Happier safe workers mean better service to the public
More people will stay and wanna work industry
It is also people’s right to fight for better pay and work conditions I will always support people wanting to strike
I work in public sector and a lot of workers can’t strike. we losing staff like crazy, work conditions are getting worse and pay awful
All we want is job security and a fair pay rise. 2% isn’t reasonable. 2500 job losses isn’t reasonable. Changes to contracts taking all the lower grades into s pool ensuring they have neither the skills nor the experience to step up when a job becomes available isn’t reasonable.
They claim it’s not going to effect safety. We don’t have enough staff as it is less is going to make things worse.
Having no one be able to step into a more demanding roll is going to make everyone worse off.
They claim they need to save money but refuse to look at the absolute insane amount they pay for things. Head lamps you can buy in places like go out doors for 30 quid are costing 90 for the exact same model.
Telephones that last a month costing 300 quid.
4 contractors to do the job of one man.
But nah can’t look at that gotta cut staffing instead.
This is the first time we’ve been on strike since 94.
Every single time the British public by and large will join the side of the businesses and the polluters. They don’t care about worker safety, they don’t care about fair wages, they don’t care about anything but zero disruptions to their day, if a worker has to die every day to get it that is fine with them, if it destroys the planet with pollution they are also fine with that too.
Saying I must support something makes me far more likely to not support it.
More power to them quite frankly. I’m seeing an awful lot of anti union sentiment on here relating mostly to “they’re just trying to enrich themselves” and “but it inconveniences me and my job”.
Both have the same solution, create or join your own bloody union! If you were in a union you could also take action to enrich yourself instead of whining that other people are being proactive, and if you were in a union your boss would have less power to give you shit for being late for reasons entirely beyond your control. Your wage has been suppressed for literally decades and if it had kept up with inflation since the 70s you would have nearer twice the salary you do now. Did unions do that? No, they didn’t.
I get that it’s difficult to change your mind on this sort of thing especially when the running narrative is “unions are bad, strikes make my life grind to a halt, they’re just greedy mafioso types holding us hostage” but how do you think the 2500 train drivers slated for the sack feel? I guarantee that if your job was about to be cut loose by some fat pocketed government-briber you’d be singing a different tune, especially if a union decided “no, we’re going to fight to keep you employed, and even try to get a pay rise for you too”.
A rising tide floats all ships.
Yep, they need the public to support them, they are not just striking for them selves, they are striking for everyone who deserves a higher wage.
I had a work trip planned to London that I didn’t especially want to do. The strike has meant I have an excuse not to go. Fab!
Rail bosses gave themselves a huge bonus.
Workers did not get any of this, and frozen pay
Now if you get told you can’t have increased pay, but your boss get a few million extra.. I feel its right to go on strike.
Especially after the government telling us not to ask for payrises due to fears of the price rise pay thing.
This should be called a Network Rail strike rather than the union that the members are signed up to. Just like when there are Tube strikes everyone says Tube strikes not RMT strikes. With different groups of workers signed up to RMT, this week “RMT strike” could be referring to 2 different strikes.
Plus RMT has bad rep with some people, mainly in London, so saying support RMT instead of the workers wont do wonders there.
Can’t think of other strikes being referred to as the name of the union tbh. Like when Tesco workers strike it’s not a Unite strike, its a Tesco strike.
All Hail. Hopefully the rest of the working population gets organised aswell. We’re being squeezed to hard.
I never understand why this is such a political thing.
People have a right to withdraw their labour. Sometimes that’s a good idea. Sometimes it isn’t. But ultimately it’s between employees and the company.
I don’t have to support a strike. I don’t have to condemn it. But whatever I do, it’s basically irrelevant because it’s none of my business.
I haven’t had a pay raise in 10 years. But I still support this 100% because of the trickle-down effect. If the unions are destroyed, we’re all fucked.
100%. Good luck to the strikers. If the public are angry they should lay the blame where it belongs: the corporations who won’t negotiate properly until a strike forces them to.
Solidarity with all the workers
Hopefully they manage to automate it and find most of the overpaid bastards redundant.
More power to them to take the gamble, but I’m fed up of every other fucking day having the tube on strike because they don’t make 70 grand for sitting there to press a button incase of emergency and open the doors, because they know that they can hold all of london to ransom, and I bet its the same up and down the country.
We are going into a deep recession, there will be no public support for strikes over pay rises. There are going to be job losses across most of the economy soon.
Stop fighting your fellow worker and realise the problem are those in positions of power trying to distract you and pull your strings.
**We need class war, not culture war.**
I’ve already seen the ‘the public will suffer’ and ‘patients are having to cancel surgery’ drama pieces on places like the S*n.
