London Underground's booklet for staff on its 'change proposals' is attached. This gives more details on the 'changes' ie cuts announced to the press yesterday.

Some notes:

The document states that LUL's strategy is to have "visible, helpful and knowledgeable staff who can guide our customers through the system" ... and then goes on to spell out how the company is going to get rid of hundreds of them!

The company's justifications for its changes are:

- New technology bringing about changes in customer behaviour. As the press release says, only 1 in 20 journeys now begin with a visit to the ticket office (perhaps because the ticket office is closed, or because of LUL's intensive campaigns to drive people away from the window over the last couple of years!). But as a comment on our website says, 1 in 20 is still around 54.5 million customer visits to the ticket office in a year

- The current economic climate - this has been their excuse for every attack on staff, every refusal of reasonable requests by us, since the term 'credit crunch' was coined. There is, of course, no explanation as to *why* the current economic climate necessitates job cuts

The change proposal fall into three categories:

1. Ticket offices and ticket halls

TICKET OFFICES: Management reassure us that every station that currently has a ticket office window will still have one. However, their detailed plans show that:

- Some ticket offices will close altogether eg. Charing Cross Trafalgar Square side.

- Nearly all ticket offices will have their opening hours reduced.

- Many ticket offices' opening hours will be reduced dramatically
eg. Monument ticket office currently opens 0645-200 weekdays; 1000-1730 Saturdays; 1100-1800 Sundays - LUL proposes to open it 1700-1830 weekdays only
eg. Loughton ticket office currently opens 0600-1930 weekdays; 0830-1930 Saturdays; 0900-1700 Sundays - LUL proposes to open it 0645-1115 weekdays; 0845-1500 Saturdays; 1030-1130 Sundays

- 450 SAMF jobs will go.

TICKET HALLS: London Underground claims that "we generally provide more staff in the morning peak than is necessary", which will come as a big surprise (or perhaps a sick joke) to staff who work flat out during the morning peak, and to customers who need help during the morning peak but find that staff are not available.

Management admit that London Underground needs more station staff at weekends, but as they plan to combine this with big cuts in weekday staff, this will lead to more weekend working, and thus more anti-social hours.

We need *more* staff during the morning peak, not fewer; and we need more staff at weekends *as well as*, not instead of, during the week!

London Underground admits that there will be a net reduction of 150-200 CSA positions.

New draft SAMF and CSA rosters will be published by July 2010.

2. Station groups and management

London Underground plans to cut the number of station groups by seven. Details are on the intranet.

This will mean:

- Loss of GSM, DSM and admin jobs

- Reserve staff having to work on even more stations than currently (the new groups will have up to 13 stations in them), so will have an even more unpredictable working life and will spend more time travelling in their own time

- All staff finding it harder to get duty changes, odd days' leave or other assistance from over-worked administrative staff

This reorganisation is intrinsically linked to the other job-cutting proposals: in fact, management's justification for it is the reduction in staffing levels at stations.

Management want to complete this reorganisation by Autumn 2010, in advance of the job cuts taking effect in February 2011.

3. Trains management

The DMT grade is to be split into three distinct roles, causing a reduction in Duty Manager posts of around 30.