Tube strike threat over sacked driver

class411
That would only work if all of staff, unions and management have confidence that the rate of false positives is extremely tiny as LU employ a huge number of safety critical staff - a 2012 FOI request identified that there were at peak 530 trains in service across all lines, all of which need a driver (and the peak requirement has increased since then). Obviously that's only one shift's worth, so lets say that there are on average 3 drivers per peak train in service per day (figure plucked from the air), giving ~1590 drivers who will drive a shift on a given weekday. Then there are spare drivers - who need to be able to do a safety critical job if required - let's say an average of 3 per depot, which is another 60 staff (based on CULG's definition of a train depot) per shift (4 per day?) - bringing the total number of drivers to ~1830
Then you need to add the depot staff - I'll pluck average of 5 safety depot staff per depot per shift out of the air (another 400).
Then you add signallers - an average of 3 per line per shift?
Then station staff - In 2012 there were 262 stations owned and/or managed by LU. Let's give a conservative guess of an average of 5 staff per station per shift - 5240 people.
Line controllers - 4 per line per shift? - another 160

I'll stop there without considering engineering staff, safety critical managers, etc. as even with the hopefully conservative estimates above we have 7750 safety critical staff working on LU each day.

This table shows the number of people on average who would receive a false positive test for different failure rates of the equipment


So even if only 1 test in a million gives a false positive, you are looking at unnecessarily sacking 1 person every 20 weeks, or 2-3 people a year. Or in reality most likely more as I've tried to underestimate the number of staff.
At a 1 in 10000 failure rate you are incorrectly sacking 2 people every 3 days - which is unsustainable practically (you'd quickly run out of staff) as well as politically.

Your calculations are interesting but they don't apply to my idea since no one is getting sacked. That's the whole point of it. It means that no safety critical staff ever start a shift showing positive. There is no safety risk if someone turns up for duty with alcohol because they will always be turned away.

I'm also not quite sure I see the logic behind saying 'we can't test everyone because the number of false positives would cause us to be sacking too many innocent people each week, but we're perfectly happy to sack just a few innocent people a decade as that is all that will happen because we don't test that many'.

What also bothers me about this is the precedent LU have set.

Let's suppose the impossible happens, and a visibly-intoxicated driver turns up for work.

He is subject to a random test. They do breath & urine.

The meter shows 7. So, what now, if he insists on a second breath test and on the same machine?

And that registers 5? Can they do the urine now, because they've already set a precedent with how they've played this case & the testers should now throw it away; after all, two negative breath tests cannot possibly be wrong, can they?

And if anyone wonders why the union leader is hot under the collar about this, you try dealing with management that insists on moving the goal-posts of precedent and procedure when it ruddy well suits them, regardless of the consequences for anybody else, as the above hypothesis shows. I have experience of dealing with just that, and pleasant it is not.

I think we need to let this one run as Donald Rumsfeld infamously said "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know." !

Apologies if I've missed it anywhere, but I don't recall seeing how long tests on LU drivers have been using this type of machine?

In fact, someone that's very active in the union remarked that the RMT's only kicking up because the the driver's an RMT rep. If it were anyone else they wouldn't have given a toss.

In the area that I work, no one including the local RMT reps, have any sympathy for the driver. In fact, someone that's very active in the union remarked that the RMT's only kicking up because the the driver's an RMT rep. If it were anyone else they wouldn't have given a toss.

Guessing that strike is only to keep the mandate "live"?