please empty your brain below
In Paris, Metro lines 1 and 14 if I recall are staff less (no driver or any other crew).
I remember when there were lift operators,now we all ride automatic lifts. The same will happen with the tube.
I think London bus drivers have the hard job, certainly not the tube train operator.
Driverless trains and Train Captains. Now.
Then again, it isn't a hard thing to do, with 40+ days of holiday a year, strict 37.5 hour weeks, and a job that only requires a few months training (for which they are paid) and a starting salary of £50,000.
I do agree with the statements that the problem is with other jobs not being paid what they are worth, especially for London rates, but the reality is that their position is currently so much better, that this strike is not going to have much sympathy from the public.
As for the 32 hour week demands - sadly we didn't get the future that people imagined in the 1950s.
A solution for night time pay rates needs to be found - a one-off payment is not suitable. What ever happened to time and a quarter?
Postpone the start of night tube, and therefore no need for strikes whilst the details are worked out of how the terms & conditions required to operate the nighttube are needed. Once agreed - start the night tube service.
In the meantime, several million people not inconvenienced by having no tube trains.
Seriously, have i missed something?
But there isn't sense in this one. By all accounts, despite announcing this in 2013 TfL wouldn't talk to the unions about it until May this year. They could have been working with the unions for over a year to ensure that they could implement it smoothly.
They didn't.
Why TfL took this approach, who knows. But I'm sure a Conservative, anti-union Mayor had absolutely nothing to do with it at all in any way.
Oh, you did miss the tube drivers (like my wife's cousin) who think the strike is wrong and that the Unions are taking the p!ss in asking for such inflated sums of money for the relatively small increase in work. But what does he know - not like he drives trains on the Northern Line on a shift pattern which he doesn't think will change too much and which will still allow him plenty of time at home with his sub-2 year old son.
That the station staff, signallers, engineers and more - many of whom are on far lower salaries - are also manning the picketline.
Incidentally don't fall for the hype that driverless trains will solve all problems. They won't. For starters such trains still need onboard staff, staff at the stations, staff at the signalling centres...
In other words if the entire system was driverless today, this strike would still be happening.
I find it funny when there is a Tube strike and everyone gets pissed off because a group of other people decided to become a member of a well organised union who will look out for their members and make sure they don't get shafted.
I think more people would sympathise with the tube drivers if there hadn't been so many previous threats of strike action. Trying to change people's terms of employment with little or no consultation is a pretty big deal IMHO.
Please be aware that this is only for the first ten shifts. Would you take £2000 (less tax) to change your working conditions for ever?
And the 52 days annual leave (43 for drivers) doesn't look so much when you remember that as shift workers, that presumably includes any Bank Holidays not worked.
1. "the NUR and ASLEF should lay it out in laymen's english for us all to read"
They have - see here
but the press choose not to publish it
The TSSA (which for some reason you do not mention - remember that even if every single driver had reported for work today, there would still have been no service) have also issued something
The strike wouldn't be legal if they hadn't done precisely that
https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/ballot-results/rates-of-pay-and-conditions-of-service-and-night-running-london3
Oh, and by the way, the NUR has not existed for 25 years.
(2) fully-automated systems bring their own risks - Air France 447 (Rio - Paris) crashed because the cockpit crew were TOO familiar with automated systems and when they failed, did not know how to recover from what became a fatal outcome. BALPA (British Air Line Pilots Association), not the world's most militant body, has expressed major concerns with over-automated planes and pilots' lack of ongoing familiarity with recovery procedures, as well as slowing their reaction times.
Never mind that LU only talk about the pay aspect while the unions address the work-life balance issue, never mind that LU's vaunted '2%' rise isn't any such amount - it's a mythical mathematical calculation for PART of the multiple year deal.
A train driver has up to 1500 people on his/her train, and always has the train in front's tail lights visible, and knows that the train behind can see his/her tail lights. Tell me that ain't stress - a potential pile-up in the peak involving up to 4500 passengers (not 'customers'), and themselves. In most end-on shunts, the train driver is the deadest of the lot. Doesn't matter if the train is automated or not.
