Be Excellent To Each Other

I hope they're not planning to leave from St. Pancras

Special RMT only train, to move "essential personnel" around the network...

Yowzer.

Statement from LU seems like they've been reasonable, but gonna look for an RMT one to see what they're saying.

"RMT declares new tube strike dates as London Underground wreck talks and confirm even worse cuts to jobs, services and safety.

TUBE UNION RMT today confirmed five days of all-out strike action across London Underground as long-running talks hosted by ACAS, aimed at settling the dispute over cuts to jobs, ticket offices and safety, were wrecked by a combination of management intransigence and the introduction of additional measures that actually worsened the original toxic package. It has also been made crystal clear to the union that this is just a first tranche of cuts with even harder attacks being lined up for the near future."

From Grim...'s link.

I think that is a fair and unbiased assessment from the RMT

Amusing. LU says no mandatory redundancy at all, though they only promise to 'try' to not reduce pay and hours for staff, which is pretty much tantamount to admitting someone is gonna get screwed over.

Does this clash with a quiz at all?

Yeah, I think so.

FFS!

This thread will do.

Unison workers (which is local government, education, NHS, etc) is going on strike over pay, apparently.

Doors it stop me getting to the quiz?

Windows it matter?

Gazebo.

Don't get yourself in a catflap about it.

More tube strikes for lucky old London.

Two in a week, this time.

That's nothing to make skylight of.

We're still doing that, right?

I've cancelled the holiday planned for that week now. No point using holiday to be out of the office on an effective day off.

Don't know if there's any truth in it but London mates all complaining that tube drivers effectively get paid £60k/annum for pressing a button that says "MIND THE GAP" for all intents and purposes, everything else is done by the train? Dunno if this is an urban myth, but whatever's the case, much damage no doubt being done to the economy and therefore everyone else's prospects over this?

Good old RMT...

As a complete aside, I think it's shocking how much they charge on the tube - ridiculously expensive imo.

There's certainly a lot of it done by the train. Today I learned that the Central Line and Northen Line are both automated during the week, with the drivers pressing the "close door" button and dealing with any problems that arise. At the weekends they're not automated to make sure the drivers don't forget how to drive!

It should be noted that it's not the drivers striking, though, it's most of the staff.

I went to Copenhagen a few years ago and there were no drivers on their tube, you could sit at the front of the train and look out of a Window.

Time they started to accepted that many of them can be and will be replaced by computers, once that starts they will be fucked as computers don't tend to strike and they know it so they are milking it for all they can.

The DLR doesn't have drivers either. And its the most reliable train line in London, at one point certainly in Europe, but not sure if that holds true still.

And just for cavey, its wholly run by a private operator with no significant TFL involvement, other than fares.

Though the DLR still has to have a 'conductor' on board at all time.

I still support the strikes. The breathtaking arrogance with which Johnson and the TFL people have tried to push through the night tube, to a timetable set for the Rugby World Cup (with no stadiums near tube stations) is insane. At this point, pretty much everyone other than Boris wants the entire plan scrapped.

FTFY

Living 5 minutes walk from a Northern Line stop, I might disagree with you there.




Who am I kidding, I'll still just take a cab.

I should have added, 'of those involved in the bringing about of the Night Tube'.

Of those, the striking workers have said as much all over the place. Mick Davey cannot be read as speaking for all the workers, but his reasoning seems largely sound.

TFL have no 'Person With A Big Stick' (aka The Mayor) above them to enforce the action of starting the Night Tube. They have shown precious little interest in discussing the issues with the workers, and should they actually want a resolution you would expect them to make some vague sort of effort.

Added to this you have the background of trying to massively improve a service in an era of austerity, where cuts to staff, benefits and working conditions are making it difficult to even maintain the current levels of service.

It would be infinitely easier for all tube staff, as well as tube management, for the whole thing to just go away.

It might reduce the enormous bonuses of those at the top of the tree, but I can live with that.

I think that's all fairly reasonable arguments to put forward in simple terms, however, there are two objections that I have to the strike.

One is the changes to rosters which are (a) non compulsory, and (b) a brief review of the current first and last trains on the tube lines in question shows that all that would happen is a rather infrequent service for an additional 4-5 hours per day for two days a week. Given that I'd speculate that the person driving the last train to Stratford (for example) doesn't arrive at their destination until 1:11 and then he has to take his train back to the depot, my feeling is that these vast outrages actually only have the potential to stretch their hours by 2-3 hours maximum once every so often. Similarly station workers, who don't slam the doors shut to the station and go home the second the last train passes through. In addition, the unions have repackaged the ticket office arguments back into the reasons for this action.