All designed to get people angry at strikers, when we all know it’s the large companies that are forcing unions’ hands and we should be joined together against their practices.
We get constantly told by media pieces to essentially punch down the pecking order while the twats on top bet on who’s going to get KO’d first.
Strike for the week after as well and I will support it. Might mean I can get out of having to go into the office for half a week, which means staying in a hotel because the office is so far to get to.
Well yeah strikes are good for workers with out them companies would he doing what they do in China
The BBC’s reporting of this hasn’t helped the public attitude to the strike.
Calling it a ‘walkout’ and vox pops of school kids saying ‘i don’t know how I’ll get to school’.
I just want to add to this discussion that for the RMT this strike **has** to happen, it’s 2,500 people losing their job. There is no way that the union can not fight this to the end. The person making this strike happen is Grant Shapps, the job cuts weren’t negotiated, they are being imposed unilaterally. These cuts aren’t the result of some careful analysis, they’re based on the assumption that other people will work overtime to make up the difference at lower cost. Grant Shapps wants to make the railway cheaper (and don’t be under any delusion that any savings would be passed down to those buying tickets) to score political points for his own career interests. Like every other industry gutted by the Tories this is about cutting from the public budget to give tax breaks to the rich. **Grant Shapps is causing this, not the workers and not the union.**
Work for a rail line for that pay
You do know it, workers, all up and down the pay scale are striking not just top-paid workers
With fuel, rent, and food rising they will need a pay rise to cope with the cost of living. The media like making songs and dances about top people pay and they still striking. But the majority of strikers will be on lower-pay brands
The government doing fuck all about the cost of living. How do you think these person will afford to live
Happy I work from home dont miss that horror called the commute to London.
It’s the CEO economy. By that I mean that the government are running the country to maximise profits for the higher ups. Sack staff or lower wages?…better for the business…give that CEO a bonus!!
We don’t have to support it. We don’t have to like it. It is, in fact, jolly inconvenient.
Do it anyway though. More power to you if you can actually strike and get what you want out of it.
It’s only a matter of time before the cost of automating the whole thing becomes viable, so get out of it what you can.
People gush over billionaires but when their own try and better themselves….
Tories lecturing everybody else on wage rises is mind bogglingly tone deaf.
I will ALWAYS support strike action no matter the inconvenience. Rail, tube, bins, etc. Unions and strikes are a vital way for workers to reduce how much they’re getting fucked over by employers.
Solidarity ✊ I work maintenance for NWR. Nobody I have spoken to is striking for more money. The pay is pretty good. It’s job losses and huge changes to terms & conditions that’s the issue. We can suck up pay freezes if we need to because a pay rise but no job is pretty useless! In my department we have had contractors backfilling essential roles for about 6yrs, we’re still understaffed. We have to cancel work when more than 2 people are on leave at the same time if nobody comes in on overtime. I actually think stopping overtime would cripple the railway much more than all out strikes, definitely in maintenance. I already work permanent nights voluntarily because the inspections I do require track access & we can’t get any on the mainline where I work except between midnight & around 5am. That isn’t guaranteed either. It’s laughable they talk about contractors covering work, not enough of them that are skilled either. Network Rail pay around £25ph for a basic contractor who earns about £11ph. Same job but direct labour is £14ph Obviously more skilled the higher both rates. I work all Bank Holidays except Xmas for no extra & I’m on 24hr call out for 1 week in 4. Worked all throughout the pandemic, busier than ever due to less trains running. Now we basically get told we’re disposable. I genuinely love the job but the government are using us. They need a distraction. They want to run us down, run pay down, reduce jobs & then when the new GBR Rail comes into force they’ll do the same as P&O fire us and offer us ‘opportunities’ for this new company at probably 20/25% less pay.
‘and the public must support it’, must I? I’ll be the judge of what I support and what I don’t thank you.
I’m a driver for Merseyrail, we can’t run the trains on these days due to signalling. Our company is already getting abuse, “greedy drivers and guards wanting more money” all that nonsense. Absolute morons.
If you work for a living and you’re in this thread shitting on unions, take a minute and ask yourself why you’re siding with your multi-millionaire bosses who treat you like shit and pay you far less than you are worth over people like yourself who know what they’re worth and refuse to accept less.
If we’re fighting amongst ourselves, we’re not fighting the real enemy.
All in the name of larger profits for greedy shareholders.
That’s why the Tories privatised the railways in the first place.
They don’t give a fuck if the trains are shit and expensive since they’ll be traveling first class on expenses.
