Tube strikes in a Lime bike era
Strikes are set to disrupt the Underground network until Friday, with the RMT telling London Centric further action could be on the cards. But is the impact being blunted by new forms of transport?
We spent this morning travelling around London talking to commuters and tube workers about this week’s strikes, which have been called by the RMT union in a dispute over pay, working hours, and benefits.
The union wants a pay rise, a longterm shift towards a 32-hour working week in the name of reducing fatigue, plus progress on cheaper travel passes for staff who want to use the rest of the rail network.
TfL says this is unaffordable and has offered a 3.4% pay rise, which they want the RMT to put directly to its members in a ballot. These members include some tube drivers but also thousands of station and depot staff, who are giving up their pay to go on strike.
Around four million journeys are made on the tube on a typical day. But after travelling around London we’ve been left pondering whether this week’s strike, while disruptive, is still causing the extreme “commuter chaos” that many media outlets instinctively describe.
Remote working has become an option for many office employees on strike days, while the Elizabeth line and rental e-bikes have provided new ways for people to get into the heart of the capital.
While our reporters encountered exasperated commuters complaining about the disruption, others were understanding of the striking workers’ demands. Some people fell into both categories.
It’s fair to say that a bright September morning probably made many people’s walks across town into work easier to swallow. But it’s certainly a more nuanced and complicated picture than many outlets have reported — and with no sign that TfL is coming back to the negotiating table with an improved offer, a potentially tricky situation to defuse.
On Saturday London Centric spoke to TfL management involved in the negotiations. They argued the RMT’s demands for reduced working hours are “simply unaffordable” and could cost hundreds of millions of pounds.
Today we’ve spoken to a leading RMT organiser in London about what his members want and the impact of fatigue on staff. After that we’ve got some of the situation’s less expected impacts — including Lime’s successful strike-busting pitch to Londoners.
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RMT warns more strikes are on the cards if TfL doesn’t make an improved offer to tube workers.
Jared Wood is the RMT’s London Transport Region organiser. He was outside Kings Cross station on Monday with picketing staff, standing where tens of thousands would usually be heading down the staircase into the tube station.
This is what he had to say to us on the current state of negotiations.
Q: When London Centric spoke to Transport for London’s Nick Dent on Friday, he said the RMT should put the 3.4% pay offer to your members for a vote. Will you?
A: What our members have asked us to do is to go and address a number of issues that they want progress on. They think they've delivered a lot of value successfully to London Underground, getting the passenger numbers back after Covid. They're now back to where they were and they're doing it with 2,000 fewer staff, which has put a lot of pressure on shifts.
London Underground's refusal to address the questions of fatigue and extreme working and to make good on previous commitments from previous pay rounds has not changed. I've been told in no uncertain terms by our members and reps that they need an offer that deals with those issues. And when we get one, we will then put that to our members.
Q: Can you share some examples of what fatigue actually means?
A: People on London Underground will typically work a roster where they may do seven shifts where they start at 4.30am in the morning. They'll then move to middle shifts where you're working from later in the morning to the afternoon. Then you do really late shifts, where you're starting late afternoon, finishing at 1 or 2am. And then many people work overnight as well.
We do that on a constant cycle where bank holidays and weekends are considered as normal working days. And it is exhausting. I did it myself for many years, and you're in a constant sort of brain fog state of fatigue. You never really recover. The only way that you can recover is with more quality time away from the workplace. And that's what we're asking for.
Q: There's talk of a compromise offer with half an hour less per shift.
A: We've been talking to [London Underground] about this since 2018. We were in quite advanced talks about the issue. And then we haven't made any progress at all in the 2023 or 2024 pay rounds. And that's why members are saying that we've got to get somewhere now.
It's really important that people understand we are not saying to London Underground you have got to implement a 32-hour, four-day week right now. We want an incremental move towards that.
Q: Talking to London Underground staff on pickets around London this morning, a lot of them also saying that they're having to live out of London due to housing costs and want the discount travel that National Rail employees get. Could you explain that?
