London Tube strike for 48 hours

[Phage]

Just to stir the pot...
A tube driver starts on £40k gets eight weeks holiday, and has a 30-hour week !!

Just my 0.02.

[j.o.s.h.1408]

Just to stir the pot...
A tube driver starts on £40k gets eight weeks holiday, and has a 30-hour week !!

Just my 0.02.

im going to apply i think

[schmunk]

An awful lot of strikes these days seem to be very badly thought through. Surely the most effective way to achieve something is to try to get the general public onside - but instead most of these recent strikes just seem to be designed to irritate. I know from personal experience that Scotrail's strikes just resulted in more people taking the bus, which means less money for their supposedly neccessary pay rises.

Also, you don't get paid whilst you're striking, so if e.g. you work 200 days per year, and strike for 2 days, you've just lost 1% out of the pay rise you were striking for...

[fezfezed]

40k? I might as well quit uni right now and apply aswell I wont be getting 40k in my first year of work though

[Barrichello]

im going to apply i think

There is reportedly a 2 year waiting list. Surprising that eh

[j.o.s.h.1408]

40k? I might as well quit uni right now and apply aswell I wont be getting 40k in my first year of work though

yes u will if your a train driver o and my mate quit uni and became a train driver lol

[badass]

There is reportedly a 2 year waiting list. Surprising that eh

Sack the lot of the lazy pricks and use that waiting list then!

I really, really hope the whole lot of those striking lazy wasters lose their jobs.

[fezfezed]

The question is though, apparently only 8% of the union voted to strike, so why arent the 92% at work running the trains then?

[j.o.s.h.1408]

The question is though, apparently only 8% of the union voted to strike, so why arent the 92% at work running the trains then?

because their bloody lazy thats why

[kalniel]

The question is though, apparently only 8% of the union voted to strike, so why arent the 92% at work running the trains then?

Because it wouldn't be called a union then. Unions act united, that's what gives them their strength - if a vote to strike is passed, then the idea is that all members strike, to make the action carry some weight.

[schmunk]

Very little problem getting in today - Jubilee and Northern lines are mostly OK.

[sp3n]

had to walk from marylebone to oxford circus yesterday, wasnt so bad
but got the tube this morning, some strike..?

[xavierzzz]

greedy people, i hate em
think of the people who just lost their job in this eco crysis

[TooNice]

I have a naive question: is the employer obliged to keep the staff (i.e. drivers) for as long as they do their jobs? Assuming there is a work contract involved, is there anything stopping the employer for letting some staff to make room for people who would work for less at the end of the contract? I don't take the bus often, but I am sure many do. What is stopping bus drivers from holding the city hostage by going on strike more often? Not to give them any idea, but I'd expect the impact to be fairly severe too - and based on what Rave said before, I do not have the impression that bus drivers are starting at £40,000, yet the main benefit of a bus driver over an underground driver that I can think of is that they get to be outdoor.

[Rave]

What is stopping bus drivers from holding the city hostage by going on strike more often? Not to give them any idea, but I'd expect the impact to be fairly severe too - and based on what Rave said before, I do not have the impression that bus drivers are starting at £40,000, yet the main benefit of a bus driver over an underground driver that I can think of is that they get to be outdoor.

Compared to bus drivers, tube drivers don't know they're born. In my last year of driving I made £32k, and that was with (I'd estimate) at least 20 days overtime during the year (so more than one week in three I worked a six day week). A bus driver's week is certainly not 36 or even 38 hours. There were a few shifts where I got paid the minimum 7h36 a day for 6-7 hours driving, but the vast majority of my weeks were 8h+ of driving; quite a few of the shifts were 'spreadovers' where you turn up to work at ~7am, have a 3h break in the middle of the day, and finish ~6pm. Those weeks paid well, but they were tiring; you had only a couple of hours leisure each day, and drove through both the morning and evening rush hours.

But- making £32k allowed me to rent a much bigger house, and still have far more disposable income than I had as a civil servant making 17k a year. That to me more than compensated for having to get up at 3.30am one week, and then finish at 2am the next.

I do believe that driving a bus is far harder than driving a tube train. Bus drivers have to cope every day with the dangerous/stupid/selfish numpties that seem to make up the majority of car drivers in London. Tube drivers have to stop the train in stations, and once in a blue moon deal with a suicidal nutter chucking themselves in front of their train. Yes, if that happens to you it must be ghastly, but what were you supposed to do? Anticipate it and stop the train? FWIW I had a couple of real heartstoppers with drunks stumbling in front of my bus.

So anyway- tube drivers- bunch of bastards. But....and it's a big but....the RMT doesn't just represent tube drivers. They're open to all employees of London Underground who want to join. I very much doubt that any tube driver is in danger of losing his or her job- there are a set number of trains to run each day, and they need a set number of drivers to drive them. Even if they cut back on the service, a recruitment freeze would surely suffice to bring numbers down. I suspect that Bob Crow, thick headed union thug as he is, has failed to get the message across; I'm pretty sure this strike is about protecting the jobs of station staff, who do a good and important job. They're paid a lot less than drivers, and they're far more exposed to bad behaviour from the punters.

I never went on strike as a bus driver; but we held out for pay rises of 4-5% each year because, at the time, that was the real rate of inflation. It's easy to portray this strike as being about £40k a year tube drivers thinking that they're hard done by, whereas I suspect the truth of the matter is that £40k tube drivers have given up two days pay to show solidarity with the support staff who earn half that but who do a harder job for far less money.