I don’t like to use the word ‘empowerment’, because it’s a buzzword. It’s a handy one, though, because the normal English phrase ‘allowing subordinates to make their own decisions and to solve problems themselves’ is cumbersome.

I watch a show called The Tube, an ITV show about the workings of the London Underground. I think that the thing must be underwritten somehow by the London transport workers’ union, because most of the show seems to be about how unbelievably hard everyone works, and how earnest they are. Or maybe they just do this to maintain access. In any case, the recurring theme is that the Underground people do their best, but that they would be able to do their jobs a whole lot better if it weren’t for all these passengers, who are a total nuisance and who just get in the way of the smooth operation of the system. It would be so much easier to keep the stations safe and clean, and to run the trains on time, if it weren’t for all these pesky people who insist on using them.

As such, the whole thing is a wonderful illustration of a libertarian’s feelings about public transport. The LU people are wonderful people, I’m sure: but they have no effective competition, and they’re working in a highly bureaucratic, highly unionized field. All of these factors tend to produce an environment where individual decision-making is strongly discouraged.

With no competition, there’s no special reason to deliver services more efficiently than anyone else. The whole purpose of bureaucracy is to establish Procedures, and to centralize decision-making power. And unions tend to favor limiting their members’ authority to make decisions; if there’s a clearly-defined Procedure, and if the employee is trained in and follows that Procedure, then the employer can’t find his actions at fault.

Add to this the general bureaucratization of modern British society and the general emphases on safety, security, and Not Giving Offence that now take precedence over everything else, and you have something like a perfect storm of customer disservice.

Consider this short clip from the show (MPEG4):

At the King’s Cross station, they’re doing construction and so don’t have room inside the station for the normal number of passengers. LU’s solution for this is to close gates at the entrance to keep the platforms from getting overcrowded. Eminently sensible.

However, after watching the video, consider:

1. The LU employee’s contempt for passengers when talking to the camera: “…they think the platforms are empty. Now, how do they know that? Because I can’t see from here, so how can they see? I think it’s the fact that they’re all in a rush, they all want to get to work.”

Not only does he seem to consider wanting to get to work on time some particularly inconvenient eccentricity, but he considers that the passengers’ frustration at being made to wait on the sidewalk as being due to their belief that the station is empty. There’s no particular evidence to back this up.

2. When a passenger complains, the immediate and sole reaction of the employee is to tell him to put his complaint in writing and to send it to LU at an address he can find on a poster in the station.

Now, ask yourself: is this going to help? No: it’s just going to piss off the customer even more. When a union employee of a monopoly tells you to send a written complaint to the head office, he means: I have adhered to the official procedure and therefore cannot be held at fault; send a letter and maybe get a response in eight weeks, and fuck you very much, sir.

It’s probably not even our intrepid employee’s fault: he’s probably forbidden to do anything other than close and open the gates, and to tell anyone with a complaint to write a letter to HQ. If he had any discretion in his actions, he might do the wrong thing, and neither the union nor London Underground want that.

In the process of relieving them of the burden of — and the ability to — make decisions based on the circumstances of the moment, LU dehumanizes its employees. Is it any wonder that the passengers then tend not to treat them with proper human respect?

Humans must mind the gap or be DELETED!!!

What if the employee had said, “I’m sorry for the delay, but with the construction in the station we don’t have enough room in there, and so have to hold people at the entrance until the previous crowd thins out”, and then told the guy to write a letter if he argued about it?

What if they increased the fare for people getting on at King’s Cross £1 while the construction was underway? If you absolutely had to get on there, you’d pay the surcharge; everyone else would walk down to Euston.

But LU doesn’t do these things: why should they? Are they going to lose customers to a competing system of subterranean trains? Are all these people going to buy cars, find somewhere to park them in central London, and then deal with the traffic? No. They’re totally powerless to do anything, so they assault the employees. And the response to this is measures that make the passengers feel even more powerless. Give ‘em any lip, and they immediately start reaching for the Button that will bring in the Hired Goons. (At LU, they first suggest that you write a letter: so that’s a progressive policy, then.)

Children throw tantrums because they have no control over their lives. Adults don’t throw tantrums often because, to a large degree, they do control their own lives. What’s more, they’re used to controlling their own lives. Deny them any of that control (as on an airplane) and they throw tantrums, just like children. More force, more authority, more procedures, and more hair-trigger hired-goonery can only make things worse.