A rather petulant memo from management appeared last week saying that they were “surprised and disappointed” that the unions were balloting for strikes over Night Tube while negations were in progress.   According to the latest memo from ALSEF during the last negotiations management barely spoke, simply repeating that the unions’ position was “noted" to every issue that was raised which I don’t think anyone can regard as remotely “meaningful”.

It’s pretty obvious to all that LU are simply waiting to see how the ballots turn out, down here we are all pretty sure what the outcome will be and I can’t believe management imagine that the result will be anything other than overwhelmingly for a strike.   The ASLEF ballot closes on Thursday so we should know the result soon while RMT and TSSA started balloting today and will deliver the result in two weeks.

While looking at what train drivers on the mainline were getting as a pay rise I noticed there were two pay levels on the Overground, the basic is £54071 but there’s also a “Sunday exempt driver” salary of £50317.  Sadly I suspect that last one only applies to drivers who’ve transferred over from Silverlink and chose to keep their old terms, Sundays used to be voluntary at double time.  If you could walk into job with Sundays off for about the same as I’m earning now I could be tempted to switch…..