35 comments
Happier safe workers mean better service to the public
More people will stay and wanna work industry
It is also people’s right to fight for better pay and work conditions I will always support people wanting to strike
I work in public sector and a lot of workers can’t strike. we losing staff like crazy, work conditions are getting worse and pay awful
All we want is job security and a fair pay rise. 2% isn’t reasonable. 2500 job losses isn’t reasonable. Changes to contracts taking all the lower grades into s pool ensuring they have neither the skills nor the experience to step up when a job becomes available isn’t reasonable.
They claim it’s not going to effect safety. We don’t have enough staff as it is less is going to make things worse.
Having no one be able to step into a more demanding roll is going to make everyone worse off.
They claim they need to save money but refuse to look at the absolute insane amount they pay for things. Head lamps you can buy in places like go out doors for 30 quid are costing 90 for the exact same model.
Telephones that last a month costing 300 quid.
4 contractors to do the job of one man.
But nah can’t look at that gotta cut staffing instead.
This is the first time we’ve been on strike since 94.
Every single time the British public by and large will join the side of the businesses and the polluters. They don’t care about worker safety, they don’t care about fair wages, they don’t care about anything but zero disruptions to their day, if a worker has to die every day to get it that is fine with them, if it destroys the planet with pollution they are also fine with that too.
Saying I must support something makes me far more likely to not support it.
More power to them quite frankly. I’m seeing an awful lot of anti union sentiment on here relating mostly to “they’re just trying to enrich themselves” and “but it inconveniences me and my job”.
Both have the same solution, create or join your own bloody union! If you were in a union you could also take action to enrich yourself instead of whining that other people are being proactive, and if you were in a union your boss would have less power to give you shit for being late for reasons entirely beyond your control. Your wage has been suppressed for literally decades and if it had kept up with inflation since the 70s you would have nearer twice the salary you do now. Did unions do that? No, they didn’t.
I get that it’s difficult to change your mind on this sort of thing especially when the running narrative is “unions are bad, strikes make my life grind to a halt, they’re just greedy mafioso types holding us hostage” but how do you think the 2500 train drivers slated for the sack feel? I guarantee that if your job was about to be cut loose by some fat pocketed government-briber you’d be singing a different tune, especially if a union decided “no, we’re going to fight to keep you employed, and even try to get a pay rise for you too”.
A rising tide floats all ships.
Yep, they need the public to support them, they are not just striking for them selves, they are striking for everyone who deserves a higher wage.
I had a work trip planned to London that I didn’t especially want to do. The strike has meant I have an excuse not to go. Fab!
Rail bosses gave themselves a huge bonus.
Workers did not get any of this, and frozen pay
Now if you get told you can’t have increased pay, but your boss get a few million extra.. I feel its right to go on strike.
Especially after the government telling us not to ask for payrises due to fears of the price rise pay thing.
This should be called a Network Rail strike rather than the union that the members are signed up to. Just like when there are Tube strikes everyone says Tube strikes not RMT strikes. With different groups of workers signed up to RMT, this week “RMT strike” could be referring to 2 different strikes.
Plus RMT has bad rep with some people, mainly in London, so saying support RMT instead of the workers wont do wonders there.
Can’t think of other strikes being referred to as the name of the union tbh. Like when Tesco workers strike it’s not a Unite strike, its a Tesco strike.
All Hail. Hopefully the rest of the working population gets organised aswell. We’re being squeezed to hard.
I never understand why this is such a political thing.
People have a right to withdraw their labour. Sometimes that’s a good idea. Sometimes it isn’t. But ultimately it’s between employees and the company.
I don’t have to support a strike. I don’t have to condemn it. But whatever I do, it’s basically irrelevant because it’s none of my business.
I haven’t had a pay raise in 10 years. But I still support this 100% because of the trickle-down effect. If the unions are destroyed, we’re all fucked.
100%. Good luck to the strikers. If the public are angry they should lay the blame where it belongs: the corporations who won’t negotiate properly until a strike forces them to.
Solidarity with all the workers
Hopefully they manage to automate it and find most of the overpaid bastards redundant.
More power to them to take the gamble, but I’m fed up of every other fucking day having the tube on strike because they don’t make 70 grand for sitting there to press a button incase of emergency and open the doors, because they know that they can hold all of london to ransom, and I bet its the same up and down the country.
We are going into a deep recession, there will be no public support for strikes over pay rises. There are going to be job losses across most of the economy soon.
Stop fighting your fellow worker and realise the problem are those in positions of power trying to distract you and pull your strings.
**We need class war, not culture war.**
I’ve already seen the ‘the public will suffer’ and ‘patients are having to cancel surgery’ drama pieces on places like the S*n.