A: There's been a scheme in existence for decades called a “priv scheme”. And before rail privatisation, all rail workers, London Underground, mainline railways were part of that, and you got a concession on all the rail travel.
Since privatisation, it's become really fragmented, with different arrangements in different places. Two years ago, London Underground said to us, "Yeah, we'll go and talk to the National Rail industry, try and get it back on a more even keel and include all those that don't currently get it." They dragged their feet, they didn't start those talks. Now they're saying to us, they haven't managed to do it by the start date that they offered.
And our members are really angry about that. In 2023 we accepted a below RPI [inflation] pay offer, and the offer to sort this travel concession out was one of the things that got that over the line. And they just haven't done it.
Q: One thing I've noticed travelling around is that people are flooding onto the Elizabeth line and thousands of e-bikes are being hired. Do you still have the same ability to bring the capital to a halt that you did 10 years ago?
A: I think that, quite obviously, London Underground creates enormous value for the London economy and we are told that every time we go on strike, it costs £50m a day. What that means is we're generating that revenue every time we come to work
It doesn't mean that the whole city grinds to a complete halt without London Underground. There's remote working and other things these days. But I have no doubt that London Underground is an essential service. I don't think anyone could envisage a situation where they couldn't rely on the tube.
Q: At the moment, it doesn't look like TfL are blinking. Do you expect the strikes to go on all week as a result?
A: London Underground haven't spoken to us since late last Wednesday morning. We were ready to have talks all day and probably into Thursday and Friday, but we received a letter from them saying this is our final position. And they said to us that they weren't going to discuss it any further. So that's where we are.
I hope that maybe by Friday, that TfL and the mayor will have perhaps considered that this can't just go on. They need to engage with us on it.
Q: And more strikes are possible if there is no deal?
A: Absolutely. We have a six month mandate from our members because our members have made it clear to us that they want us to deliver progress. In the last two pay rounds, we haven't succeeded in doing that. And there was a mood to not just walk away again. So unfortunately, there could be further strikes if there isn't progress.
Lime bikes are running a successful strike-busting sales strategy.
The growth of the Lime e-bike as a way of getting around London has been one of the biggest changes to transport in London in recent years. Readers will know we’ve repeatedly investigated the safety risks of the private company’s bikes and the lack of regulation of the business — but they’ve also created a wildly popular new form of strike-resistant transport, which is especially tempting for commuters on a sunny day.
The tech company, which is looking for a billion dollar valuation on the stock market, has been running a marketing strategy that offers an alternative to London Underground strikes. Customers have been sent notifications prompting them to use the service to get around the disruption caused.
The strategy seems to have worked. Standing at Ludgate Circus near St Paul’s Cathedral with a clicker at 9am this morning, we counted 81 Lime e-bikes* pass us during a single change of the lights. While many of these people would already be commuting this way, it’s likely that others have decided to try something different. One London Centric reader got in touch to say “there doesn’t seem to be a single Lime bike in Islington or Hackney right now”.
Forest, another provider of rental e-bikes, also said they’d seen four times their usual demand on Monday.
One of Lime “juicers” (the people tasked with replacing the batteries on the e-bikes) told us they’d been offered extra shifts to cope with expected increased demand. “It’s going to be crazy all week,” they said.
*Seeing 81 bikes in the space of two minutes at one crossing also raises questions about the true total number of Lime e-bikes on London’s streets. Other outlets often refer to an unsourced number of “around 50,000” e-bikes on the capital’s streets. Lime ignores our requests for an accurate number.
The Elizabeth line through central London is taking a lot of the strain.
One of the most tedious debates among a certain sort of person who writes about London transport is whether the ‘Elizabeth Line’ should be classified as a tube line or not. It’s on the tube map and it goes in a tunnel. But technically it’s a mainline railway that just happens to be run by Transport for London, who control it with a different management structure, similar to the London Overground.
