How much do TfL's trade unions cost us?

It may well be impossible to say.  Certainly, I haven't turfed up any reliable figures.  However, londonlovesbusiness.com has an interesting article on the cost of trade unions in the UK to the tax payer: £113 million.  £92 million of this is in 'facility time' (basically time in which we are paying the staff their salaries to do union work - organising strikes, as best I can tell).

The article references the Metropolitan Police and TfL in particular, saying:

"The Metropolitan Police has the equivalent of 16 members of staff working full-time on trade union activities, with Transport for London having the equivalent of 34 staff."

I did a quick search for the sizes of those organisations and, while the figures may be a little out of date, I suspect they're not horrendously wrong.  Here's what I find illuminating:

1. TfL had 17,735 staff members as of 2004 (source)
2. The Metropolitan Police had 55,377 staff members as of January 2012 (source)
3. TfL is less than a third the size of The Met.
4. TfL has more than double the number of work-shirking, strike-planning leeches on the public purse.  And that's excluding the cost of actual trade union action to businesses and consumers, not to mention the wasted time in delays this blog was set up to document.

TfL: in a world all of its own when it comes to public service.  My cup positively runneth over.