The Sweat of the Workers

[RichardB]

One early morning in 1989, about a year-and-a-half after I’d transferred out of the district bus office to become a bus driver, I arrived for work at the bus garage to find that overnight new logos had appeared on the buses. In fact the engineering staff – mechanics and maintenance workers – were still sticking the last ones on. They bore the words ‘London General’ and a depiction of an old LGOC (London General Omnibus Company) B-Type bus.

This wasn’t rose-tinted nostalgia. On the contrary, it was the first straw in the wind that would blow us into the brave new Thatcherite world of privatisation. The eight London Transport bus operating districts had been split into smaller ‘business units’ in preparation for being sold off, and London General was the name that had been chosen for the one I worked in.

I eyed the shiny new logos without much enthusiasm. I didn’t anticipate getting any benefits from the privatisation of the organisation I worked for. Rather the opposite.

At first nothing much seemed to change, at least not from the viewpoint of we drivers. It was a bit like the Phoney War of 1939-40, except that it lasted longer. It was another three or four years before the news broke, and it could have been worse, or so it seemed. London General was going to be privatised not by being sold off to an outside buyer, but by a management and employee buy-out.

A meeting was called to which everyone was invited. Obviously not everybody could attend, for the buses still had to run, but I happened to be off-duty that evening, so I went along to the old London Transport sports ground at North Cheam.

(As a comparatively benevolent employer, LT had always provided facilities such as this for its staff – there were two more sports grounds in other parts of London, a library in the headquarters building and even a small team of welfare workers – but in the new age of UK plc this sort of thing was no longer considered to be of any importance. A Sainsbury’s super-store sits on the North Cheam site now.)

Our General Manager (or whatever his official title was – I forget), Mr Keith Ludeman, got up on his hind legs and made a speech. This was an exciting new venture, we were told, a co-operative venture in which we all had a chance to own a part of the company we would be working for. We were all urged to buy as many shares as we could.

Of course, the true reason for this spiel was the need to raise enough capital for the buy-out. He must have known that the reality was not going to be quite like this. How many bus drivers were going to be able to buy a significant number of shares on their pay? Employee participation in the buyout was bound to be minimal. (And indeed, when I looked some stuff up on-line to refresh my memory, it was referred to simply as a management buy-out, with no mention of employees at all.)

As for me, I had all I could do trying to make ends meet. I had no spare money to spend on shares.

Economies would have to be made, he warned us, if the new company were to become profitable and survive in a competitive business environment. But we were all in this together, so it would benefit everybody in the end. We’d all have to tighten our belts and work hard to make the company successful. And not just the workforce, he answered to a challenge from the floor. The management had already been working hard to get this venture off the ground, he assured us. He personally had put in hours of unpaid overtime.

I don’t suppose you’ll have much trouble imagining the reaction this got from the assembled hands-on workers – drivers, mechanics and others. A murmur ran round the big room, a groundswell of sotto voce derision. This geezer who sat in an office all day playing with figures and shuffling bits of paper around, what did he know about real work?

There would have been more than just a murmur if Ludeman had revealed exactly what tightening our belts would mean for us, but it wasn’t long before we found out. An increase in our working hours, a cut in pay, and the loss of a week from the annual leave allowance. All at the same time.

And what did the trade union have to say about this? Not a lot. I never heard anything to disabuse me of the impression that they had meekly rolled over and accepted the proposition without a whimper of protest. I even heard a rumour that they’d bought shares which, if true (I never did find out), would have constituted a clear conflict of interest – indeed, a betrayal of the membership.

The part that hit first and hardest was the increase in working hours. There was, for example, one duty on the route I was driving at the time that left such an impression on me that I still remember the duty number, 308, and sinking feeling it caused when it came round to my turn on the rota. The route was a short one, and before privatisation most duties had consisted of six round trips, or ’rounders’ as bus drivers call them. Now most duties had seven, but Duty 308 had eight rounders. By the time I was driving that eighth rounder I felt like the Flying Dutchman, condemned to drive a bus for ever, and I’d go home totally knackered.

Not all duties were quite as bad as this, but over the months following the change fatigue slowly mounted until it became a normal part of my life. For those of us down at the sharp end, out on the road doing the actual work that brought the money in, this was the reality of making London General profitable.

One afternoon I encountered the garage manager in the yard, as the main area where the buses are parked is always called, whether it is open-air or roofed. This gent liked to think he had the common touch, so he greeted me politely by name and asked how I was. ‘Tired,’ I replied. ‘I think you know why that is.’ He didn’t seem to like that answer very much.

Many drivers were not prepared to put up with such working conditions, and the ranks of familiar faces in the garage thinned week by week as the resignations mounted up. I stuck it out. With a young family to consider, I didn’t see that I had much alternative.

