven that you can fish out a cash bag using a hook and fishing line (took six minutes!) from some SLS safes. The safes were supposed to have been redesigned some years ago after it was identified you could do this.

Your reps raised concerns that not all SAMFs can get witnesses to confirm cash bags going into safes and also many other people have unsupervised access to the safes - cleaners, contractors, etc. We requested that in light of this discovery any CDIs that are pending be postponed until the evidence is fully collected and examined and avenues explored to rectify the problem. LU were not interested in our proposals to solve the issue (eg. CCTV in safe room).

This has been referred to the Revenue sub group for further talks.

Uncounted monies

The RMT is extremely concerned about London Underground's response to the RMT’s recent discovery which exposes serious failings with the way the accounting is done in ticket offices on LUL, and the lack of concern shown by LUL towards protecting their employees, despite being made aware of the problem.

The problem that LUL have is that when monies go missing or a debit is identified it is reported to LUL from the counting house some considerable time after the event (up to 4 months in some cases). The staff member is then automatically presumed guilty and asked to account for this as no investigation is done into the counting house. What is also unbelievable is that LUL have admitted to losing around £60,000 per month from the worst affected 5 stations in discrepancies and appear unwilling to look at their accounting systems.

Under old procedures the staff member was able to count their money at the end of their shift and where there were mistakes these could more often than not be rectified. There is no opportunity to put right any mistakes under this system and so how can the staff member have “Individual accountability” as is expected under LUs’ policies for money they themselves haven’t accounted for?

Also LU has a debits and credits procedure that it is not being adhered to and so we demanded an action taken to review this system.

This has also been referred to the Revenue sub group for further discussion.