It all feels (and I haven't paid that much attention) a disproportionate response to the issues in question, and there is a feeling of political objection rather than reason to it by the unions themselves, much like the FBU strikes in 2003 (I think it was 03, I know it was during a cricket world cup). Which - for the record - had the leader of the FBU at one stage turning down an offer that was better than the union had originally balloted for, on the grounds that he now wanted to 'Destroy Tony Blair because of Iraq' instead.

In 2015, the firemen have proper grievances about changes to pensions, which aren't getting significant public traction behind them, largely because the response of the government following the previous strike was to build up private sector resilience plans in the event of future strikes, so that we barely notice them.

My take on this? All-out striking costing the country billions? Over non-compulsory roster changes or whatever? Seriously? This is bloody 2015, not 1978 ffs.

Don't even get me started on the other stuff.

Collective bargaining is important, because it's all that stands between employees and rampant abuses. Am I being paranoid? Is this really a problem in the modern world, or just clinging to the idea of nasty Victorian factory bosses? Well, consider that I work for one of the best firms in the world and I do arguably the hottest job of this decade. An employer that did this: http://m.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/16/s ... ettlement/

The "market" wants me, I should have everything going for me, and I'm still getting screwed around by employers. How much chance, then, does someone with a less fortunate mix of skills than I enjoy have of not being taken advantage of? And if not collective bargaining, who or what will balance the scale?

Edit -- also, billions is hyperbole. No way does a strike cost London that much.

I'm not saying we get rid of collective bargaining, Doc, just the "right to strike" when you're part of an essential public sector infrastructure upon which the rest of the country and economy depends (especially over something so trivial, at least to my eyes).

There are, as you appreciate, plenty of other ways whereby collective bargaining can be very effective in ensuring both sides in a dispute must accept findings of independent arbitration processes and suchlike; the police are not allowed to strike and they seem to get by.

To my mind, it is just absurd that we, as a country, still have to put up with the public sector union bully boy tactics, be it tube & train drivers, teachers educating our kids or whatever, holding us all to ransom; we dare not introduce much safer, cheaper, self-driving trains for fear of causing an entirely selfish, self-interest backlash from the unions, so we must all pretend the technology either doesn't exist, or pay people to sit there to do nowt because "they were there before"? We had enough of that crap in the 70s and early 80s; pretty much ruined our industrial base and broke the whole country; three blokes turning up to change a lightbulb and the whole 'closed shop' pile of shit. Enough!

My "billions" comment was a figure of speech but on the other hand, seriously, how much overall lost productivity caused by these repeated strikes do we think costs the country's economy? It must be huge.

I'd say our company productivity goes up on strike days, as the shit people don't turn up and the useful ones get more work done, but I appreciate that isn't the case right across the board

I'd say if these people are so vital to our economy, and they can indeed cost us billions, why don't we try treating them nicely and see how it turns out? We sure as shit treat 'bankers' et al brilliantly, and they're the ones who fucked the economy up more than a tube driver ever could.

Also, odd choice to put teachers in there with tube drivers. Surely they are of vital importance (as opposed to tube drivers who are only important because of how our archaic infrastructure is set up)?

Strikes "cost" £2,000,000 an hour, apparently.

Show your working

Curio, every time I hear someone having a go about how unreasonable the tube drivers are being, someone on the other side of the political fence always pipes up along the lines of '... well, they're not as bad as the bankers!' Gnnngh, George Galloway did just that on QT a few months back.

Of course they're not as bad as "the bankers", but who the feck *is*? That's hardly a bloody argument or any justification; we can all agree that "the bankers" are, pretty much, the shyster index value of 1.0?

Just because there are those who've done vastly more damage to people's livelihoods doesn't mean that somehow by default, this lot are okay, sorry. I stand by my earlier points re. ludditism, naked self-interest and holding the country to ransom - which I don't think they should be able to do, precisely because their actions have such a knock-on for everyone else. £2million quid an hour? Even if that figure is even remotely accurate, that is nothing short of an outrage; I make that a brand spanking new, state-of-the-art school for every single day they're on strike over their roster arrangements...

As asfish says, get self-driving trains already, just like on loads of other networks around the globe (and the DLR for that matter). Computers don't go on strike or get tired, and we can have a 24-hour service.

