Station staff are increasing angry about the use of 'mystery shoppers' to assess staff performance. Formerly known as Mystery Shopping Surveys (MSS), the reports are now known as Staff Information Surveys (SIS) - but many staff are starting to think of them as Spying and Insults Surveys.

London Underground pays a private company to send people round stations marking staff on a range of things from clarity of PAs and the information you provide, to how you look and whether you smile! Although this information is supposed to assess overall station performance, it is now being used to grill individual staff members. On some groups, GSMs are sending the full report to all stations on the group: although the individual staff members scored are not named, in many cases it is easy to work out who they are as the station and time is named and they may be the only person on duty at that time.

Staff find it very insulting to read that they were 'slightly scruffy, untidy or unclean' when they know that they were well-turned-out and in full uniform. One SIS report on East Ham group labelled every staff member on every station as 'slightly scruffy, untidy or unclean': they are justifiably furious.

RMT, backed by TSSA, raised this issue at the recent Stations & Revenue Council meeting. We complained of the injustice of the process; the arbitrary nature of the scoring; the fact that staff cannot challenge allegations from an anonymous source; and the inappropriateness of some of the criteria (eg. it may not always be appropriate to smile at a customer, for example when they are upset about a serious service delay). We would like to see all assessment of staff carried out by accountable London Underground employees, not by anonymous private contractors - but while this contracted-out 'mystery shopper' system continues, RMT will challenge its injustices.

So we asked for the process to be suspended pending a review. Management refused.

While still asserting that this system provides 'independent and objective feedback', management did appear to accept some of our complaints, saying that they 'want to use the information to improve performance not create bad feeling'.

Management accept that information from which individual staff can be identified should not be circulated around stations. However, they refused our request to issue an instruction to this effect straight away, and said that it 'could carry on for a while'.

Two managers will draft new advice to GSMs within the next two weeks, and there will be an ad hoc Strategy and Development Forum to discuss this further within four weeks.

However, management refused to allow us to discuss the actual content of the surveys, as they said this was not the business of the Stations & Revenue Council but of something called the 'Customer Insights Team', a body on which there is no trade union representation!

Management stated that the only way to raise the content of the surveys was for us to get our union head offices to raise the issue with the Director of Employee Relations, who will then discuss it with the Director of Service and Strategy Development. So that is what we will do.

Reps and members: Please email Janine with reports and information about how this is being used on your group, and you and your workmates' views on it.