Letter: What the city does to buses

I am a mechanic repairing London buses, and having seen the leaflet you reprinted from the Committee for a Fighting Transport Union, I thought I would share some of what it is like working on the buses.

The first thing you realise is how old things are. Some of the garages were built over 100 years ago. I have co-workers who joke that this was the last time Britain knew how to build anything. Many buildings didn’t start as garages, and they have only been minimally converted. Instead of installing vehicle lifts, they dug pits, and you do most of your work there. No such thing as fluid hoses, you get oil and coolant etc by hand pumping it from barrels into cans and carrying it to the bus. If a bus won’t move on its own, five or six mechanics push it round the garage, because a tug would cost money. The walls are filled with asbestos with a bit of sealing paint to keep you “safe”. The roofs leak, heating systems are left to rot and the plumbing and electrics are patched together. I’ve heard recently that one of the few garages that was actually purpose built is being closed because the land is more valuable for high-rise flats!

Not surprising, they have a hard time hiring people and getting young people into the trade. Those youth they do get have to complete a 3-4 year apprenticeship that starts at like five quid an hour and then moves up to the minimum wage. The reward when they are done is dirty work in crappy facilities for pay that barely covers the rent in London. Overtime is the norm for all mechanics (and drivers), seen as the only way to keep your head above water.

To plug the holes, the companies have an army of subcontractors that do even cheaper work and they bring in skilled labour from abroad. The latest scheme I’ve seen was to offer visas for workers from Africa and try to get people to put them up on the cheap in their spare bedrooms. Even with the lure of a visa they only got ten or 20 workers, not nearly how many they need. After seeing what the cost of living is, many of these immigrant workers are already questioning coming here. Some British workers live like immigrants: they rent a cheap room for themselves in London and try to send money to their family living out of town.

The companies have no reason to invest, they are here to squeeze whatever they can out of the workforce, and then sell on to the next group of investors in a few years’ time. UNITE will bargain for a pay rise once a year, this year telling us that the company is losing money too! The union tells the drivers they can refuse a bus on a very hot or very cold day, if air conditioning or heaters don’t work (AC rarely does). But otherwise, conditions are mostly left alone, because demanding improvements would mean challenging the entire way capitalism is run in this country — sell everything off and beat down workers to attract investment. And the whole country looks like a 100-year-old garage barely getting buses out every day.