Train drivers were offered a 14 per cent pay rise over three years on Wednesday night in an effort to bring an end to their crippling strikes.
Louise Haigh, the Transport Secretary, announced the above inflation increase which will see the average driver’s salary rise from £60,000 to just shy of £70,000.
People gaining economic power through combination, thereby being able to charge everyone else economic rents.
Outta be illegal of course.
Just as companies shouldn’t be lobbying MP’s (or bribing them for parliamentary questions / influencing legislation) as happened in the Cash-for-Questions affair, the same should apply to other organisations such as unions, charities, etc.
Otherwise you get into the American realm of things where those lobbyists which fund election PAC’s (like AIPAC) get more say than the voters.
The problem with this is that it would kill the financial support that Labour receives from the unions and they’d be dependent upon the likes of individuals like Dale Vince.
Then again, I also think individual donations should be capped as well, to a level where there can be no consideration of influence, say £200 per year per individual.
That bloke recently who got a nice job in the Treasury after bunging Labour 20 grand is just such an example, JG.
They should have sacked all the drivers and employed illegalss off of the boats. But no, ‘thinking outside the box’ is impossible gor these clowns.
Given that the salary for that job is in the range of £97,000 to £162,500 (allegedly) and is normally employed by career civil servants, that sounds like a good return on investment, especially since the £20,000 was donated over a period of 9 years.
To everyone else, it looks like plain corruption.
We pay people £70k per year to drive trains! When the Victoria line opened 60 years ago it had automatic train operation. The drivers job was to press the button to close the doors then press a pair of buttons to start the train running automatically. The train did the rest. Technology has come on quite a bit since then and self driving cars are with us in some limited circumstances. In comparison to a self driving car a self driving train is quite trivial. Why do we still have train drivers, let alone pay them £70k per year?
After Reeves’s recent inflation-busting offer to the junior doctors and other public sector workers what exactly did anyone expect to happen with strongly unionised groups like the train drivers?
I was only surprised it didn’t ape the doctors settlement by including a “stealth” back-dated increase.
Then I re-read the article and realised it did.
Of course this is where the forfeited winter fuel payments are going. Most mugs think that went to the NHS
The DfT and the TOC monopolies have massively contributed to this with the absentee landlord model of managing the railways. For about 30 years they have operated a deliberate policy of structural understaffing, basically they choose not to employ enough people to run a resilient service, instead they operate on high levels of overtime (sometimes referred to as rest day working) or temporary staff to haphazardly mitigate the problems. In the case of train drivers, temp staff are not an option, so that deliberately engineered shortage of staff gives those that do exist extra leverage. For a short spell they blamed the shortage on not being able to recruit sufficiently during the pandemic period, that this reasoning doesn’t cover the 20+ years before or the years since is usually skipped over.
@andyf
The reason why we don’t have greater automation of rail based transport is because retrofitting it in the real world it is prohibitively expensive. The cost of ‘bumper’ pay packets for drivers may incense some people, but it really is a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the level of investment required for automation. The payback period on automation investment makes most of it simply not economically viable. Besides it sets train drivers up nicely as a bete noire of people jealous of their salaries, but largely ignorant of the absentee landlord approach which actually costs a lot more.
@John Galt
We already have a similar lobbying situation to America, we just have a smidge more veneer of respectability. The problem is political parties are only ever likely to want to restrict bungs that mainly benefit their opponents, as opposed to bungs that benefit themselves. As such routes will always remain open.
I like what MJW says there.
The franchise system as developed in the 1990s was a recipe for disaster and so it proved. Many of us said so at the time but the dundeheads in Major’s govt couldn’t see it and the wazzocks in Blair’s ( ahem Stephen Byers ahem ) did not improve things. 30 years later we now have a perfect example of a broken market ( see the thread above ).
@MJW: ’The reason why we don’t have greater automation of rail based transport is because retrofitting it in the real world it is prohibitively expensive.’
On a recent Facebook thread about a ‘one under’ incident delaying Greater Anglia trains, the number of people who commented that stations should have secondary barriers to prevent this, and how the Jubilee Line only had them to ‘protect the rich in London’ was ridiculous.
And pointing out that it had them because it was the newest line and they’d been designed in from the start (and retrofitting them to other lines would be a challenge) was a wasted effort.
Fortunate there was never a lift operators union, wasn’t it?
They don’t have a monopoly. Covid broke that. They could take the piss when they could hold the country to ransom, but everyone can just work at home on strike days and outlast the RMT. Strikes 101: it has to hurt the bosses more than it hurts you.
It’s why the strikes have been running for 14 months and mostly on weekends. If they still had the power that Bob Crow had, this would have been resolved much earlier.
There is no issue on a weekend. There isn’t the congestion that holds up traffic, which is rail’s main advantage. And leisure travellers are fine with the speed of a car or coach. If I go to an event in London on a weekend, I just book the coach in advance. It’s a little slower, but it’s also £35 cheaper, so overall, I don’t mind either way.
Really, the government should be cutting all that Covid subsidy that still hasn’t been removed and starting Beeching II on the rural rail lines. See how the unions like that.
Ah, Bob Crow…
I remember him making some particularly foul remarks on the death Of Margaret Thatcher (at the age of 88).
Less than a year later, Bob Crow died (at the age of 53).
I put that in the ‘there must be a God’ column.
Docklands Railway was built from day one with *zero* drivers.
Western Bloke,
“They don’t have a monopoly. Covid broke that. They could take the piss when they could hold the country to ransom, but everyone can just work at home on strike days and outlast the RMT. Strikes 101: it has to hurt the bosses more than it hurts you.
It’s why the strikes have been running for 14 months and mostly on weekends. If they still had the power that Bob Crow had, this would have been resolved much earlier.”
This is now political and the unions don’t care now that the railways are going to be taken back in to direct government management or to use the lazy term renationalised. (Yes I know track is still nationalised)
They don’t care whether or not people use the service, if anything its in their interest that people don’t use it. Fewer people to complain to their MPs about late or cancelled trains, dirty carriages and surly staff. They’ll get paid anyway so why put up with the grief of endless newspaper articles about it?
Its also in Labour’s interest to have fewer customers and therefore fewer complaints, although they don’t realise it yet, because now ministers are directly responsible. Oh they’ll kick management about a bit but as the funding dries up because ministers are choosing between spending on the railways and more money for St NHS, the underfunding will become obvious to the general public.
And when the unions want wage rises? Well, “nice political party you’ve got there, it would be a shame if it ran out of money”. Far easier for Labour to pacify them from the public purse, especially in the run up to a general election.
I know I’ve said it before, but when my father had pubs in Yorkshire in the ’60s & ’70s he was only half joking when he said he wanted the government to nationalise pubs so he could sell the worst pint in town.
BiND,
“They don’t care whether or not people use the service, if anything its in their interest that people don’t use it. Fewer people to complain to their MPs about late or cancelled trains, dirty carriages and surly staff. They’ll get paid anyway so why put up with the grief of endless newspaper articles about it?”
The train operators, too. The train operations are still going to be run by the likes of First, but they’ll just be running the trains under contract. No franchise where they try and make more money. As long as they tick the boxes for minimum service level, they get paid. Expect a whole lot of stories about the weird incentives in contract and how the operators do things to barely meet that.