The key issue is that unions mostly debate with their own members, and its the members who call the disputes, not the Execs or Gen Secs - this dispute met all the present and future strike criteria - doesn't anyone get it that almost all of the staff are severely pee'd off?
Most mass media will never give trade unionists a fair report, and those which do are in a tiny minority, unread or un-noticed by their audiences.
End of rant
http://www.cityam.com/221710/august-2015-tfl-tube-strike-union-rmt-wants-pay-rises-line-house-price-growth
The only mention of pay is linking it to the Consumer Prices Index, i.e no more than a pay freeze in real terms.
And to repeat - the unions rattled all the safety skeletons when guards were taken off tubes, but in practice nothing much happened, so they're probably crying wolf again.
Train and station staff get 28 days holiday.
Drivers get paid for a 35 hour week, but work an average of 36 hours - one hour a week is unpaid overtime. This hour a week is "banked" and amounts to six days a year. These six days are called Banked Rest Days (notice that they are not called Holidays, because they are not holidays, they're time off for unpaid work already done).
Station staff have a similar arrangement, but work an average of 37½ hours a week whilst only getting paid for 35. Therefore, they get 15 BRDs a year to make up for the unpaid time worked.
Nine days are bank holidays. LU's way of working is that, instead of giving you a day off in lieu if you work a bank holiday, they give you nine days and then if you are booked off on a bank holiday they deduct that from the total. Therefore, if you were booked off on 8 of the 9 bank holidays, you would only be given 1 day. If you worked all the bank holidays, you would be given 9 days. It's no differnt to any other firm that gives you holiday, then an additional day in lieu for every bank holiday worked.
LU changed the old method of days in lieu to the current system. They both work in exactly the same way, but it means that LU can always quote the bank holidays, BRDs and holidays as one total whenever there is a strike etc. just so it makes it look as if staff get a lot more time off than they actually do.
What's not realised is that, unlike most staff in 9-5 Monday to Friday jobs, most staff who work shiftwork on the Underground will also work most bank holidays. This is especially so for drivers and station staff. Long gone is the time when a bank holiday service was a Sunday service or even a reduced Sunday service.
Many of whom also aren't on far lower salaries...
It's very odd that we have a dispute that has managed to get all 4 trade unions to agree and where their view of what's going on is pretty much identical.
I doubt the Night Tube and the accompanying night bus changes will happen on time. It's way too late now to create new rosters if there was an agreement and there's no point changing night buses if there's no night tube (barring one or two new daily new night buses in the proposals which could start regardless of the night tube). There are similar notification issues for bus driver rosters and lead in times for implementing changes on such a big scale. The Mayor doesn't seem to be hung up on the 12/9 date even though Night Tube is a massively political move on his part.
1) Rogmi: this is England, 8 Bank Holidays not 9
2)Tetramesh: your comments about underpaid nurses and coppers - Google 'UK Median salary 2015', as per Office for National Statistics, Inner London £34,473 so Tube drivers get c 50% above the median wage in Inner London. Median for UK as whole is £22044, ie for rest of UK well below £22k, so Tube drivers get double plus. Additionally do they and their families not get free or heavily discounted travel? And for what? Underground trains have massive safety measures, much more so than those applying to bus drivers, and frankly the worst aspects of the job are shiftwork, I accept, and possibly boredom. Many, many people do much more stressful jobs for less money, more dangerous jobs for less money and much more physically demanding jobs for less money. Let's be frank: Tube drivers are in the cushiest number going thanks to forceful union action in the past but they should the guts and decency to admit it and stop holding other less well paid people hostage. I don't blame anyone for being a greedy bastard but at least have the decency to admit it.
to give some perspective...
brand new easyjet co-pilots are paid less than £20,000 pa with no benefits
- worked constant unsocial hours with all the attendant long term health risks, lack of sleep, inability to lead a normal life with their family and friends, eat, sleep, use the toilet or try to keep fit and well normally?
