Wed, 16 May 2012

London Underground Ltd (LUL) will take on 600 new customer service advisors, according to senior reps at union RMT. LUL is a subsidiary of Transport for London (TfL).

In February, recruiter.co.uk reported that TfL denied RMT’s claims that it was creating 300 new jobs as the result of a “massive blunder”.

In its statement today, RMT re-iterated its claims that the 300 new jobs allegedly created by TfL were the result of financial cuts.

In a press statement RMT claims that this recruitment drive “is an outright admission that they got their station staffing cuts programme wrong and that if they had listened to the union in the first place they could have saved themselves a huge amount of disruption and embarrassment”.

A spokesperson for LUL says that the union “has got its numbers wrong on this”, adding that natural staff turnover of about 30 people per month makes it appear that new jobs are being created, when in fact new recruits are just replacing existing staff.
 
Howard Collins, chief operating officer of LUL, says: “We have been engaged since late 2011 in an active recruitment campaign to take on around 300 more customer service assistants to replace employees who have retired, left or moved to other jobs within LU.

“This recruitment is all about continuing the Mayor’s pledge to ensure we maintain a high visibility presence on all of our stations whenever services are running, and will mean we can maintain our station staff numbers to the level we implemented in February 2011, while enabling us to support what we know will be a great Games.”

However, RMT general secretary Bob Crow further tears into LUL, saying that he and the union are “deeply concerned” by the potential lack of skills in LUL created due to the impact of “this whole botched staffing cuts process”.