The whinging bitches politics poo-bin thread
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Oneball
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For balance: Thats because the RMT have spent all their money on backhanders to Labour MPs. £1million over the last 10 years apparently and that doesn’t include the money they give to the central Labour Party
philw696
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Mick Lynch said several times yesterday that they give nothing to the Labour Party mate.
Tim can you confirm it takes 9 people to change a plug as the right wing press are saying?
Even Ms French can do that task.
Oneball
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Inside rail unions bankrolling Labour's top brass with donations & meals
MILITANT rail unions poised to unleash a “summer of discontent” on passengers have been bankrolling the Labour Party and its top team, we can reveal. Leader Sir Keir Starmer and frontbench colleagu…
www.thesun.co.uk
Keir Starmer hit by revolt on train strikes as Labour MPs receive MILLIONS from unions | Politics | News | Express.co.uk
SIR KEIR STARMER is facing open revolt with members of his own frontbench defying his order to join striking union workers on the picket line.
www.express.co.uk
The RMT is a non-affiliated union but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t give donations. I’d imagine that’s what Mike Lynch was going on about. He’s a politician in the same way the transport Secretary stood up in parliament and quoted train drivers’ earnings. Sounds great, isn’t a lie but they aren’t on national strike! That’s like the Royal College of Nursing going on strike and saying doctors get paid £120k a year.
No it doesn’t take 9 people to change a plug, but it might do to complete the whole process including testing over miles. We have the safest railways in the world for a reason and the RMT have a genuine gripe but I don’t believe 3 days of strikes is the way to go about it.
Andyk
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11% pay rise…What planet are they on. No one gets rate of inflation pay rise as that will just rise inflation more and get us in a bigger mess. No time for them. I will say one thing …I left for work early yesterday thinking the roads would be busy but quieter than ever so thank you RMT….
I did laugh at the reporter in the news last night. People are being forced to work from home….Now if my boss asked me to work from home there would not be much ‘force needed’ on what was the hottest day of the year.
CatmanV2
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Socket in fact, not plug. It doesn't seem impossible if
a) All rosters have to be teams of three as opposed to individuals
b) There's no cross skilling (i.e. to use the example if the socket will need retiling around and a dishwasher pipe moving)
But I would also like to understand the accuracy
C
Oneball
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Yep, welcome to the 1970s. We used to get 43p a day if it was foggy. That’s probably some old bloke who’s had continuous service since 1980 and is still on the same terms and conditions.
P5Nij
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Yes, believe it or not 'walking time' has to be factored into jobs and has to fit around the working timetable, for both passenger and freight drivers. Some of the locations we work to and from on the freight side are in awkward places where there are no stations, taxis are also used in some cases. I'm based at Rugby and often have to travel up to Crewe to relieve trains there, the traveling time is factored in plus it takes at least twenty minutes to walk from the station down to the yard before relieving the train. The same applies when travelling to the southern end of the WCML when woring out of Wembley Yard, everything has to be very tightly timed to make each shift we do as efficient as possible, there are also legal requirements for breaks to be factored in which isn't as easy as it might appear. The terms and conditions have changed hugely over the years with concessions given on both sides of the table, but we're certainly not as stuck in the '70s as some would have you believe. Improvements in working conditions can take decades to put in place.
Apologies for what probably comes across as a minor rant, but I get fed up of people often thinking the railways and those who work on them are fair game, just because most of us happen to be in a union or some of us are well paid compared to millions of others. There are many other walks of life which are just as heavily unionised but they don't get half the stick we do. And it's not necessarily a given that every union member is a raging leftie either, in my case I opted out of a portion of my subs going to the Labour party many years ago and will never vote Labour in my lifetime. A common theme amongst those talking about the rail strikes is ''well, what about the cleaners, teachers, nurses, Police etc..?'', well I agree, they deserve to be paid much better but attacking those in the rail industry who are lucky enough to be paid more isn't the answer. The answer is for them to get their various unions working harder for them, or start a union of their own. Someone on another forum said to me the other day ''if rail workers don't like the money they should just leave'', this doesn't actually solve any of the issues though, and throwing the same thing back at nurses, teachers, police etc doesn't go down well.
