Be Excellent To Each Other

Which part? the £400k mortgage, or the fuck all in London?

Funny you forgot to mention that at the quiz the other month.

The latter.

Remind me where you used to live and where you live now

Both were considerably less than £400,000.

Yes, but what you get in each area is considerably different. My point was that he was hardly going to be moving into a gin-soaked mansion if he moved out of his council house. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he had to downsize if he moved...

The whole Bob Crow/council house thing is a total red herring anyway - if people cannot see the blindingly *obvious* hypocrisy of someone - anyone - staying put in subsidised social housing that's in very short supply, upon which there are long queues of desperate people with no other options trying to get into, on £150k/year, well, that's their problem, frankly.

What we should be discussing is how Bob Crow's union, under his leadership, routinely holds the entire country to ransom, costing it (i.e. all of us, rich and especially poor) billions in lost business revenue through strikes, forcing 'us' to keep paying for *totally outmoded, luddite, unnecessary* jobs & business practices for their members that the rest of us have to pay for?

Makes me laugh; the union helps the thousands of 'working man' members who pay their subscription to them, but very much at the expense of the *millions* who don't. Seen how much the tube costs lately, to pay for absurd, unnecessary, overpaid jobs? (The latest being manned ticket offices - in 2014 - that hardly anyone uses). Who do you think suffers the most, the rich..? Pfft.

David Starkey had it right on QT the other week - Tube drivers could be dummies. George Galloway's predictable retort that '... it's a more meaningful job being responsible for hundreds of people on a train than a banker earning £1 million bonuses' was the usual crass nonsense spewed out by the Left - a fucking pick pocket in Covent Gardens has a more meaningful, useful 'job' than your average banker earning these bonuses, as propped up by the rest of us. This in no way detracts from the fact that the Tube is ridiculously expensive to have to pay for RMT demands with a gun to our heads, and it's the poorest who pay, and suffer the most.

'Working man's hero'.... what about the majority of working men and women in London who DON'T work for London Transport? People like Bob Crow/unions destroyed this country in the 1970s and early 80s. I know, I was there, I saw first hand rail workshops with people blatently sleeping on the job, being told '... it's the unions, son, don't say a fucking word'. Asfish is right, we DO need a strong government to break this union once and for all, so we can all enjoy an efficient, modern transport system with no dead wood/ridiculous 1970s working practices, no-strike agreements in place, reasonable fares and 24-hour operation, like they do in just about every other major world city.

Note the past tense.

I live in Kidbrooke, which has fuck all of use in it, and is just walking distance from where Stephen Lawrence was fatally stabbed. A three bedroom house in the new development by the station costs 800k.

For 400k you can probably get a 2 bedroom flat.

We clearly live in a world where CEOs have huge power. He was an extremely powerful head of a union (which seems quite rare).

In my simplistic understanding, isn't the idea that as you have CEOs with untenable expectations of how much they can maximise profits for their shareholders (at the expense of their staff) versus Union chiefs with untenable ideas of how much they can maximise the living standards of the workforce.

They then argue from their positions and reach a tenable compromise.

If thats the case it is not in the best interests of a union rep to come across as being in any way reasonable - if he wants to do his job well.

So it seems to me he was doing his job well.

(It's all very alien to me. Very little concern for truth)

I'd have to agree with cavey that the unions have behaved in ways that did their cause no good at all, especially in the 70s and 80s. However, I can't but help think that low paid workers are increasingly being treated as sub-human scum, there to be pretty much abused. All this zero hours bullshit has to stop for example. If you want to employ someone then you should recognise that carries with it a responsibility.

But now it seems that any expectations people might have towards getting decent treatment from their employers are dwindling as their wages and rights disappear in a race to the bottom to compete with China etc, meanwhile all the money is indisputably filtering upwards. I don't see how this trend can be bucked as long as anyone who thinks it should or could be any different is dismissed as some feckless lazy cunt who just wants to stand in the way of progress.

As Lave said it needs someone fighting both corners, however money talks and the little guy has had his day.

This post is so bang on with my own sentiments that I think I'll just leave it there.

Who am I kidding. No I won't. He earned my enmity when he joined the 'burn in hell' Thatcher bandwagon, like every other small-minded 'working-class' cunt who, for some reason, believe the government should forever hold up failing industries to stop people losing jobs, or otherwise pay people more money than their worth, because otherwise the world is somehow unspeakably unfair.

I don't live in London, and have never been affected by a tube strike, but the very notion of these blackmailing bastards pissed me off from afar. Jobs that not only require little skill, they require no skill given that the average tube driver sits there and acts as a backup in the unlikely event the automated system doesn't work. £50k a year, extra holidays, holiday pay? Fuck off..

It was money-grabbing greed, made possible because of the monopoly the tube has over London's transport network. Working class unionists spend most of their lives harking from pedestals about how terribly unfair the world is, and how terribly amoral the well-off are, with their high-class education and nice houses. How dare they! Whereas in reality people are all the same, and will scrounge and grab as much as they can whenever opportunity allows them. You've never heard of a noble working-class tube driver turning down all of the extra benefit because they were taking a moral stance on how their pay was out of disproportion to the difficulty of their job have you? Of course not. Everyone takes whatever they can get, at the expense of anyone they can, and they are easily convinced that not only is this acceptable, it's their absolute RIGHT, and anything less is them getting a bad deal.

