£166 million in operating surplus. Management claims poverty anyway.
That’s the contradiction. Transport for London says cutting the work week from 35 to 32 hours is “simply unaffordable.” The RMT union points to TfL’s actual financial statements showing that £166m surplus from 2024/25, which actually exceeded budget expectations.
Workers deliver 5 million passenger journeys daily with 2,000 fewer staff than in 2018. Productivity jumped. Conditions didn’t. The union calls it “extreme shift patterns.” Management calls it efficiency.
The Broader Pattern
London’s strike is part of a larger labor movement rethinking work hours. The UAW demanded a 32-hour week in 2023. Congressional staff are exploring it. Companies in the UK that trialed shortened work weeks in 2022 found revenue stayed stable while burnout dropped. Most kept the reduced schedules.
Fifty-seven percent of RMT members backed the strike. Not a fringe demand.
This is a negotiation about who bears the cost of productivity gains. Underground workers absorbed a 2,000-person staff reduction while maintaining service levels. Now they’re asking for some of that productivity dividend back in the form of time.
Management claims shorter hours would cost “hundreds of millions.” But they’re starting from a surplus position with a £10 billion annual operating budget. The math suggests room for negotiation that management won’t acknowledge publicly.
The Leverage Point
Essential services create leverage. You can’t offshore a Tube driver. You can’t automate the entire network overnight. Workers know this. Management knows they know this.
Coldplay and Post Malone rescheduled shows. Commuters are adapting with bikes, buses, and alternative routes. Productivity gains can’t flow in only one direction forever.
Resolution comes from negotiation or exhaustion. One path acknowledges the financial reality that TfL’s own reports reveal. The other pretends the surplus doesn’t exist and hopes workers blink first.
Labor movements have always pushed for shorter hours. The 40-hour week took 72 years to achieve in the U.S., from first demands in 1866 to the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938.
The fight for the 40-hour week took 72 years. The 32-hour push just started.
London’s Underground is where it’s being tested. Not where it ends.