I imagine there are a lot of members on here who are paid several times my (very good) salary with just as much responsibility (or not maybe?), or are savvy enough to make money from shares, options, markets etc and fair play to them, but I honestly believe I earn every penny. There is far more to being a train driver than simply pushing buttons and pulling levers, the knowledge we have to learn and keep competency in and responsibility is why we're so well paid. My route and traction knowledge alone would make some people's heads explode. I've dealt with all kinds of sh*t in my time on the footplate, from suicides (two so far, witnessed another one last year and have had hundreds of near misses), trespassers, vandalism etc, which most people don't take into consideration.
It's also worth pointing out that less than 2% of drivers are in the RMT and the number actually striking this week is probably just a handful. 96% of drivers are in ASLEF and haven't all been balloted for strike action, the other 2% are not in any union at all. Most of the those on strike are signallers, signalling engineers, P/Way staff, cleaners, fitters, technicians, backroom staff and lower managers etc.
Right, rant over - first one to spark up and say ''you don't even have to steer the bloody train'' get's a virtual fat lip!
Oneball
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I don’t think the walking time C was referring to was driver’s diagrams, I think it’s maintenance staff. And yes I was a bit flippant about 1970s working practices but it’s just the same as NHS staff having old T&Cs because they started 40 years ago. Most of these things have good reason. The fog payments hark back to the days when you worked using lookouts to stop you getting run over but BR still wanted you to work when it was foggy.
Virtually no staff have these sorts of T&Cs now but there’s the odd ones that do and they always get sprouted out as an example to justify wholesale change.
Virtually no staff have these sorts of T&Cs now but there’s the odd ones that do and they always get sprouted out as an example to justify wholesale change.
CatmanV2
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Right, rant over - first one to spark up and say ''you don't even have to steer the bloody train'' get's a virtual fat lip!
No I'm genuinely interested.
Obviously moving to many different locations takes time, and should be compensated for. Is there a school of thought though that says, (within limits) You're expected to start work here at this time?
FWIW Mrs C is in Unison, and is not a raging leftie either, nor does she support Labour and you are right to raise the false dichotomy of nurses and cleaners
Actually it was for drivers to get from their 'base' to the train which (according Google) is 1 minute, but warrants a 12 minute allowance. Now that would seem to me to be madness. This was in Birmingham and allegedly a result of the movement of the base as part of a £750m refit part of which was to improve the drivers' base, but also was 2010 so who knows how accurate the story is.
The flip, of course is the attitude evinced by union leadership (and to be honest many people on here) that somehow 'management' are a different species than 'workers'
I'm 'management' and I don't have 'workers' that I exploit. I have a team that I try to look after to the best of my ability. I cannot give them an inflation matching pay rise, but that's not because my boss (the CEO) is an exploitative ****. It's because we are not making enough money as a company. One could well argue that the better paid members of the company should sacrifice their salary to bolster that of the more lower paid, butI I imagine most of my peers also believe they earn every penny and being an SME in what I do is a valuable skill, so then we dig into the far more thorny issue of 'Why should I?' and what is an acceptable level of income......
There are many other managers and leaders on this forum, and having met many of them, I find the 'Union' attitude to be just as divisive as that of claimed to be attributed to the right wing press.
C
Oneball
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Ah ok, it was train drivers. Their walking time is all about running a punctual service. So it needs to be factored into account how long it takes them to get from loco a to the toilet/break room and then back to loco b or from loco a on platform 1 to loco b on platform 12 if they don’t need a break.
