Its a real shame its come to this. Schapps needs to pull his head out of his arse, stop lying in front of cameras and lift the embargoes he’s placed on the tocs negotiating with their staff. So many people buying his bs its untrue
All down to the Tories refusing to allow the companies to offer anything more than they already have.
2500 jobs at network rail is huge. Pool workers is a terrible idea. Dreamed up by some twat thats never had boots on the ground experience. All it’s going to do is lead to more burnt out staff as they will have even less support than they currently do.
5% no joblosses and the network rail side of the strike will be called off the morn. None of this 0.5% cash bonus shit that’s flat out insulting.
How dare they demand better pay and working conditions! How absolutely reasonable of them!!!!
Blame the Government.
Blame the management.
Stand in solidarity with the workers who are being told that they can choose between massive pay cuts, involuntary redundancies, slipping safety standards on the railways or striking.
Flairs are back in so let’s have an economy like the 70’s
Smegging madness
They’re not paying enough to employ the workers who run the train, so the trains aren’t running.
I’m sorry but if the train companies wouldn’t pay enough money for the diesel used in the trains, the trains wouldn’t run.
And we’ll all forget about it next week, because somehow the tory’s are immune to criticism.
How many horrendous scandals are they up to within the last few years now?
Why don’t the staff simply carry on running all scheduled trains, BUT DO NOT CHARGE CUSTOMERS. The company gets hit where it hurts and the workers would have public support
Ah well 4 days off for me then I guess. Not bad weather for it eh?
Andrew Roden, deputy editor of Modern Railway magazine speaking on BBC5live today:
“If you are a train company and you need to change something like an engine on a diesel train, you have to get permission from the government, through the department of transport, to get the funding to do that. So there is no way anywhere where the train companies can negotiate freely with the unions and find out what is possible unless the government gives them permission to do so. The government is absolutely in control of the railways and if the government wanted to avert this dispute, if it wanted to give the train companies freedom to negotiate it could have done so a very, very long time ago.
Q: Grant Shapps said there is effectively an existential threat to the railways because people have changed how they are using them… people are staying at home, numbers indicate more use at weekends. Is it such a fundamental threat to the railways as he points out?
AR: Only because the government says it is. The government wants to cut funding to the national rail network by about 2 billion quid, huge cuts planned for TFL. He doesn’t have to do this. Now passenger numbers are recovering, it is mostly leisure though, but they are recovering. We need a strong rail network to get people out of their cars, we need rail to carry more freight. If it’s an existential crisis it’s one that the government decided exists. Not one that necessarily has to be the case. It’s a political calculation.
Q: what about his [Shapps] point in the commons today about the inflexibility of the system, and he quoted the voluntary working on a Sunday that’s been in place since 1919?
AR: Yeah, there’s certainly working practices that if you were starting an organisation with a blank sheet of paper you wouldn’t even think of looking at. There are certainly technological developments using technology to measure the state of the infrastructure, that are going to require fewer workers on the track, which from a safety point of view is a good thing because the fewer workers you have on the track the less chances you have of anyone getting hit. This is not black and white on either side, there are certainly working practices that need to change.
Equally what we are hearing from rail staff is that they are desperately concerned about their job security. As a very local example from here, down in far west Cornwall, 3 single boxes are going to close with some resignslling. If I were a signaller, I’d be terrified about what was going to happen to my job. There are legitimate concerns from the unions, there’s a legitimate drive from the government and parts of the rail industry to modernise some working practices. What hasn’t happened, as far as we are told, is that the rail companies and network rail have been given the freedom to actually negotiate meaningfully and come up with something that works.
Q: So it’s one thing to have a pay dispute, you are arguing that the government are holding the levers, but what about modernisation? Is that something in your eyes that the government would determine or would it be down to network rail themselves to make those decisions?
AR: If you take modernisation in the round looking at network rail and the train companies, yesh there’s loads of things that you can do that can run the railways more efficiently… new signalling system…trains are becoming smarter, maintenance is becoming smarter, you are able to identify the state of a bridge or a viaduct, or an overhead line mass… so you can intervene when it’s needed rather than taking an educated guess or doing things on a time based basis.
These things are happening now and they are going to continue to keep happening and the pace of technological change will accelerate. I don’t think there’s any question about that, it’s how you manage it. And if there are going to be reductions in the workforce and I think there probably will be overtime, how you do that fairly.
Q: Yeah and Mick Lynch referred to that today, that he’s had no guaranties that there would be any forced or compulsory redundancies, which was one of the issues today as well as the all the pay.
