Tube Strikes

It's tube strike time again and no one is exactly sure what the unions are striking about, not even the unions themselves. Is it redundancies or ticket offices or...frankly who cares? The net effect is that millions of commuters have a miserable journey to work, if they can make it at all. I imagine some will be humming the London Underground song, where the singer imagines shooting every single LU employee with a 'f**king rifle'.

London Undergound Song

Now I personally think that's a somewhat extreme solution to this industrial dispute, not least because one of the victims would be the red mohican-sporting man who works at Oxford Circus - and he for one is a charming fellow. But the problem remains that tube workers, often a minority of those workers, have the potential to inflict £100 millions of damage to the  capital's economy more or less at will.

I've lived in London for nearly 40 years and can remember many, many tube strikes. They all sound, look and feel exactly the same (well apart from some questionable suits worn in the early 90s): irate union bosses blaming management, management blaming unions, massive queues of irate and tired travellers outside train stations.

The problem remains that the tube unions have an uniquely powerful negotiating position. When they go on strike, their members lose a few days' pay. London's business and workers, however, suffer much more. At the end of the strike, there's a good chance that the union will have extracted extra concessions or payments to offset the loss of earnings.

In other words, it makes sense for the unions to strike on a regular basis and it is cheaper to buy them off than to stand up to their demands. This is certainly the calculation that successive managers of the Underground have made - dealing once and for with the unions is just not worth the grief.

You'll notice that I've skated over the specifics of this strike, which are about voluntary redundancies and the closure of ticket offices...apparently. It's got nothing to do with an internal power struggle at the RMT following the death of Bob Crow, nothing whatsoever. Yeah, right.

To me there is a more general issue about modernisation, to which the tube unions seem axiomatically opposed. To take one example: the advent of Oyster cards reduces the need to have a person behind a ticket counter at every station. New technology has made that role in some cases redundant. That doesn't mean stations will be left unattended, just that there won't be somebody twiddling his or her thumbs behind a ticket counter that is almost never used.

The other big step in modernisation, which is already part underway, is to automate the trains themselves - making them driverless. Before you recoil in horror, just think about the following: automated trains are never late for work, never call in sick (unauthorised absenteeism accounts for around 10% of delays), they never drink on duty, never fall asleep, react faster and always drive at the optimum speed. They are more reliable, cheaper and safer. There is also one clincher for automation, it means a driver will not have to witness someone hurling themselves under a train.

Redundancy is always reported as a negative outcome. But thanks to technological progress many unpleasant and dangerous jobs have become redundant, from cotton pickers to chimney sweeps. Driving tube train no matter well paid, is a lonely, isolating and depressing job where statistically you are likely to see somebody commit suicide.

The tube unions are always against any changes to the status quo, no matter how small. That is no way to run a railway; technology allows us to achieve the same or better outcomes for less money and fewer people. Progress in other words.

The unions could behave differently, they could co-operate and compromise but there's nothing in it for them. It seems to me that the only way we can achieve real change on the Underground is to ban strikes altogether. There, I said it.  Otherwise, get used to strikes for the foreseeable future.