As for teachers, well, when they go on strike because there's a centimetre of snow on the ground or whatever, countless numbers of families have to take days off at short notice for childcare and all the rest, the same massive disruption and cost to the economy. I don't think they should be able to do this, nor any other public sector worker, but by the same token there should be other protections such as independent performance and pay reviews which would need to be binding.

On a more general point, and I know we'll not agree on this, but do these people realise the pain, cuts in earnings, benefits etc. that the average private sector worker has had to endure since 2008?

"Proper" self-driving trains aren't going to appear on the tube before 2025, cleverer people than me think.

Also you can't automate the engineers, who actually strike more often than the drivers do. And without the engineers the tube shuts down for safety reasons.

Legit.

Accepted.

But in that case, why do they seem to manage with driverless trains elsewhere? It may well be true, of course, what do I know. But, colour me sceptical I'm afraid.

It's the tunnels, not the trains. There's limited time to work in them, and they're really small, too. I'll see if I can dig up the article.

There's a lot of stuff about the signal and track design for full automation too, I think. To be genuinely completely automated, you either need to design the whole system around that (which the DLR was), or do a fuck ton of retrofitting, which is long and expensive and hard. Until then you need a human in the loop for edge cases and emergencies, even if they only happen once in a blue moon.

Also, again, the drivers barely matter in this, numerically. It's the station staff that make up the bulk of the workers and the bulk of the strikers. And they're difficult to automate away any more than TfL has already done.

Yeah, but the people doing vastly more damage and harm, who have caused the ridiculous 'age of austerity', have the government falling over themselves to help them out, change regulations, and failing to crack down on tax avoidance or reckless gambling with the finances of the country. Then on the other hand you have workers striking over their working conditions getting significantly worse without much in the way of recompense, and suddenly everyone seems to think they're massive shits.

If you had to put them on a scale then maybe you'd have:

'Bankers' 100 shit points
Landed gentry types 95 shit points
Anyone who has ever tried to make a career of being on reality TV 90 shit points
Politicians 85 shit points
High Ranking Clergy 75 shit points (should be higher tbf)
Footballers 50 shit points
...
...
...
...
...
Striking workers 2 shit points

That's all I'm saying re: scale.



Firstly, you do realise that these are real people, who are really quite nice in the main, who work unsociable hours so that we don't have to worry about getting in to the office, who have wives and husbands and children, who worry about being able to meet their mortgage repayments, etc? They're not just some amorphous mass of evil.

And of course they have self-interest! Who doesn't? If your company was going to be liquidated, and it doing so would make some kind of magical net profit to the country of a million quid, of which you would see nothing, but everyone you employ, including yourself, was immediately out of a job... would you take that if given the option to keep it running at a profit? Or would you decide to keep your company going out of naked self-interest?

The £2million an hour is obviously nonsense. Their entire budget for the year is 10 billion, tube receipts will obviously go down, but bus/taxi/bike use goes up. People don't stop eating, drinking, etc.

Likewise, even if the imaginary millions were being wasted, what's to say this government would spend them on schools, given that they have banned councils from building new ones? They'd be more likely to spend it on bombs, kickbacks to bankers, or pensions.

Speaking of pensions... if the government decided to just cut all pensions in half, would that be okay? It'd save a lot of money, and loads of pensioners are well off, own their own homes, etc. It'd allow us to build more schools and they're really just acting out of naked self-interest if the old people don't just accept it, or truck themselves off to Dignitas...



They're feck all use when things go wrong though. Engineers, station staff and conductors are still required, and they go on strike too. Simply automating the tube driving apparatus would not even change this one iota.



Teachers are probably the worst treated sector of the workforce in the entire country, apart from those on workfare, etc. Their jobs, ridiculously hard and underpaid as they are, keep on getting worse and worse as the government introduces more and more red tape and bureaucracy, making their lives really shitty. Most of the people I know who teach do so because they really want to instil learning and education in people, and they understand that education is important. Yet it is treated by the government as a sorry afterthought, since all they have ever known is private education.



Which is literally nothing compared to the cuts levied on the poor, low wage earners, disabled, etc. But that's another argument. I mean, there's plenty of money to sort all this out and give a good deal to all people, but the powers that be want it all tied right at the top, as inequality gets greater and greater every year.

At the end of the day, for me it comes down to this:

When you see someone who gets a better deal than you, do you ask, "I wonder how I can get a better deal?" or do you ask, "How can I bring that person down to getting as poor a deal as me?"