It should be far more acceptable to not pick a side in matters like this. It’s a labour dispute, both sides are negotiating in their own best interests, they’re at an impasse so they’re taking action to try to force a resolution. Every side is acting within their rights.
Good luck to them.
Fuck the Tories and the Tory voters, fuck the lot of you.
I wish we had the RMT union. Ours (the FDA) never goes on strike no matter what they do to us. I can’t honestly remember a period when the RMT were *not* threatening strike action.
Good on them
This entire issue is a top-level strategy from high up in our government. They have chosen this dispute because they think they can foster an anti-union sentiment in the general population and deter other groups from taking similar action.
I would argue other groups have better reasoning for strike action than those in the Railway industry, and I hope their respective unions hold their nerve whatever the outcome here. No union should be accepting a sub 5% rise for their members.
go geddem boys 🤧
Seems like a goverment plan to let it go ahead not help so they can use it as some excuse and attack on, well anyone else that is negative about them
I personally am going to be massivly inconvinced by the strike action.
But I stand fully in support of the strikers.
Blame this incompetent government and their piss poor management!
Wonder what BS response the Tory wankers will put out about this.
>Few opinion polls that claim to detect a shift in public attitudes merit the ubiquitous label “landmark research”, but here’s one that does. The Legatum Institute, a thinktank, and Populus have found levels of support for nationalising large parts of the economy that would have been hard to believe a few years ago.
Company makes hundreds of millions in profits a year yet can’t adequately compensate the very people who run the day-to-day operations. Solidarity to the workers
Tory government + Johnson = total lash up.
Well fuck. I’m supposed to fly back to Toronto from Gatwick on Saturday. Will some trains still be running?
Found out that the well paid train drivers belong to a separate union that isn’t striking but the government have lumped them all together to make it seem like the drivers are being greedy
Should be legal for them to strike by still working yet not charging — that would impact the wealthy while not hurting everyday people. Complain about the overzealous striking restrictions before you complain about those on strike.
Honestly what talks could possibly work. Just throw the entire government and for profit TFL system in the bin where it belongs. I’m happy for these strikes with the Tories and Inflation the UK will turn into a 3rd world country which it already is several ways
How is it that that fat turd of a so called in- house voted ” Prime Minister” can still be allowed to “govern” the country of Britain.
Rich self serving hypocrites…and the sheeple keep them in power.
The thing that has not been mentioned is that most of the railway companies are franchised by the Germans, Spanish and Italian railway companies.
The UK railways are making plenty of money, especially the commuter routes into London, but these foreign companies take the majority of profits in order to subsidise their own railway networks back home.
Obviously, with covid and WFH this has affected the market, but nonetheless our railways are being used as a cash cow for foreign railways.
That is why they don’t want to pay more and of course as these companies have paid for an expensive franchise to the government, they don’t want to make the companies look less attractive so support the hardline of no extra money for workers.
More than 40,000 British Railways workers took part in the protest, and 13 train operators were disarmed. The British Minister of Transport called the protest a complete misery.
The Union of Railway, Maritime and Transportation Employees (RMT) has called for a 7% increase in staff salaries, which is higher than what is proposed by employers but less than the 9% inflation rate in the country.
Thanks unions, for another pleasant day working in, no sorry, from, definitely working from my garden. That’s another 40 quid in the bank too!
I wonder if the move to work from home and people doing it during covid weakens the powers of these train strikes. Obviously for some it’s still as bad as ever but for others it’s lost it’s power of total disruption
Boris back to the Ukraine for a short city break then?
I was under the impression that the government has been refusing talks, what’s this about “last-ditch” if they never tried to begin with
Fuck all the newspapers and politicians trying to pit the average person against the strikers.
We’re in this together. We all deserve better pay, conditions, and rights.
These elitist cunts wants us to fight against each other instead of them.
“Well, they get paid more than nurses already!”
That’s in an indictment that they’re not paying nurses properly.
Not that they’re paying RMT union workers too much.
In Canada as well, signals and communication staff all went on strike this week for a major rail line. Trains are still running but its only a matter of time before a near miss or accident shuts them down. CBC news reporting further supply chain issues will result. Your rail worker strike in the UK is far more comprehensive and immediate but the effects and outcomes will all be the same, massive supply chain shortages. This is all planned, you government is as equally corrupted as Canada’s by the WEF and if you cannot see the patterns and similarities I pray that God has your back.
Conservative government activity trying to divide the nation. Classic.
I find this thread highly unlikely. This much support for the strikers and hardly anyone against them? I find that really unlikely.