People miss how complicated the timings on the railway are. Joe Bloggs having an argument with the guard about his bicycle at Penzance station on Sunday evening can delay your train home from York on Monday night or stop you getting a bottle of Prosecco from Tesco in Liverpool on Wednesday and that’s not a once in a blue moon sort of occurrence it happens all the time.
People miss how complicated the timings on the railway are. Joe Bloggs having an argument with the guard about his bicycle at Penzance station on Sunday evening can delay your train home from York on Monday night or stop you getting a bottle of Prosecco from Tesco in Liverpool on Wednesday and that’s not a once in a blue moon sort of occurrence it happens all the time.
P5Nij
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Catman - where you're based on the railway will very often involve travelling to another point to work a particular train, a couple of our managers have questioned the fact that our base is in Rugby and ought to be twenty miles away in Kettering to cover the work we do on the Midland Mainline, it was then pointed out to them that we'd still have to travel the twenty miles back to Rugby to pick up much of our other work here on the West Coast Mainline! Where we are now is right in the middle of the large area we cover, almost exactly mid way between London and Crewe for starters so it's the most 'efficient' starting point for all of our jobs, wherever they happen to start or finish. Naturally, most depots work load overlaps quite a bit to allow more flexibility in covering everything that moves, since the traffic levels don't flow north, east, south or west consistently. We work all round the east and west Midlands, and from Birmingham we also work down to Leamington, Banbury, Oxford and Didcot, Worcester, Cheltenham and Gloucester. There are numerous branches and freight only lines on our patch plus all the connecting lines between the major routes which come together in and around London (a few of us go saaarf of the river to Clapham and Battersea too). A couple of our lads sign the road a little further down to Bristol too, and the furthest east any of us go is March in Cambridgeshire. By it's nature freight work is often a one way per shift, with the return working being done by another driver either later the same day or the next day, depending on the customer's requirements. We're not allowed to go over twelve hours without special authority in emergencies and by law have to have twelve hours break between any two shifts, and since the Clapham disaster of 1988 we're not allowed to work more than thirteen days in a row.
By the way, I have no problem with 'management', most of ours are brilliant, but the railway does seem to suffer a small number of individuals who move from one company to another determined to build their own little empires before failing miserably and moving on to pastures new to do it all over again
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CatmanV2
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Catman - where you're based on the railway will very often involve travelling to another point to work a particular train, a couple of our managers have questioned the fact that our base is in Rugby and ought to be twenty miles away in Kettering to cover the work we do on the Midland Mainline, it was then pointed out to them that we'd still have to travel the twenty miles back to Rugby to pick up much of our other work here on the West Coast Mainline! Where we are now is right in the middle of the large area we cover, almost exactly mid way between London and Crewe for starters so it's the most 'efficient' starting point for all of our jobs, wherever they happen to start or finish. Naturally, most depots work load overlaps quite a bit to allow more flexibility in covering everything that moves, since the traffic levels don't flow north, east, south or west consistently. We work all round the east and west Midlands, and from Birmingham we also work down to Leamington, Banbury, Oxford and Didcot, Worcester, Cheltenham and Gloucester. There are numerous branches and freight only lines on our patch plus all the connecting lines between the major routes which come together in and around London (a few of us go saaarf of the river to Clapham and Battersea too). A couple of our lads sign the road a little further down to Bristol too, and the furthest east any of us go is March in Cambridgeshire. By it's nature freight work is often a one way per shift, with the return working being done by another driver either later the same day or the next day, depending on the customer's requirements. We're not allowed to go over twelve hours without special authority in emergencies and by law have to have twelve hours break between any two shifts, and since the Clapham disaster of 1988 we're not allowed to work more than thirteen days in a row.
By the way, I have no problem with 'management', most of ours are brilliant, but the railway does seem to suffer a small number of individuals who move from one company to another determined to build their own little empires before failing miserably and moving on to pastures new to do it all over again
Useful ta
C
mowlas
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Absolutely brilliant!
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