Be Excellent To Each Other

Why isn't there a button on every level crossing that immediately signals all trains in the area to stop? Or is there one? There should be one.

Same union though, guy - and you can bet they would have tub-thumped to get the DLR drivers parity of pay for all sorts of genuine, non-money grubbing reasons.

Air traffic controllers earn £60k in this country. That's mental. Not quite as mental as the average £300k they get in Spain, but still.

FEEX

Twats would press it?

Wouldn't have helped in this case anyway by the sounds of it

I guarantee you they're not classed or paid as tube drivers. Which is why the DLR still runs when there's a tube strike.

Tube drivers are part of the rail union, aren't they? Tube drivers, DLR, train drivers, all the same union?

Different job though.

And surely the DLR runs during the strike because the computer isn't a union member.

No, it's because it's a tube driver's strike. And they aren't tube drivers. Platform staff are part of the same union, but they didn't strike. Because they aren't tube drivers. DLR 'operators' are not tube drivers.

So what? Tube driving and train driving are different jobs, but they're still part of the same union. And christ, the CWU has members from across enough different jobs. It's not all posties. Same union != same job.

What's the union got to do with anything? They do a different job, so they're not paid the same wage.

Please read my first post.Because I woudl bet that the union *would* see it as the same job, and woul dhave got behind the DLR drivers to get paid near to what Tube drivers are paid.

Shall we see if we can google up starting salaries?

viewtopic.php?p=1273#p1273 ?

Yes. I'm hungry.

Right. But the union doesn't see it as the same job, because when the TUBE DRIVERS go on strike, the DLR OPERATORS don't. So it's not the same job. So they're not paid the same wage. FFS.

That may be by choice of the DLR operators, of course. Our posties didn't go on strike before christmas.

OpenTTD is the new lunch-time game, and someone mused "Why aren't all trains computer controlled?". I thought I'd ask here because a) you're all opinionated swines b) Metal Angel is some form of train-man.



"Train Driver Hate Pod" -- sounds like something you climb into whenever you find yourself in a rage that you've been sat in a station for 5 minutes because the clown train driver left his keys in a door and can't remember which one.





EXCELLENT JOKE.

Right. I'll be there in a few hours to stab you in the face.

Tube Drivers are called 'Drivers'. They drive the train. Their starting salary in 2007 was £40k, assuming they were happy to do early and late shifts in their rotation.
DLR Drivers are called 'Passenger Service Agents', and are able to take control of the train in an emergency. They also control the doors, even though there is no need for them to do so. I can't find their starting salary.

I want to be a robot train driver.

AHA! See? They're hiding their mahoosive salaries that they earn for doing feck all.

You can be a robotic passenger service agent.

Like in "Serenity".

Isn't being an air traffic controller supposed to be incredibly stressful, though? That's what I'd heard, anyway. I should imagine messing up in that job could be really rather costly. It's probably quite difficult, like that annoying DS game* except 4realz ....

*the name escapes me, even though it was probably something really obvious.

Yeah, air-traffic control is actually pretty intense. I remember getting to the final (after many, many tests!) interview stage for it a few years ago once I'd completed my degree as a mature student. I always recall being entertained that one of the criteria in the medicals was based around how often you get diarrhea - if you get it too often you can't be a controller! Can't have you having an emergency case of the squirts while guiding a jumbo through fog

Being a social worker or a teacher's incredibly stressful too, but they don't get that much.

Granted, an ATC could kill a lot of people if they royally fuck up, but so could a train driver. Or a nuclear submarine driver. Or a man who makes flesheating viruses for research purposes. Or the man in charge of not pressing the self-destruct button at Sellafield.

So what metric are you using to determine that they aren't worth £60k?

Only that teachers and social workers are paid less. Ideally they should all be paid more.

I'm assuming here that ATC's are still public sector employees, of course. The private sector can pay whatever the hell they like with whatever differential between job roles that they fancy.

The public sector, however, should be more equitable in how it distributes its finite resources across the various job roles it is required to finance. Chief Execs of primary care trusts, for instance, are grossly overpaid. As are many senior civil servants. Cut their pay and give it to teachers, nurses, care workers etc, and raise the average public sector wage.

Yeah. If Flight Control on the iPhone is anything to go by, I wouldn't be able to land more than about seventy planes before having one crash and burn.

Well, indeed. But people aren't paid on the basis of the responsibility they have, they're paid on the basis of how easy it is to attract people with the right skills into the job.

I don't think ATC is public sector is it? I'm not sure but there's some factoids here:

http://www.prospects.ac.uk/p/types_of_j ... salary.jsp

and here:

http://www.nats.co.uk/

See edit.

As the Tories are rightly pointing out, it's difficult to attract the best people into teaching, for example, but teachers aren't paid £60k to get round that.

Raise pay across the board for "average" pay public sector employees, and lower it at the top end. I've met senior civil servants and senior NHS execs, and they often couldn't think their way out of a paper bag. The inflated salaries aren't attracting the right skills, so we may as well lower it and use it to fund an across the board increase.

And I bet it's pretty easy to attract people to air traaffic controlling notwithstanding the pay - that's one excellent job to use in a chat up line. And we've all seen Pushing Tin, right?

Ah, fair enough then. I thought they'd only part privatised the NATS, and it was still basically tax-payer funded.

I was going to start a thread about this. Well reminded.

Would it make much of a difference? Halve the pay of the PCT Chief Exec, and then spread that among all the nurses and hospital staff in that PCT. They'd probably get about an extra £20 pa more, wouldn't they?

Quite. It'll mostly attract MD types, who are generally highly (personally) ambitious, which means greedy, bluffing, risk-taking and short-term thinkers.

There's also the rest of the PCT management, though, which could truth be trimmed on headcount as well as salary, which would also save the associated support costs.

Then add in all the quangos as well...

Even if they were public sector employees there are far fewer air traffic controllers than there are teachers and crucially the costs are passed on to the airlines. I can see what you're saying but I think ATC is a terrible example to use.

Those bloody ATCs, coming over here and pushing our planes around.

No, I agree it's a bad example on quantity, but the principle is sound.

I'm not especially convinced by your maths, comrade.

There are meeeeeellions of pounds to be saved simply if the government scrapped a lot of unnecessary quangos, which are basically retirement posts for senior civil servants and assorted twats.

There are also a lot of overpaid senior people in many public sector organisations (and remember things like the NDA, the FSA and so on are public sector organisations, with big senior teams being overpaid). There are many millions to be redistributed if one was so minded.

There are 400,000 nurses alone in the UK. If you want them to get them (say) another £5k pa each, you need to find an extra 2 billion. And that's just the nurses.

The 'bonus tax' payment from Goldman Sachs alone is half of that.

That's brilliant Are they going to pay it?

Yup. Their response was "Oh, OK. If you want".

Even though they are a non-UK firm and received no bailout money from any government.

Depending on how much the nurses earn, they may have to take a pay cut to bring up the pay for, say, cleaners.

There will be winners and losers under this plan, true.

I say Fire Train drivers should be paid even more than lawyers. It's an important job.

If they're private sector employees I agree, and I want in!

You think nurses ought to be paid less? Yikes.

Social workers get paid more than you'd think. My wife's a highly qualified, trained and experienced nurse working in crisis teams (at management level), and she earns less than the attached social worker, who has eff all qualifications and is essentially crap at her job.