39 comments
Its a real shame its come to this. Schapps needs to pull his head out of his arse, stop lying in front of cameras and lift the embargoes he’s placed on the tocs negotiating with their staff. So many people buying his bs its untrue
All down to the Tories refusing to allow the companies to offer anything more than they already have.
2500 jobs at network rail is huge. Pool workers is a terrible idea. Dreamed up by some twat thats never had boots on the ground experience. All it’s going to do is lead to more burnt out staff as they will have even less support than they currently do.
5% no joblosses and the network rail side of the strike will be called off the morn. None of this 0.5% cash bonus shit that’s flat out insulting.
How dare they demand better pay and working conditions! How absolutely reasonable of them!!!!
Blame the Government.
Blame the management.
Stand in solidarity with the workers who are being told that they can choose between massive pay cuts, involuntary redundancies, slipping safety standards on the railways or striking.
Flairs are back in so let’s have an economy like the 70’s
Smegging madness
They’re not paying enough to employ the workers who run the train, so the trains aren’t running.
I’m sorry but if the train companies wouldn’t pay enough money for the diesel used in the trains, the trains wouldn’t run.
And we’ll all forget about it next week, because somehow the tory’s are immune to criticism.
How many horrendous scandals are they up to within the last few years now?
Why don’t the staff simply carry on running all scheduled trains, BUT DO NOT CHARGE CUSTOMERS. The company gets hit where it hurts and the workers would have public support
Ah well 4 days off for me then I guess. Not bad weather for it eh?
Andrew Roden, deputy editor of Modern Railway magazine speaking on BBC5live today:
“If you are a train company and you need to change something like an engine on a diesel train, you have to get permission from the government, through the department of transport, to get the funding to do that. So there is no way anywhere where the train companies can negotiate freely with the unions and find out what is possible unless the government gives them permission to do so. The government is absolutely in control of the railways and if the government wanted to avert this dispute, if it wanted to give the train companies freedom to negotiate it could have done so a very, very long time ago.
Q: Grant Shapps said there is effectively an existential threat to the railways because people have changed how they are using them… people are staying at home, numbers indicate more use at weekends. Is it such a fundamental threat to the railways as he points out?
AR: Only because the government says it is. The government wants to cut funding to the national rail network by about 2 billion quid, huge cuts planned for TFL. He doesn’t have to do this. Now passenger numbers are recovering, it is mostly leisure though, but they are recovering. We need a strong rail network to get people out of their cars, we need rail to carry more freight. If it’s an existential crisis it’s one that the government decided exists. Not one that necessarily has to be the case. It’s a political calculation.
Q: what about his [Shapps] point in the commons today about the inflexibility of the system, and he quoted the voluntary working on a Sunday that’s been in place since 1919?
AR: Yeah, there’s certainly working practices that if you were starting an organisation with a blank sheet of paper you wouldn’t even think of looking at. There are certainly technological developments using technology to measure the state of the infrastructure, that are going to require fewer workers on the track, which from a safety point of view is a good thing because the fewer workers you have on the track the less chances you have of anyone getting hit. This is not black and white on either side, there are certainly working practices that need to change.
Equally what we are hearing from rail staff is that they are desperately concerned about their job security. As a very local example from here, down in far west Cornwall, 3 single boxes are going to close with some resignslling. If I were a signaller, I’d be terrified about what was going to happen to my job. There are legitimate concerns from the unions, there’s a legitimate drive from the government and parts of the rail industry to modernise some working practices. What hasn’t happened, as far as we are told, is that the rail companies and network rail have been given the freedom to actually negotiate meaningfully and come up with something that works.
Q: So it’s one thing to have a pay dispute, you are arguing that the government are holding the levers, but what about modernisation? Is that something in your eyes that the government would determine or would it be down to network rail themselves to make those decisions?
AR: If you take modernisation in the round looking at network rail and the train companies, yesh there’s loads of things that you can do that can run the railways more efficiently… new signalling system…trains are becoming smarter, maintenance is becoming smarter, you are able to identify the state of a bridge or a viaduct, or an overhead line mass… so you can intervene when it’s needed rather than taking an educated guess or doing things on a time based basis.
These things are happening now and they are going to continue to keep happening and the pace of technological change will accelerate. I don’t think there’s any question about that, it’s how you manage it. And if there are going to be reductions in the workforce and I think there probably will be overtime, how you do that fairly.
Q: Yeah and Mick Lynch referred to that today, that he’s had no guaranties that there would be any forced or compulsory redundancies, which was one of the issues today as well as the all the pay.
It should be far more acceptable to not pick a side in matters like this. It’s a labour dispute, both sides are negotiating in their own best interests, they’re at an impasse so they’re taking action to try to force a resolution. Every side is acting within their rights.
