I’m a train operator on the London Underground (LU) and a member of the RMT (National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers). I’ve worked here for over ten years. London Underground (LU) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Transport for London (TFL), which manages the day to day operation of the Underground. Industrially we are organised into one collective bargaining unit, so all 14,000 (approximately) directly employed workers bargain together and strike together over things like pay and terms and conditions. 10,000 of these workers are RMT members. Another 1800 are ASLEF members, a drivers only craft union. TSSA have a few hundred station staff, and UNITE organise in engineering with around 1000 members. I will look at what a day at work for a train operator is like, followed by a brief overview of recent disputes we have had in our workplace, then go on to examine how some of the work of producing a public transport system is organised and how it could look different under workers control.

The working day for an LU driver can start at any time between 04.30am and 11:55pm. We work a five day week, with two days off every week, with your total weekly working time not exceeding 36 hours. Each driver is only trained to work on their specific line, due to differences in the rolling stock on each line and different types of signal operation. Each line has train depots where drivers book on for work. For baby lines like the Bakerloo they have only two at Elephant & Castle and Queens Park, whereas bigger lines like the Northern have four. You book on with a train manager at your shift start time, you then have an agreed time until you pick up your train, which for us is 17 minutes. These times have been negotiated with management over the years and include agreed walking times from your booking on point to the location of the train. You may have heard these kind of agreements referred to as “Spanish practices” during recent train company strikes. But when your entire working day is structured by a timetable as it is for a train operator, you need the protection of agreed travel time, as every delayed train is looked into by a duty reliability manager to apportion blame for the delay.

The normal working day is 8 hours, split into two halves from around 3 hours 30 mins to 4 hours 15 mins, with a meal break of 30 mins to 1 hour in between. We have a maximum agreed driving time of 4 hours and 15 mins without a break, and this along with other driving parameters are all written down in our agreements. These are learned verbatim by drivers over the years to protect yourself from line controllers who will always try to get more work out of you. The line controller is responsible for the overall management of the train service day to day, they sit in a central control room and communicate with drivers and other staff via radio. When the service is running as planned they have a relatively easy time, but, as anyone who uses the tube knows, we have plenty of unplanned events, it’s then the line controllers job to get the service back to good, after signal failures etc. This is the main point of conflict for drivers when at work. The line controller wants certain trains in certain positions in order to get the service back to good, and you want to finish work on time and in the location you are supposed to. These two desires don’t always match up. This is where we use our agreed driving parameters to assert ourselves over instructions from management. Or as the Tories would cry, “Spanish practices”!

The RMT nationally is divided up into geographical regions for organising. The London Transport Region (LTR), contains most workers organised under the TFL umbrella, with notable exceptions for London Overground and the Elizabeth Line. There are seventeen branches inside the LTR. Station and train staff share branches generally organised around a line (for example, Central Line West and Central line East), as well as grade specific branches for Fleet (train maintenance) and Engineering (track and signal maintenance). The branch is the democratic lynch pin of the union. Ideally you would have mass participation in branches. Even though we work in a heavily unionised workplace with union membership being over 90% for many grades, branch participation is low. Unfortunately most colleagues approach the union through the service model: I pay the union a fee, they provide me with services, if the union tells me to go on strike, I will. Local reps then become viewed as the representative of the union in the workplace. We are regularly asked questions along the lines of “what is the union position on this?”, or “what is the union going to do about this?”, rather than thinking of the union as a collective project where we come together to decide what we want, what we need and what we are willing to fight for.

This service model is one which British trade unions have slipped into over the decades since the historic defeat of the miners in the 1980s and with the continuous passing of anti union legislation, which has all been acquiesced to by the trade union movement without any real fight. The lack of democratic participation in branches suits the interests of union bureaucrats looking to occupy positions in the union without being challenged or even disposed of. This attitude can even lead to new people attending branch meetings as being viewed with suspicion. Having said all this, it still remains a relatively simple process to get strike action put on inside the RMT: a resolution calling for strike action needs to be put through a branch meeting which then goes to the union’s National Executive Committee (NEC) for ratification, which has a culture of not refusing requests for strike ballots.

The past four years since the pandemic have seen the train operating companies and the government launch a number of coordinated attacks against workers, using the drop off in fares during COVID as a justification to push for cuts to terms and conditions. The peak of these disputes was a combined London Underground and national rail strike on 21st June 2022, where 40,000 national rail staff were joined by 10,000 London underground workers. This was the first time since the privatisation of the railways in the 1990s where there has been a combined shutdown of London tube services and national rail trains. Unfortunately this was the only day where this national action was used. After this, the various disputes were hived off to fight separately, with Network Rail settling their dispute in March 2023. RMT station and train staff were left to fight on alone with seemingly random one day strikes organised now and again, none of which were coordinated with ASLEF drivers who were also calling a succession of one day strikes. These two pay disputes were strung out until the election of a Labour government, where they were settled for an ever so slightly better offer, that proved to be more acceptable to union bureaucracy as it was wrapped in a red ribbon.

