London 2012: A deal that solved an Olympic bus strike?

An agreement has been reached to avoid strike action by London's bus workers during the Olympics

This morning just before the peace talks started at Acas there was a pre-emptive move by Transport for London (TfL).

It put out the latest offer to the media through its press office.

What it was trying to do was force the Unite union's hand and show its members the deal on the table.

The deal on offer is now £583 for every bus worker, or £700 for bus drivers at depots badly affected by the Games.

That is an increase on the £17 per person, per day the bus companies had previously offered.

Acas talks are ongoing but the bus strike was suspended at 1pm.

But the more interesting part of the offer is the split of the extra fare revenue generated during the Games.

This is the first time I've heard of that and I'm told the transport commissioner himself came up with it.

It certainly shows TfL is extremely keen to get a deal done if it is willing to give up half of the fare box.

Let's break down that deal with some back-of-a-fag-packet mathematics:

The unions says it was expecting at least an extra 800,000 journeys during the Games.

General secretary of Unite Len McCluskey took part in talks for the first time

A single is £1.35 on Oyster, and £2.30 cash.

So let's say the average is £1.80 as we will have a lot of tourists in town. That means there's £1.4m extra revenue of which the workers' cut is £700,000.

Split that between 21,000 workers and it's roughly £30 per worker.

So bus workers are probably going to get a £610-ish bonus, maybe more.

A good deal?

Update: clearly my fag packet calculations have raised some heckles.

True, a lot of people will have ODA-funded Games travelcards - although I'd assume they will be part of the deal.

And yes £1.80 as an average fare is probably high.

What it means is that the guess of £30 extra on top of the £583 is probably top end - it may be less.

All of this will no doubt be thrashed out at Acas. We won't know what it's worth until after the Games.