Good luck to them.
Fuck the Tories and the Tory voters, fuck the lot of you.
I wish we had the RMT union. Ours (the FDA) never goes on strike no matter what they do to us. I can’t honestly remember a period when the RMT were *not* threatening strike action.
Good on them
This entire issue is a top-level strategy from high up in our government. They have chosen this dispute because they think they can foster an anti-union sentiment in the general population and deter other groups from taking similar action.
I would argue other groups have better reasoning for strike action than those in the Railway industry, and I hope their respective unions hold their nerve whatever the outcome here. No union should be accepting a sub 5% rise for their members.
go geddem boys 🤧
Seems like a goverment plan to let it go ahead not help so they can use it as some excuse and attack on, well anyone else that is negative about them
I personally am going to be massivly inconvinced by the strike action.
But I stand fully in support of the strikers.
Blame this incompetent government and their piss poor management!
Wonder what BS response the Tory wankers will put out about this.
>Few opinion polls that claim to detect a shift in public attitudes merit the ubiquitous label “landmark research”, but here’s one that does. The Legatum Institute, a thinktank, and Populus have found levels of support for nationalising large parts of the economy that would have been hard to believe a few years ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/oct/01/jeremy-corbyn-nationalisation-plans-voters-tired-free-markets
Privatise the profits.
Socialise the losses.
Working as intended.
Company makes hundreds of millions in profits a year yet can’t adequately compensate the very people who run the day-to-day operations. Solidarity to the workers
Tory government + Johnson = total lash up.
Well fuck. I’m supposed to fly back to Toronto from Gatwick on Saturday. Will some trains still be running?
Found out that the well paid train drivers belong to a separate union that isn’t striking but the government have lumped them all together to make it seem like the drivers are being greedy
Should be legal for them to strike by still working yet not charging — that would impact the wealthy while not hurting everyday people. Complain about the overzealous striking restrictions before you complain about those on strike.
Honestly what talks could possibly work. Just throw the entire government and for profit TFL system in the bin where it belongs. I’m happy for these strikes with the Tories and Inflation the UK will turn into a 3rd world country which it already is several ways
How is it that that fat turd of a so called in- house voted ” Prime Minister” can still be allowed to “govern” the country of Britain.
Rich self serving hypocrites…and the sheeple keep them in power.
The thing that has not been mentioned is that most of the railway companies are franchised by the Germans, Spanish and Italian railway companies.
The UK railways are making plenty of money, especially the commuter routes into London, but these foreign companies take the majority of profits in order to subsidise their own railway networks back home.
Obviously, with covid and WFH this has affected the market, but nonetheless our railways are being used as a cash cow for foreign railways.
That is why they don’t want to pay more and of course as these companies have paid for an expensive franchise to the government, they don’t want to make the companies look less attractive so support the hardline of no extra money for workers.
More than 40,000 British Railways workers took part in the protest, and 13 train operators were disarmed. The British Minister of Transport called the protest a complete misery.
The Union of Railway, Maritime and Transportation Employees (RMT) has called for a 7% increase in staff salaries, which is higher than what is proposed by employers but less than the 9% inflation rate in the country.
Thanks unions, for another pleasant day working in, no sorry, from, definitely working from my garden. That’s another 40 quid in the bank too!
I wonder if the move to work from home and people doing it during covid weakens the powers of these train strikes. Obviously for some it’s still as bad as ever but for others it’s lost it’s power of total disruption
Boris back to the Ukraine for a short city break then?
I was under the impression that the government has been refusing talks, what’s this about “last-ditch” if they never tried to begin with
Fuck all the newspapers and politicians trying to pit the average person against the strikers.
We’re in this together. We all deserve better pay, conditions, and rights.
These elitist cunts wants us to fight against each other instead of them.
“Well, they get paid more than nurses already!”
That’s in an indictment that they’re not paying nurses properly.
Not that they’re paying RMT union workers too much.
In Canada as well, signals and communication staff all went on strike this week for a major rail line. Trains are still running but its only a matter of time before a near miss or accident shuts them down. CBC news reporting further supply chain issues will result. Your rail worker strike in the UK is far more comprehensive and immediate but the effects and outcomes will all be the same, massive supply chain shortages. This is all planned, you government is as equally corrupted as Canada’s by the WEF and if you cannot see the patterns and similarities I pray that God has your back.
Conservative government activity trying to divide the nation. Classic.
I find this thread highly unlikely. This much support for the strikers and hardly anyone against them? I find that really unlikely.
Bring in the Army.
Then sack them all