On the London Underground, rank and file reps looked at the ineffectiveness of one day strikes being taken by both ASLEF and RMT on national rail, and came up with a new format of strikes for the underground. This new format looked to shut the tube for a week, using different grades going out on different days through the week, so each grade would only lose two days of pay, but the strike would affect seven days of tube service - effectively seven days of strike action for the price of two. This is where having an industrially organised union fighting in the same collective bargaining unit gives workers an organisational advantage over craft unions fighting in sectional disputes (NHS workers, take note please). This seven day strike has now been named three times - in August 2023, January 2024 and November 2024 - and all 3 times it has been called off at the very last minute. In only one of these instances, January 2024, was the strike called off for what was a significantly improved pay offer: two days into the strike the Mayor offered an extra £30 million for pay to call the rest of the strike off.

This year’s 2024 pay negotiations are still ongoing in November, and the pay rise was due in the May 2024 pay packet. This delay always advantages the company, as back pay owed increases as the negotiations continue. The negotiations this year centred around TFLs attempt to break up the LU collective bargaining unit into smaller groups of “job families” - a classic piece of neo-liberal management guru doublespeak. These conditions were eventually dropped from the pay offer, which left an actual pay offer which averaged out at 4.6%, however this was weighted to be slightly more for lower paid grades, leaving higher paid grades below RPI inflation for Feb 2024. At a well attended reps meeting on October 30th, this offer was deemed not good enough and it was agreed that the strike, which was starting on 1st November, should remain on. In spite of this outcome from the all reps meeting, the seven day strike was pulled by the RMT NEC on the morning of 1st November. At the time of writing this decision still seems to be a bit of mystery. The decision to pull the strikes was accompanied with a communication from Mick Lynch that a “significantly improved offer” had been made, the actual details of which are yet to materialise. This sort of “union” intervention into disputes to call off strikes last minute without any consultation is exactly the kind of action which leads people into the service model relationship with their union: one where the union makes the decisions, and we, the workers, follow.

The democracy of a union and the levels of worker participation are a work in progress, and always have room for improvement - but compared to the authoritarian dictatorship that is the capitalist workplace, they are revolutionary. The model in union branch structures, reps elected to time limited roles, and voting on resolutions, can give a glimpse of how a revolutionary workplace could be managed. The culture is in place where it could be transferred from a branch to a workplace council, where debate around how to democratically manage work and mass participation should hopefully be much easier, given the free time available to workers freed from capitalist work time directives. There already exists some workers self-management in train depots, as currently we have what are called “syndicates”. This is where the allocation of driving duties is given over to another train operator who is then given time away from train driving every week to organise the duties. The rules of this are set out in a LU document called syndicate guidelines.

Where I work there are 150 drivers, with a 95 week long roster. You can swap any duty with any other driver weekly, by filling out a mutual changeover of duty form. However, management simply would not have the time to process all these duty swaps. So the company agreed to leave this changeover of duties in the hands of the train operator assigned to the syndicate, whom we have called the mafia man/woman - mafia and syndicate being interchangeable, of course. Their job is to keep a list of what each driver wants (start times, rest days etc.) and then assign the duties every week in order to give everybody what they have asked for. The mafia person will need to be someone who is agreeable to most in the depot, and they will need to keep most of the depot happy in order to maintain high participation in their mafia. There have been situations where competing mafias have been set up in the same depot when drivers haven’t been happy. A well-run mafia means that instead of working the roster - where start times vary from 4:30am, 5pm or night shifts starting at 11pm - drivers can choose a relatively consistent start time, leading to a much healthier sleep pattern and reducing fatigue, stress and sickness. Although this is a little glimmer of workers’ self-management, I don’t think colleagues imagine our syndicate as an example of how a post-revolutionary workplace could be managed. This is probably due to a distinct lack of imagining a new world on all our parts.

There are roughly 27,000 people directly employed under the TFL umbrella, according to their workplace monitoring report of 2016. 15,327 of these are employed in operational roles, such as drivers, station staff, and engineers. 11,108 are employed in support roles “providing administrative, specialist and policy guidance”. Are these 11,000 bullshit jobs? As somebody who works on the operational side, I couldn’t begin to imagine what these 11,000 people actually do. A quick example of some of the job titles in TFL doesn’t really help us get an understanding of their role in running trains and buses. Director of People Operations, Employee Relations and Rewards, Head of TFL Change, Chief People Officer, Director of Diversity and Inclusion, Head of Change Portfolio Office, Head of Employee Comms and Engagement. In an attempt to give some credit to these departments, I did look up TFL change on our intranet to try to figure out what they do. It appears their role is to convince the workforce that proposed changes are actually good for us. “Change” in this context is nearly always, for operational staff, an increase in your workload, increase in time at work, worsening of rosters etc. The change management guidance produced by the Change Department includes a diagram called “The change curve - understanding the emotional journey of change”, and other such pearls of wisdom. This diagram includes a line which says:

A structured business change approach aims to smooth the curve to minimise the time spent in the dip of the curve and also to ensure that people reach enthusiasm and commitment faster.