And then, after not much more than a year of this, we learned what all this tightening of belts and pulling together had led to. The company’s financial performance, it seemed, had become good enough to tempt Go Ahead, a transport consortium based in Newcastle upon Tyne, into making a take-over bid. The bid was accepted, and London General was sold for over half as much again of the cost of the original buy-out. Those who owned large chunks of shares made a killing. Keith Ludeman pocketed a personal profit of £1.5 million, more like £4 million in today’s money. To this day I don’t know whether something like this had been the management’s aim all along, or whether it was a lucky break for them.

But not for the rank and file. Those who’d managed to make small investments in shares got the crumbs from the table. Those like me who owned no shares got nothing. You could have been excused for thinking that it might have been a nice gesture for the management to show the workforce some recognition of what they’d had to put up with to make such a profitable deal possible – a small bonus perhaps, or a short message of appreciation – but not a penny, not a word, was forthcoming. So what had happened to We’re all in this together? What was it Karl Marx said about the profits of the bosses coming from the sweat of the workers? As the managers counted their loot and we carried on working the same long hours for the same reduced pay I found it hard to resist the conclusion that we’d been shafted.

I wasn’t the only one. One late afternoon at work, crawling along in stop-start rush-hour congestion, I found myself behind a car with the distinctive registration VLT 15, which had once been borne by one of the first production batch of Routemaster buses, now scrapped. This car, I knew, belonged to our revered CEO, Mr Keith Ludeman, and temptation whispered in my ear. What if my foot were to, er, slip off the brake pedal? Who’d ever be able to prove anything? I quickly dismissed the thought – a brief moment of vindictive satisfaction would hardly have been worth the hassle that would have ensued – but when I mentioned it to a colleague after my shift he said, ‘You should’ve done it, mate. I would’ve. I’d have rammed the bastard right up the arse.’

But the final insult to add to the injury was yet to come. It was maybe ten years later when a press clipping appeared on the garage noticeboard, an interview in a business magazine with a successful executive, one Keith Ludeman. He had done well for himself over the years. He had spent his gains from the take-over on two houses in prime locations, one in the Surrey Hills and the other in the South of France. He had risen above London General to fly high in the management at Go Ahead. He was, as they say, not short of a bob or two.

In the course of the interview it was put to him that there had been a lot of discontent in the workforce at London General while he had been in charge. The truthful reply would have been that you could hardly expect anything else when you’d increased working hours and cut wages at the same time, but of course he didn’t mention that. He could have uttered pious noises about necessary economies, but he didn’t say that either. He shrugged off the issue with one short, dismissive sentence. ‘Oh, they were a lazy lot of bastards.’

Lazy? All of us?

I don’t think I have ever, before or since, felt such consuming anger.

Mr Ludeman, I was one of those lazy bastards without whose work out on the road, in all weathers, before dawn and after midnight, coping with challenging traffic conditions and aggressive drivers, getting grief from discontented, obstreperous or rowdy passengers, you wouldn’t have had the money that paid for your two fucking luxury houses. I did that work to the best of my ability, often coming home too tired to do anything more than eat something and collapse into a chair, and I did it for a wage that kept me perpetually on the edge of financial disaster. I’m sure I speak for many of my colleagues. What right did you have to insult us?

[Athelstone]

I know that feeling. I was also a government employee who found himself parcelled up and sold to the highest bidder, or at least the one that made the most empty promises and said the things that our betters at the high table wanted to hear. I recall now how our managers queued up to tell us what a good thing it was and, yes, they used that exact same mantra, ‘We’re all in this together.’ And how curious it was to see so many of them, almost without exception being unexpectedly found to be “vital” to the business of government and so retained instead of passing over to the massive US multi-national that swallowed the rest of us. And, of course, because of the fabulous work they had done in selling us off, their demonstration of skill “above and beyond” earned almost all of them promotions and bonuses.

Strange to see that, over the last few years, much of the work we did which we were told HAD to be privatised, because it was NOT CORE business, has quietly been taken back in house, because it is so much cheaper and far more efficient to have those who know the business doing the Information Technology for that business. It’s been done almost by subterfuge, with the establishment of private companies owned by government with civil servants as directors, so that it looks as though the work is still done by the private sector.

It’s a sad story, Richard. Some of the major cities are still well served by buses, but nationally and in rural areas the picture is not so good with some areas reduced to just a few buses a week or cut off altogether. And prices have soared everywhere. In my town, Stagecoach won the local bus contract with the promise of the “pulse” service, which would see a bus every ten minutes on all the arterial routes through the town. A few years down the line, with much wringing of hands and weasel words about fuel prices and the international scene, the pulse has been cancelled and a less-frequent through-town service has had its route adjusted to cover some of the stops. But not all. The push to privatise essential public services has very little to do with efficiency or the public good, but a lot to do with phenomenal personal greed and political ambition and prejudice.

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