Bob Crow exemplified this morally-bankrupt entitled mindset, to argue for 'rights' that are far above most other workers in most other sectors of society, and yet still he wanted more. The fat fuck doubtlessly died from stuffing his fat greedy gob with all kinds of shit until he died. He won't be missed here.

I want your babies, EBG.

I totally agree about the zero hours thing being properly shit. Is that especially wide-spread, though? I can't see that anyone would ever enter into a contract like that (unless they were told big lies about the expected number of hours).

583k signed up to them last year apparently.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014 ... -contracts

Are you trying to get him to change his mind?

Science will one day make this possible


There's plenty of genuine disadvantage, and this is one example. There's also a rise in self-employment, where employers basically make people like cleaners act as self-employed agents to avoid having to pay them a variety of benefits.

For these people, there needs to be some law-tightening to stop this kind of pseudo-employment. I'm not entirely sure how that works, as I'm sure there's a stipulation that you can't declare yourself self-employed if the majority of all your work is always for the same employer. You're in an effective employment relationship without any of the employment law to back you up.

Apples and oranges though and doesn't bear comparison with already high-paid workers demanding more.

Gosh.

It doesn't explain why they would do so, though (although it does use the phrase "forced to sign up", but then doesn't provide any details, so I'm assuming that's just hyperbole).

Not if the science unions force companies to keep paying people to manually add up numbers.

Unless I'm woefully misinformed is it not the case that if you turn down work you lose benefits, even if it is a zero hours contract. That's pretty close to being forced I'd say.

As with any such employment related abuse, people will enter into it because they need the money and are struggling to get any other kind of job. If the job that offer a zero hour contract is the only one available it's not like people have the luxury to refuse it because someone else behind them in the queue would take it and the employers are well aware of that. It would take an entire workforce to go on strike or whatever to have any kind of leverage against it and if you're already in the financial position where you would consider accepting this kind of thing you're hardly likely to be able to afford to go on strike.

It's surprising how many problems in the work are basically due to population. There are just too many people in the world. Problems of unemployment and disparity can only increase, because we don't need as many people employed to service the number of people that exist.

You can't make people stop fucking for love nor money though, so...

Watch this to terrify you about the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umFnrvcS6AQ

I imagine its a case of: Do you want this job? Yes? Then you're on a zero hours contract.

Malc

http://tab.co.uk/2013/09/06/staff-at-ha ... contracts/

In my industry, there are over 180k academic staff on zero-hours and many support staff are being moved over on the justification of covering evenings and weekends without having to pay overtime.

"It's your fault for existing that we're going to treat you like shit." Fuck off.

Only clever people should be allowed to breed. We could mince the poor and feed them as brain food to the gifted kids.

MissKov have has a plan to poison Frost Jacks Cider it will kill off the underclass..

I think this is an accurate prediction.

What happens when chavs breed with chavs for 20 generations?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6057734.stm

If that's the case, then that's fucking shameful.


But they wouldn't make any money, would they?

Give what he said some though before getting your swear on - the population is growing, but technology is replacing people in the jobs they do.

How can unemployment not rise?

Skip to about 13 minutes into that video I posted.

But many poor people are very attractive.

Like me, for exmaple.

And some rich people are ugly. And died yesterday

I can't see much wrong with what he's said. Unless more people = more jobs you have a problem. As it stands technology advancing generally means less jobs.

They do make money, just not a guaranteed amount that can be relied on or is necessarily a living wage; which is entirely the point here.

Sorry Dave, bugbear.

I was in Morrisons yesterday and their checkout signs still say '15 items or less'.

Fewer for quantity, less for value - that's the rule.

Less than a tenner, fewer than 10 pound coins.

It literally makes my head explode!

I'm going to need an expresso to calm down.

You have read this forum before, right?

It's almost like i did it on purpose

Sadly, I used literally correctly
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/defin ... /literally

Really? Do go on.

You will not be surprised to learn that I was moaning about that a couple of weeks ago too. Even the baristas seem to say 'expresso'.

Grim... - were you being formal or informal? That's the critical point.

12 items or less (than that)

It makes sense if you imagine those 2 words have been left off the end.

Malc

Still doesn't work. 12 items or fewer than that. It is always fewer items as you are talking about discrete data.

Still just wrong. It makes perfect sense. But it's wrong.

And is that even a bad thing? We are apes, stuck to a rock, orbiting a speck, in an uninteresting backwater. What we do and how we live is up to us. So you could argue needing less monotonous ape task (jobs) to support the population is a good thing.

I would say a solid aim for our species is to minimize employement and maximize play.

In the industrial revolution we freed ourselves for a day a week. In I think the 1850s we changed that to two. Lets keep going. 4 day weeks. 2 day weeks. Whatever we can get away with. If our only difficulty is an economic system we invented - why not?

This may be one of those areas where language has adapted so that the wrong is now the right and the wrong taken as right only on Internet forums across the world.

Or not. I mean, I'm no language-talking-guy. Anyway, I'm sure that's happened recent with a usage of a word in the dictionary. Yowser, perhaps. I dunno, dunna look at me, gov'nah.

*sigh*

The word brave comes from bravado, which means a false show of bravery. It used to mean 'cowardly'.

Class =/=money. Just look at Jordan.