- taken responsibility for the wellbeing of hundreds of passengers, sometimes on their own, dealt with abusive drunks, fighting, people collapsing on platforms, oh, and, deciding to use your train to end their life?
- Worked the majority of weekends and bank holidays, as well as Christmas and New Years Eve knowing that on some of those days their reward is to be attacked by the sort of idiots commenting on blogs like this and many others?
- taken a job on the basis of particular hours only to find that their employer wants to make a very radical change to this that will severely Impact on their lives, without any consultation at all?
- been constantly vilified in a right wing media with no hope of ever having a fair press to put their side in an atmosphere of consideration rather than condemnation before even listening?
- had their job and their skills constantly undermined by people who may do far less skilled work but apparently know everything about how easy their job is and how obviously overpaid it is?
- been resented by people who have poor pay and conditions and seem to think we should be dragged into a race to the bottom OR presumably and just as disturbingly, that the working classes should know their place. This is Britain and we still don't like people to get out of their hole, which is presumably why we've allowed our nation to run down industry, erode workers rights and make it less likely that the next generation of working class kids will ever get to university and climb the greasy pole.
50k is a hell of a lot for a relatively unskilled job
a lot of airline and helicopter pilots earn a lot less and have worse Ts & Cs and do just as much unsocial shift work, with as much responsibility and they've spent £100,000 of their own money on their training
as much as like the idea of unions and applaud their right to strike, they have to realise they are onto a good thing, and they are paid by the taxpayer
i bet if they advertised tube drivers jobs at 35k a year they would be deluged with applicants...
If an emergency occurred on a train on which I was travelling, I would far rather the person in charge had a broad knowledge of the workings of the whole system, as well as the specific procedural training for the driver's job. That is surely one reason to recruit from existing employees. I admit that I have no special knowledge or affiliation to confirm this.
The Guard rarely did any driving, unless they were able to cadge a driving trip. The Guard's training was very thorough, and almost as much as what they would do again when they went up for the driver's course.
This line of promotion meant that when s Guard became a driver they already had a very good background knowledge of the job and (if they stayed on it) the line they would be driving on. The only thing they lacked were the actual driving skills and this came with time.
Station staff going up for driver would have had basic prior knowledge of how the job operated, but no train-side experience.
Direct Recruit Operators started completely from scratch, being taken from outside and having to learn a lot of new stuff in a short time before ending up on the road driving the train. Training was extended, but it was also dumbed down a lot in many cases. It's not to say that DROPs were no good and, in time, many made excellent drivers. However there were often more incidents during their first few months as a driver (such as SPADs) than would have happened if they had been a Guard first with prior experience.
(And just for clarity, I despise the daily mail, I'm a life long member of the Labour party and believe that the selfishness of tube drivers is the biggest threat to the union movement by giving reasonable and fair minded unions a bad name)
I do more so on the manual ones, as there is quite a bit of skill in stopping a train in the right place and driving at the right speed! But all the same, I get paid less than a Tube driver, and I spent 3 years and £10k at university and a lot of my own time learning to do so.
But I do think that the unions are the main issue I have about this action. As pointed out, they don 't seem to care that by holding such devastating strikes and timing them to deliberately upset two days and not one, they are causing significant issues to a large part of the London population - and generally the lesser paid ones who can't work from home. That doesn't seem very socialist, which is what I believed unions were. Maybe they're actually right wing entities just for the benefit of their members and to the detriment of anyone else?
Despite being quite left on the political spectrum, I am not a huge fan of strikes as they come across as a bunch of petulant kids throwing their toys out of the pram and saying "Fine, if you won't follow our demands we'll make everyone's life hell!". Not that TfL have handled things well either mind you...
LU - like any train operator - will be training all the time. They have to plan now for the number of drivers they will need in 12 months, and with drivers who can quit far more easily.
And do you know what? Sometimes they do. London Midland had a major issue a few years ago because they kept losing drivers to other companies who paid more. And do you know what happened? They had NEARLY A YEAR OF CANCELLATIONS.
