Great Western Coffee Shop

This thought was triggered by my need to travel into London tomorrow and I believe there is a TFL strike.

In the members opinion do these strikes have the affect desired by the strikers?

Just curious

Very rarely.... and I've heard many workers suggest that those higher up within the union benefit more out of any settlement!  ;)

I'm not sure a strike achieves much for the drivers.  The threat of a strikes on the other hand has produced some very nice T & C's for drivers. 

They need to hold the occasional strike to make their threats in the years to come credible. 

If I were an RMT member, I would look at the day's pay lost as an investment in better pay in the future. 

It may achieve some financial reward & self satisfaction in the short term, but the RMT can only stick two fingers up & stroke the egos of its leadership for so long.

Legislation to make strike ballots more representative is already going through, and in the case of the Tube I would imagine the push for driverless trains will be intensified.

If you want to assess the effectiveness and long terms results of repeated strike action, ask any coal miner, steelworker or shipbuilder - if you can find one.

The Government will always win in the end.

In principle, this legislation makes sense (although I would question the need for it given that UK days lost to strikes are at a historical low), but I don't think it will curb the power of the RMT because they usually DO have a strong turnout in strike ballots and often do have strong supports for strikes.  The legislation will weaken the power of unions that are already weak but do little to weaken the power of the RMT which is strong.


The mines have closed in the areas of strong unionism and the areas of weak unionism.  The coal industry was always on its way out.  Without the actions of the Government and/or the NUM at the time, the details of the winding down of the industry would have been different (perhaps gentler), but the pits would still have closed in the end.   

Remember SOGAT and NATSOPA?  The print unions in Fleet Street were always in the news when I was growing up.

Merged into what is Unite these days, as is what was the EETPU

Stephen Pollard ... in the Daily Express[/quote]

 (http://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/595998/Unions-calling-rail-strikes-just-because-they-can-Stephen-Pollard)

I have mixed feelings about the role of unions. When I worked at an aluminium plant in South Wales I had a few run ins with the main engineering union there (can't remember which one it would have been) who thankfully didn't strike very often. I say that because the plant was already bleeding money and it takes quite a while to shut the plant down and bring it back up to operating status.

I do understand that (some) unions are concerned about job losses but sometimes I wonder if their actions are counter productive.

Anyway, here is a recollection of one of my brushes with the union rep on site who knew I wasn't a supporter of them bringing the plant to its knees. It happened when there were out on strike and in order to get the keys to the computer room (where I was a computer operator) I had to cross the picket line to get to the gate house. Having seen me cross the line the union rep was waiting in the gatehouse expecting me to be trouble.

I asked the security man for the keys to open up at which point the union rep (who was expecting trouble from me) said something like: BBB (Brother Berkshire Bugsy) Please can I ask you to show solidarity and not work today?

At which point I said (to his surprise) Yes, no problem I will leave site straight away and return when the issues are resolved.

Mr. Union Rep was obviously taken a back by this and shook my hand and said "Thank you BBB - your support, whilst unexpected, is appreciated"

My reply: No problem - just be aware that I was due to run the outstanding payroll today which will now have to wait until the strike finishes.

With a not insignificant portion of humble pie the keys were passed to me in double quick time.

I could right a book about industrial relations in South Wales in the 1980s but suffice to say the miners strike was very bitter and I believe there are still communities where rifts have not healed to this day :( I clearly remember striking miners and supporters dropping stones from the M4 bridges onto the cabs of lorries that were being used to ship coal whilst the rail unions were out in sympathy.

Message to London from Nick Brown, Managing Director of London Underground:
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/news-articles/tube-strike-open-letter-from-london-underground?intcmp=30273

RMT:  Why we are striking.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/270888061/London-Underground-Strike-Leaflet

Reading those and by speaking to Tube staff I totally support the reason why they are striking.  The demands being put on LU staff are ludicrous.  The letter from Nick Brown is laughable.  They talk of listening to work-life balance concerns but the offer they make does nothing to address it.... and apparently customers no longer use ticket offices despite there being daily queues at them!  