If you think the former, support the strikes. If you think the latter, welcome to Britain 2015; the land where empathy died.

Essentially, we are suffering for being innovative way back when. The underground system is really old. It started in 1863, FFS!

So when other countries can build networks these days they can allow for all sorts of things. We, sadly, have to make do with the fact that everything is underground already, in a massive network of tunnels some of which were built around 80 years before WWII! That's why adding useful aircon, more trains, automated systems, new signals, etc is exceedingly hard on the older lines.

The DLR is almost entirely overground and was built and designed from scratch to be like it is. Even then, it took multiple years of development around the time of the Olympics to simply add an extra carriage to the trains.

Stupid successful industrial revolution!

Also worth noting that the drivers are actually voting not to strike in favour of more talks, since LU has hinted at putting hard limits on night shifts.

The other underground unions are still striking.

So add driverless trains all you want; the drivers are categorically not the problem.

SAUCE - http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015 ... ices-union

That's not what it costs the TFL, meathead. It's the economic cost (apparently).

FTFY

The driver's union is not striking: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015 ... ices-union

You've got to wonder what they will be doing that day, then.

Okay, looks like I stand corrected on the significance of tube drivers as compared to other tube staff in all of this, as well as the difficulties in modding the tube itself to carry wholly driverless trains. In fairness I did concede from the off I knew bugger all about the latter issue, but fair do's.

In terms of the former, the significance of staff generally as compared to drivers, well, I guess the same fundamental criticisms I make stand for them, also (IMO of course); I really can't see how it could be denied that there's huge, union-driven inertia to any change? Even I, as a non-Londoner, remember the furore over manned ticket offices, despite that it's 2015, people have Oyster and contactless credit/debit cards, there are countless ticket machines and all the rest of it. To my mind at least, it's fairly obviously job protectionism on the part of unions, as brought about by the power they're still able to wield in this particular arena, almost uniquely so these days. But anyway.

I would take issue some of the things Curio says in his lengthy, impressive and obviously from the heart post, though, if only on a personal level, for clarification.

The whole 'shit points' thing? Well, doubtless semi tongue in cheek, but even as cynical as I am, I don't think ALL high ranking clergy, politicians etc, rank as orders of magnitude worse/more damaging than perpetually striking tube workers. You know, there are plenty of good, well-meaning politicians and clergy out there.

As for "nice, real people", well, I am not making personal remarks about tube workers, I'm not saying they aren't "real" or "nice"...? I'm sure most of them are, but whether or not someone is "nice" or "real" has little bearing, at least to my mind, as to whether or not there's sufficient moral or other justification for, in effect, holding much of the country to ransom to get what you want, even if that's maintaining a completely artificial status quo unique to your working sphere, whereupon countless millions of other equally nice and real people in the private sector cannot hope or dream to do this, not least because they, as a collective, don't wield such power? (Of course, at one point in the past, many people DID, as a collective, have such powers - it was called the 1970s, and it ended with a rather embarrassing begging bowl trip to the IMF, the first industrialised economy so to do, and everyone's mean standard of living was utterly pitiful as compared to now etc etc)

I am not, of course, blaming people for having selfish, self-interest; I of all people recognise this reality far more readily than most here. I'll stop short of "Greed is Good", but as a Tory, people's drive for self-improvement is an entirely good thing and a clear driver for the economy, it keeps the world revolving.

The thing that really got me scratching my head, though, was this:



I mean seriously Curio, can you imagine someone like me thinking "how can I bring that person down"...? I *love* it when people do well for themselves, genuinely and absolutely, but I'll caveat that by saying, not at the deliberate and unfair, gun-held-to-head expense of other people just as deserving, and not when actions (e.g. striking) seriously affects the ability of said other people to earn their living, and when the costs (£2m/hr of whatever) are ultimately coming out of all their pockets?

I'm not even saying strikes are never justified; if people were dying on the tube because of major health and safety concerns, or if it was some other big issue like that, chances are very much that I'd support it. But, from what I can see, I'm afraid this doesn't fall into such a category.

As for the latter point, that not supporting these strikes effectively makes you an empathy-free psychopath, well I'm sorry mate, I must totally disagree.

Some wag on Twitter suggested that they would have got more sympathy if they'd called it Cecil The Tube Strike.

Well, you've gotta laff.

"Call off the strike or the lion gets it!"