And do you know who was sat there through all this? The passenger. And the passenger doesn't like cancellations. They sit around being sarky on the internet about how much drivers get paid.
Strikes me drivers know what they're worth. They have training costs that go into the tens of thousands (and wouldn't surprise me if it goes over a hundred thousand given the time aspects.) They're a critical lynch-pin who keep a city moving. And they can walk out and get a better paid job with another train company quite easily and cause chaos. As London Midland can tell you.
But of course this was only ever a strike about driver salaries. Wasn't it?
Because the gateline staff weren't on strike, where they? The engineers? the signallers all went in, didn't they?
Oh hang on, they did. In fact all four tube unions went out on strike.
Even the moderate ones - TSSA and Unite. The two who never strike.
How pissed off do those union's members need to be, to go out on strike?
Oh and if your jealous about the drivers salary, or perhaps your own in relation to it - which you clearly are - why not join a union and collectively work together to improve things?
But you won't. Because it's easier to snipe and moan.
1) skills scarcity. This links in with staff retention rates. Any business that does not think a high staff retention rate is not a problem, is deluded. Recruitment and training costs serious cash - especially in an area like train drivers where it is extremely slow and very costly to get new bodies on the ground - there isn't a hoard of unemployed drivers wandering round. Scarcity of skills drives up wages in most industries. You want to keep the people you have as long as possible.
2) competition. This is a good one. With British Rail there was one salary structure across the whole system. But once the Conservatives privatised it all, some companies started paying their drivers more. They did so partly for retention, and partly to try and poach drivers from other companies. (This still happens - it happened with London Midland not long ago.) After all, if you can pay a bit more, you'll get a driver now rather than in a years time. Of course the tube wasn't privatised, but the effects of that competition ripple through everywhere. If a tube driver can move to driving for somewhere else for more cash, that impacts the retention rates at LU.
3) National Rail companies being "afraid" of strikes/having better employee relations Now this is an interesting one to consider. How often are there are strikes at National Rail companies? Not very often actually. They seem to try and avoid them. And that impacts pay too.
Each of these is a factor in driving up salaries in the rail marketplace, and that impacts LU at every turn.
There are probably other factors as well, but the simple answer boils down to: because factors in the market have decided drivers are worth the money they are paid.
A large number of people pay for their own 'training' via university, for three years - and even when they get out, they can only get low-ranked jobs because they have no experience, only training - and that's when they've studied in-demand jobs.
So I can see why becoming a tube driver takes 12 months to learn - I guess there's a lot of line layouts to learn, as well as emergency protocols, how to press the door open button, and so on.
And they're doing a job that's hard to differentiate performance - either they do the job, or they get chucked out (presumably during the training process). So I guess you could say that all employed tube drivers are 'high performers' in their roles...
But that still doesn't negate the fact that most graduates in London are earning at most £30k, except in very few fields, and won't get to £50k for five years even if their job scales that high. So it is easy to see why people are shocked by £50k+50 days off as a baseline.
I have no sympathy with London Midland ... 3-4 years ago when they had a chronic shortage of driver and I had a chronic shortage of.. a job that paid money, I applied on the London Midland website. I got a "thanks for application email, we will be in touch" reply and then - Never heard a thing from then again.
Six months later, the boss of London Midland was on TV apologising for the cancellations blaming it on being unable to recruit enough drivers. I actually thumped my head on desk in despair.
It was quite good money too.
Rules and Regs, Train Equipment Principles, Stock Specific Training, and Road Training (route learning and practice). All in all took about 22 weeks.
For a signalling technician the training is even longer - from start to finish the core training is 43 weeks, and in that time you never set foot outside of the training centre onto the real railway.
To learn the TBTC system on the Jubilee and Northern lines is another seven weeks to do the full suite of courses, another seven or eight for the Victoria Line DTG-R system, and another three or four for the one-off systems at Neasden, and a few other places.
After that you still haven't achieved the external IRSE licence to work - this generally takes another five or six months of mentoring, getting used to actually doing the job rather than learning the systems in a training room...
And I haven't even mentioned the time needed for mandatory safety and track training!
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