There are, I believe, similar legacies of bitterness on the railways from events dating back to the last millennium. That hlonstanding rift may be being born in mind by some staff deciding on their stance at the current time.

Yes: those lorry drivers tended to be members of the Transport & General Workers Union (TGWU), and were not in dispute. They had a rather tough time of it, in the face of some very vociferous criticism from members of the NUM and RMT.

And a taxi driver, David Wilkie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_David_Wilkie), was killed, as a result of a concrete block being dropped from a bridge by two striking miners.  :(

It achieves me getting some exercise walk Paddington to Waterloo although coming home I think it will be train via Windsor

There is dogma on both side now, I am not convinced about all night Tubes it is likely to see the demise of a number of night busses which are a much cheaper way to get around at night

On completion of several months training Tube drivers earn just under ^50,000 a year, this is well over double the salary of a newly qualified Nurse, Police Constable or Firefighter, all of whom are obliged to work night shifts... a similarly qualified infantry soldier earns roughly a third of this figure, and all of them face considerably more challenging working conditions/environments and difficulties maintaining their work life balance..........when are the Tube Drivers Unions proposing to have a ballot on joining the real world, and how many night shifts annually would they consider feasible for their members to maintain their "work life balance", taking into account their 35 hour working week and eight weeks annual holiday?

oh, it's reward for looking after '000s of commuters and ensuring they come to no harm that they earn more than those you list. Frankly they need to get real.

It's not the tube drivers fault that nurses, firefighters etc are underpaid.  Blame the government for not treating them fairly.  There's nothing stopping anyone joining a union and standing up for better pay and conditions. 
So many people are quick to jump to the level of pay.  Conditions are far more important and valuable than the basic salary

That's why the RMT have requested a 34 hour 4day week for that ^50,000 then? Right.

Sorry, that's seriously overpaid/hour

There's an old adage that you don't get what you deserve, you get what you can negotiate.

Strong unions and weak management lead to higher pay and better conditions - up to a point. I'm sure the print workers felt pretty smug, pre-Wapping, as did the miners after the three-day week. The danger is that when all this comes to a head - which from a historical perspective seems likely - then the railway, and those who use it and work on it, will be much worse off.

And I rather suspect that when that day comes, Lord Cash of Watford won't care one little bit.

Ok, let them have their 34 hour working week, 8 weeks paid holiday with no night shifts, but lets drop the salary to something more sensible, perhaps around the national (London weighted, of course) average for a semi skilled operative, would that be ok? No, didn't think so...

Once the technology is tested, approved and in place for driverless trains (it is getting close even for autonomous road vehicles, which is a considerably more complex undertaking...), then that is when strikes and unions are simply ignored and the redundancies can begin - these people should just accept the cushy number they've got now and prepare themselves for a time in the not so far off future when their jobs no longer exist.

Is working a couple of nights a month really that much worse than a 4am booking on time or a 2am booking off time?!

What about commercial airline pilots then?  a computer can fly a plane, land it and take off yet they earn ^100k.  Are they overpaid? 

Train driving is a skilled profession.  We're not paid for what we do, we are paid for what we know and the risks involved.  Less than 3% of people who apply for a train drivers role will actually pass the initial assessments.
There will never be totally driverless trains on the Underground network.  A computer will never see passengers trapped in a door before they're dragged under a train, a computer will never be able to fix faults on trains, will never be able to deal with out-of course situations like signal failures, will never be able to safely de-train passengers in a tunnel, will never be able to spot potential track defects before they become a major incident./
If an emergency occurs on a driverless train and a passenger pulls the emergency alarm, what happens?  does the train stop automatically or keep going? 


Completely aside from the tube driver discussion though.  The average London salary is ^34k.  To get on the house market in London, first time buyers need to have an annual salary of ^77k a year.  House prices in London are predicted to rise by 30% over the next 5 years.  How is our NHS going to attract the best nursing staff in London if their salary means they can't afford to live in London?  This is why they should be fighting for their pay and conditions now. 

They don't now - simply detrain & take it out of service. A computer & station staff can do that.