As a result the Elizabeth line (like the Overground) is able to run during tube strikes — meaning there’s a high-capacity route through the heart of the capital carrying 1,500 people on every train that didn’t exist during previous decades of strikes. Not all central London stations will be open early or late due to staffing shortages but it makes a massive difference.
Talking to commuters on the Elizabeth line, around half said it was their normal route and the others said they were using it to avoid strike-affected routes.
“I got off a stop early and walked because I heard Bond Street was closed but other than that no change in my journey,” said one young woman on her way to central London. Another businessman in a suit said he’d had to change his route away from the tube but it only added “20 minutes or so”. The most confused people appeared to be American tourists heading to Heathrow.
A surprising number of Londoners seemed completely unaware of the tube strike.
We sympathised with one man outside the locked Elephant and Castle station trying to get “a tube to Hull”, while RMT staff on many of the picket lines we visited were busy redirecting baffled would-be travellers. Queues for buses at major national stations such as Victoria were incredibly long, while there were visibly more people choosing to walk compared to a normal commuting day.
Talking to tube staff on picket lines, several of them suggested commuters weren’t paying as much attention to mainstream media outlets as in the past, meaning that getting the message out about a strike is becoming more difficult. This is exacerbated by other issues such as absence of Evening Standard headlines on the streets of London.
Abbie, a young office worker who had commuted to Kings Cross, told us she was surprised the strikes went ahead: “I thought they’d be cancelled because of the impact, but I suppose people have to have their say. Super inconvenient. It normally takes me 25 minutes to commute but I left at 8am and arrived at 9:40am. It was a horrible journey.”
Rebecca, waiting for a bus outside Oxford Circus station, said she’d had an exhausting morning: “Was a two hour journey, should have ridden a bike for the first time in 11 years.”
Tube staff insist conditions are as important as pay when it comes to settling the dispute.
Eve, a tube station supervisor manning the picket line at an inner London station, said the main reason for going on strike was wanting “better work-life balance” in terms of a four-day week.
“The whole idea for 32 hours a week is not because we're lazy. If you've done shift work, you know how tiring it can be, especially on night shifts.”
She said the rapid switching between late and early shifts is exhausting, with days off used to sleep in and recover from a run of night shifts: “That creates a complete and utter discombobulation with your body clock."
“Your meal times are different, you're tired. It's a case of go to bed, wake up, don't do anything during the day, then get ready to work. So there's no time to actually do things you want to do and it does create fatigue because your body clock is just figuring out what are you doing. Are you on earlies? Are you on nights? What is going on here?”
Eve added: “Money's important but my health is more important.”
The mayor is staying out of it.
When the RMT threatened a tube strike back in early 2024, just before a general election was due, mayor of London Sadiq Khan intervened and found £30m of funds to avert industrial action.
Khan has oversight over Transport for London and can intervene or claim credit when he wants. This time he’s staying out of it.
A spokesperson for the mayor of London said: “Nobody wants to see strike action or disruption for Londoners. Strikes have a serious impact on London’s businesses and commuters. The mayor continues to urge the RMT and TfL to get around the table to resolve this matter and get the network re-open.”
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Standard tube driver base salary of £65,179/year. Overtime of £44.62 = £70-£80,000 take home. Defined benefit final salary pension which for a standard driver with 30 years service = £32,500/year. Plus free travel. All this for a job that can be and is automated across the world. And they want more! I don’t know anyone who gets a pension remotely similar to that, and the only people on a similar salary are in the city slogging through 60+ hour weeks. TfL is a non profit and staff costs account for about 2/3 of its total costs. I hope anyone bored enough wfh to read this appreciates that you can’t simultaneously support the RMT whilst complaining about extortionate tube fares - which are amongst the highest globally.
As a regular commuter by bike (10miles from east London to TCR) I found the roads truly were chaos this morning. It seemed lots of people had dug their bikes out of their sheds for the first time in years, or were wrangling a Lime Bike for the first time. I saw four near bike-on-bike collisions in the last ten minutes of my journey, and the number of fellow cyclists skipping redlights seemed way more than usual.