I am sure that many people will find this quite incredible.London Midland is a train operating company with a fairly extensive network of services.
Today (Sunday 6th September 2009) nearly all of London Midland's train services have been cancelled, due to many staff not volunteering to work today.
According to Bob Crow, the failure to volunteer "was not organised action by workers but a case of the contractual right not to work being exercised".
I find this a little strange. I don't know how many people have failed to volunteer to work today, but it strikes me that if London Midland have had to cancel most of their trains, the number must be statistically significantly different to the norm. In my experience, such a significant variation in the behaviour of people is rarely un-coordinated, or without cause.
Which ever way you look at it, this appears to be a case of management incompetence at London Midland.
3 comments:
It doesn't make sense, does it? Assuming most people quite like having the right not to work Sundays then why put that at risk?
This has to be organised in some way so all they've done is draw attention to the fact that Sunday's are voluntary. All that can happen from here is that LM tighten things up and start making Sundays contractual.
As I understand the position, an agreement to pay drivers more for working on Sundays expired at the end of August. No agreement means staff volunteers don't get paid more for working on Sundays, so they have declined to volunteer.
Clearly a solution will have to be found - it does however seem to be a very strange way to run a 364 day business.
Ah, I see, makes total sense now!
A clever way of doing it though rather than going on strike or something like that. With the latter public sympathy probably wouldn't be great but now everyone is looking to London Midland as being at fault.
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