Pretty much all the restructuring changes that have come out of the change department in the past four years have been knocked back with strike action, so I guess this means we are stuck permanently in the dip of the emotional curve, disillusionment. I am of the belief that we could run a public transport service without “a structured business approach to managing the emotional journey of change”. Work under capitalism is authoritarian and hierarchical, and as such always leads to conflict. The attempt to manage this conflict leads then to this ever expanding field of human resources that asks: how do we manage these humans to get them to do things that are simultaneously boring and exhausting? A post-revolutionary workplace would surely have to free us from the meaningless guff of human resources, both for those who work under it and in it, because the people writing the “change management” guidance must hate it even more than the people reading it.

There are probably roles in amongst these 11,000 support workers that would still need to be done in a post-capitalist workplace - procurement of materials and parts being one - but undoubtedly the disciplined focus management administration side could be done away with. If this figure of 40% of workers inside TFL “supporting” the operational side are mirrored across other industries, then that is a vast number of workers who could be retrained and help reduce time spent at work for all.

These directly employed LU staff are then backed up by an army of outsourced more precariously employed workforce of 3000 cleaners who are outsourced to ABM (American Building Maintenance), security staff to Mitie, canteen staff to Serco, maintenance staff to Close Brothers, and track staff to Cleshars. The list of outsourced companies employed under LU is almost endless and is further complicated when many of the outsourced companies further outsource work again, especially for work deemed unprofitable for them. The RMT organises across all these employers, and will have members everywhere, but union density is much lower amongst the outsourced staff, and as a result so is organisation. There have been various attempts made over my ten years working here to organise these workers, which have primarily focused on the cleaning grade. These have normally been led by the organising department in the RMT with help from directly employed activists and a few cleaner activists as well. These efforts have run up against the usual obstacles to organising a diverse precariously employed workforce.

The workplace itself spans the entire city, with cleaners based at every station in London and every train depot. Visiting different workplaces as activists to recruit becomes laborious, you could spend a day traveling the city to talk to only ten cleaners. Where we have directly employed activists and reps who work alongside cleaners and see it as their role to organise cleaners as well is where we see the best results. We have recently won a recognition agreement with ABM, which for the first time means we can elect cleaner reps which will be recognised by their employer, meaning facility time and a machinery of negotiation. There is still a long way to go, but having a cadre of cleaner reps representing other cleaners will hopefully help break the mindset of many outsourced staff that the union is only for directly employed staff.

For anybody who works in the public sector and has encountered trying to navigate the labyrinthine complexity of networks of outsourced employers, the idea that this system is more efficient or productive is laughable. How many outsourced London Underground workers does it take to change a light bulb? Maybe four, and a large payment from the public purse to the private sector. If I find a problem in my workplace, let’s say a blocked toilet, I report it to my line manager who then raises it as a job at the centralised TFL fault reporting centre. They then create a job number and file and will then send it to one of the outsourced maintenance contractors, probably Close Brothers. They may send one of their directly employed staff to fix it, or they may outsource the job again to a smaller contractor. Close Brothers are paid the same flat fee every month to respond to these small scale jobs, so the more work they do in a month the less profit they make. Therefore the profit margins inside such contracts involve avoiding work, doing it late, doing it badly and then relying on poor record keeping or reporting in TFL to get away with this. Even something as simple as getting the toilets cleaned has to follow a similar process, with the cleaning contractor ABM also incentivised to employ the least amount of staff possible in order to maximise profit.

Obviously the skill set exists in the 28,000 staff TFL directly employs to change light bulbs and clean toilets - these outsourcing facility companies offer no special expertise. These sorts of contracts don’t even make sense under capitalism, with each outsourced company having to reproduce the management, payroll, HR departments multiple times over. Each outsourced contract is simply a way for public sector dosh to be turned into profit, rather than a job with sick pay, pension and security of position.

A post-revolutionary train depot would hopefully be able to deal with a dirty or blocked toilet far more efficiently than this, with no such artificial division of labour necessary between cleaners or drivers. Workers’ self-management would mean dealing with such problems ourselves as they arise, every driver a cleaner, every cleaner a driver, with no need to sign a multi-million pound contract with a multinational facilities management provider to get our toilets cleaned.