I was walking on the platform one morning when I slipped and jarred my back. I went to the supervisor's office and told him what had happened. Then I sat there for a bit, complaining about the pain radiating down my legs.
"You don't have to convince me, Daniel," he said.
What I had accidentally hit upon was a way to go sick without falling foul of the draconian sickness policy—injure yourself at work. The underground, like most jobs populated by a coalition of the unwilling, has a problem with sickness. People are constantly going sick. Managers' bonuses are higher the more people are in work. But the staff still pull sickies and sometimes drag them out for months on end.
To get around this, LU introduced a sickness policy which, it claimed, would discourage malingering without penalising the genuinely ill. But when I first took up the absurdities of the "unauthorised absence procedure" with my manager, he admitted to me that he thought it worked "70 per cent" of the time. He seemed to think that was acceptable, but it looked to me like a third of the staff were getting a raw deal.
The central plank is that sickness is counted in "items," not days. One day or 39 weeks (not as unusual as you might hope) count as one item. Two items within six months add up to an automatic 12-month "level one" warning. Another warning within those 12 months gets you a two-year "level two" warning. Any more and it's the disciplinary board, where they'll most likely give you a two-year final warning not to get any more warnings. Or else you're out. This means, for example, that if you were to have three days off with flu at the onset of the flu season and three days off at the start of April with food poisoning, you'd better spend the next 12 months eating plenty of vitamins and keeping out of the rain if you want to be sure of keeping your job. It's easy to get caught, especially when you're new and haven't sussed it out.
It seems to escape LU how much trouble it causes itself. One hungover train driver, who legally can't come to work with any alcohol in his blood at all, may as well sit out the whole week at home as come into work the next day. It's still one item. When I was sick for the first time I came back after a couple of days and was sent on my way by fellow staff before the managers could get hold of me.
The genius of the system is that it takes no account of whether the doctor has signed you off or not. This may be fortunate, since, as the government seems to have realised, many doctors are unwilling to burden their workload further by over-investigating people's sicknesses. But even hospitalisation counts for nothing, unless you've got an appointment. From time to time rumours float around that the European court of human rights is going to put this straight, but in the meantime the genuinely ill suffer while the cunning prosper. One colleague of mine, having already worked his way up to a level two, was mugged in the street and hit over the head. Lying in hospital he was told by the nurses he would have to stay in a day or two. "You don't understand," he told them. "I have to go to work."
Then there is the story of the new guy who went sick for a few days and admitted on his return to work that he'd not been ill but just needed a break. This earned him a two-year final warning from the disciplinary board.
Recently LU has updated the policy because it has cottoned on to the common practice of working when sick and taking an extra week off roughly every six and a half months. As one clerk told me, "If you're gonna feel crap you may as well come into work." The update doesn't, as you might expect, solve the problem. Instead, it says that LU can issue a warning gratuitously if it feels it can sense a "pattern" in your sickness.
Working with the hordes who traipse through the underground everyday you're going to catch every bug going, and if you don't get it from the customers you'll get it from your fellow staff who can't go sick because they're on a warning. So you turn up on a bitterly cold winter morning, snivelling and griping, and pass the germs on to all the others who haven't caught it yet.
But, as I say, there is one cast-iron way around all this—the accident on duty. This can range from twisting your ankle on the stairs to a one-under to an armed robbery, but the beauty is that it doesn't count in the warnings system.
Many is the time we've stood there on a busy evening, just willing one of the rude, miserable punters to go that little bit further and take a potshot. It doesn't have to be too grievous—one colleague of mine got into a row with a fare-dodger who reacted by grabbing his throat momentarily. "That'll do," he said, and booked off sick.
I knew a supervisor who, fed up to the back teeth, decided to concoct an accident on duty by falling down the spiral stairs with the station assistant as his witness. Everything went fine until they came to interview the SA, who rather flunked his part and admitted, "I didn't see him fall, I just found him lying at the bottom of the stairs." Faced with this, the supervisor slunk back into work as quickly as possible and was told by his manager, "Next time you fall down the stairs, don't have Jerry O'Connell as your witness."