Drivers don't fix them either. They wait for instructions from Control & either detrain & remove in the oppo direction or simply wait until fixed. A computer can do that.


Drivers do get involved, but never on their own unless a total emergency - otherwise they await emergency services & other staff first.


True enough. That and looking for stuff trapped in doors. So, some might suggest (not I) that they're glorified look-outs. Pretty much what Victoria Line drivers do now. Oh, and push the "start" button.


As now, moves to next station in order to obtain easy assistance.

Yes, a computer can fly a plane, computers can do most things, but airline pilots are required to have in depth knowledge of relevant aspects of physics & maths, principles of flight, navigation, meteorology, ability to process information in 3 (well, 4 really) dimensions, a minutely detailed knowledge of a machine some orders of magnitude more complex than a train - have you not seen typical flight deck instrumentation and/or the inside of an avionics bay compared with a train drivers controls?! And if something does go wrong in the air, you have to have the knowledge & skill to overcome that issue calmly and rationally, you're effectively alone. You can't just pull up at the next signal and phone someone for help with everyone sat behind you safe and sound. To compare airline pilots with train drivers is, has and always will be a ridiculous comparison.

To illustrate, I would draw your attention to some of the many videos available on youtube taken from the flight deck jump seat during bad weather manual landings, or from manual landings at difficult airports such as Funchal, Hong Kong Kai Tak, Toncontin - you will clearly see how and why airline pilots earn their money.

And besides, it's generally only Captains at airlines such as BA that break into the 6 figure salaries, to get to that level you need in the order of 1500+ hours on type. The rest are on the sorts of figures being paid to train drivers.

I would also be interested, using you arguments against driverless trains, as to how you can explain why the DLR has such a good safety record - someone recently posted the incidents to date on that computer controlled railway, and the only collisions between trains occurred when a human was at the controls of one of the vehicles involved.

There are automated trains already on the Paris Metro, including Line 1, one of the oldest (and one of the busiest) lines on the system. These are 100% driverless apart from a few extra trains deployed at peak time. It enabled them to run 38 trains an hour, and incidentally cut staff by about five-sixths. They are acting as advisers to TfL.

The trains are driven from a central control point, to which any passenger alarms are directed.

There's actually been a number of fatalities on the DLR, whilst information is not available for all them to determine fault two made the press.  One whereby the operator was prosecuted for a serious health and safety offence after someone was pushed onto the tracks and was not picked up by CCTV.  The most recent being a young lady who had a fit and fell off the platform was then struck by a DLR train 12 seconds later.

The statement that we "just pull up to the next signal and phone someone for help" just goes to show how little you know about the role and requirements of a driver.   

That comment was making the point that an airline pilot simply does not have the option of stopping and sorting out whatever issue has arisen, whereas a train driver can bring a train to a stop in order to buy time to address any issue that may have arisen en route.

Thanks, but I do know enough about driving trains to know that, however vehemently the unions and those in that position like to dress it up, it really isn't the proverbial rocket science. I fully appreciate it is not the simple button pressing many of the general public assume it to be, but it really cannot be compared with flying a commercial airliner.

A distinction must also be made between metro type trains, e.g. London Underground, and mainline type service - two very different environments which I think you are getting a little confused - this thread was primarily about the LUL strikes, not FGW or any other mainline operator.

I seem to recall that, quite recently, 2 men were struck by an Underground train at Stockwell - the presence of a 'driver' didn't do them an awful lot of good did it?

I'd disagree with that.


Apologise I didn't realise you are or were a mainline qualified train driver.  Out of interest, freight or passenger side?
 

That is probably true.  And, looking at the subject of this thread we are going way off on a tangent and we're never going to see eye to eye!   ;D

   

Nope, but there was at least a driver and platform staff present to assist passengers to evacuating the station safely.   

LUL strike action from Tuesday and Thursday evenings this week now called off after the remaining three unions involved have suspended their action pending further talks.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-transport/11820468/Tube-strikes-this-week.html (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-transport/11820468/Tube-strikes-this-week.html)

Postponed to 8 & 10 Sept. night tube due to start on 12th.

No pressure then