All designed to get people angry at strikers, when we all know it’s the large companies that are forcing unions’ hands and we should be joined together against their practices.
We get constantly told by media pieces to essentially punch down the pecking order while the twats on top bet on who’s going to get KO’d first.
Strike for the week after as well and I will support it. Might mean I can get out of having to go into the office for half a week, which means staying in a hotel because the office is so far to get to.
Well yeah strikes are good for workers with out them companies would he doing what they do in China
The BBC’s reporting of this hasn’t helped the public attitude to the strike.
Calling it a ‘walkout’ and vox pops of school kids saying ‘i don’t know how I’ll get to school’.
I just want to add to this discussion that for the RMT this strike **has** to happen, it’s 2,500 people losing their job. There is no way that the union can not fight this to the end. The person making this strike happen is Grant Shapps, the job cuts weren’t negotiated, they are being imposed unilaterally. These cuts aren’t the result of some careful analysis, they’re based on the assumption that other people will work overtime to make up the difference at lower cost. Grant Shapps wants to make the railway cheaper (and don’t be under any delusion that any savings would be passed down to those buying tickets) to score political points for his own career interests. Like every other industry gutted by the Tories this is about cutting from the public budget to give tax breaks to the rich. **Grant Shapps is causing this, not the workers and not the union.**
Work for a rail line for that pay
You do know it, workers, all up and down the pay scale are striking not just top-paid workers
With fuel, rent, and food rising they will need a pay rise to cope with the cost of living. The media like making songs and dances about top people pay and they still striking. But the majority of strikers will be on lower-pay brands
The government doing fuck all about the cost of living. How do you think these person will afford to live
Happy I work from home dont miss that horror called the commute to London.
It’s the CEO economy. By that I mean that the government are running the country to maximise profits for the higher ups. Sack staff or lower wages?…better for the business…give that CEO a bonus!!
We don’t have to support it. We don’t have to like it. It is, in fact, jolly inconvenient.
Do it anyway though. More power to you if you can actually strike and get what you want out of it.
It’s only a matter of time before the cost of automating the whole thing becomes viable, so get out of it what you can.
People gush over billionaires but when their own try and better themselves….
Tories lecturing everybody else on wage rises is mind bogglingly tone deaf.
I will ALWAYS support strike action no matter the inconvenience. Rail, tube, bins, etc. Unions and strikes are a vital way for workers to reduce how much they’re getting fucked over by employers.
Solidarity ✊ I work maintenance for NWR. Nobody I have spoken to is striking for more money. The pay is pretty good. It’s job losses and huge changes to terms & conditions that’s the issue. We can suck up pay freezes if we need to because a pay rise but no job is pretty useless! In my department we have had contractors backfilling essential roles for about 6yrs, we’re still understaffed. We have to cancel work when more than 2 people are on leave at the same time if nobody comes in on overtime. I actually think stopping overtime would cripple the railway much more than all out strikes, definitely in maintenance. I already work permanent nights voluntarily because the inspections I do require track access & we can’t get any on the mainline where I work except between midnight & around 5am. That isn’t guaranteed either. It’s laughable they talk about contractors covering work, not enough of them that are skilled either. Network Rail pay around £25ph for a basic contractor who earns about £11ph. Same job but direct labour is £14ph Obviously more skilled the higher both rates. I work all Bank Holidays except Xmas for no extra & I’m on 24hr call out for 1 week in 4. Worked all throughout the pandemic, busier than ever due to less trains running. Now we basically get told we’re disposable. I genuinely love the job but the government are using us. They need a distraction. They want to run us down, run pay down, reduce jobs & then when the new GBR Rail comes into force they’ll do the same as P&O fire us and offer us ‘opportunities’ for this new company at probably 20/25% less pay.
‘and the public must support it’, must I? I’ll be the judge of what I support and what I don’t thank you.
I’m a driver for Merseyrail, we can’t run the trains on these days due to signalling. Our company is already getting abuse, “greedy drivers and guards wanting more money” all that nonsense. Absolute morons.
If you work for a living and you’re in this thread shitting on unions, take a minute and ask yourself why you’re siding with your multi-millionaire bosses who treat you like shit and pay you far less than you are worth over people like yourself who know what they’re worth and refuse to accept less.
If we’re fighting amongst ourselves, we’re not fighting the real enemy.
All in the name of larger profits for greedy shareholders.
That’s why the Tories privatised the railways in the first place.
They don’t give a fuck if the trains are shit and expensive since they’ll be traveling first class on expenses.
Britain is a scab nation now, that’s the reality.