Northern ex-FNW drivers have to work their booked Sundays too...
There are some caveats attached to that ...eg...if a drivers booked Sunday job has changed , it is not considered their job, and dont have to come in for it.
Northern ex-FNW drivers have to work their booked Sundays too...
Some BR grades, (fitters etc) had long included Sunday’s in their rostered working week, paid at an enhanced rate, however train crew & traffic grades didn’t get restructured before BR was broken up .
I believe privatised TOCs that sucessfully incorporated Sunday’s into their working week eg Virgin SWT, did so very early on when wages & growth rates were significantly lower than now, giving the TOC rather more bargaining power than they seemingly have currently.
When DRI (driver restructuring initiative) happened in around 1996 ish. The companies at the time which I think were regional railways northwest and regional railways north east, though it may have been FNW and northern spirit cant quite remember the eastern side started off on I think £22,000 basic with sundays inside the working week and the west side started on £20,000 but with sundays outside the week.Interesting.
So can anyone confirm whether Northern Spirit/ Arriva Trains Northern "bought" Sundays into the working week or whether this was something already inside the working week from Regional Railways North East days?
I'm interested in how this happened (as it wasn't a period where I kept up with railway developments) since I don't remember any disruption/strikes (or threatened strikes) when it happened, but it's been too difficult for subsequent TOCs to harmonise in many (over twenty?) years.
The blunt answer is that I disagree, I think we're at the point now where the only remaining option is to call the unions bluff and go for radical, wholesale change. The lovely thing about strikes is that you don't have to pay people, so no problem hiring in - or even buying in, for a prolonged dispute - fleets of buses to replace train services. I say this as someone who is actively involved in my own trade union, and who has been a rep in the past; the railway is stuck in 1970s industrial relations and Aslef and the RMT are, in my view, part of the problem. The railways aren't public services anymore, they're commercial companies, and the sooner the unions realise that they too need to change with the times the better it will be for the travelling public.
I don't minimise the pain that will be experienced by some railway staff who might earn less, or have to work longer hours, under poorer conditions, but that's the world we live in and which, peculiarly perhaps, we call progress.
That is what is agreed , but there is no consensus over what happens if a driver does not appear for a booked Sunday . The company claims they can discipline drivers for not coming in for a booked Sunday . Various mess room lawyers reckon they cannot .Northern ex-FNW drivers have to work their booked Sundays too...
The irony here of even suggesting a contract imposition is that the prime union this discussion is about are not against Sundays being in the working week , it is part of their charter after-all . They just would not accept it being done for nothing or in a way which is detrimental to drivers conditions which is the role of a TU .
Yes I can remember BR proposing DRI nationally around 1992 and it being rejected by the unions, but wasn’t sure if the successor BR TOUs had the authority to undertake wage restructuring before they actually became proper franchised TOCsWhen DRI (driver restructuring initiative) happened in around 1996 ish. The companies at the time which I think were regional railways northwest and regional railways north east, though it may have been FNW and northern spirit cant quite remember the eastern side started off on I think £22,000 basic with sundays inside the working week and the west side started on £20,000 but with sundays outside the week.
Sheffield - Manchester Piccadilly - BlackpoolSurely if you are going from Yorkshire to Blackpool you go via Leeds. I don't think these services are affected by the NW cancellations?
Sheffield - Manchester Piccadilly - Blackpool
Sheffield - Picc services are at risk of cancellation on Sundays, since they're worked from the Manchester end.
Indeed!
An excellent point that is often raised but usually ignored in these discussions, as it does not suit the rabidly anti-union bias of some posters.
I suspect many of them lack strong union representation of their own, and have perhaps seen their own T’s and C’s drop through the floor, hence the evident sour grapes towards rail staff!
Indeed!
An excellent point that is often raised but usually ignored in these discussions, as it does not suit the rabidly anti-union bias of some posters.
I suspect many of them lack strong union representation of their own, and have perhaps seen their own T’s and C’s drop through the floor, hence the evident sour grapes towards rail staff!
Sheffield - Picc services are at risk of cancellation on Sundays, since they're worked from the Manchester end.
To be fair, not many have been.
when of course the real issue is weak management and a certain mayoral fares freeze policy...
Likewise that the TOCs like RDW because it allows them to employ fewer drivers, saving all the associated costs with having extra people on the headcount. Unions have incentive *not* to support RDW as that means recruiting more drivers, which means more potential members (although this can of course conflict with the wishes of some members who like having their salary topped up with OT!).
Incredibly, I’ve heard from a highly reliable source that LU of all operators is flirting with the idea of RDW. From a reliability point of view it’s insane for one of the few operators who don’t do any form of RDW (for drivers at least) to be even considering it, but there again if we look at how many cancellations some lines are now seeing on a regular basis then this provides some explanation, namely that they clearly don’t have enough drivers and this is a tempting sticking-plaster lifted from the box marked “desperate”. Could be an interesting one to watch if the idea progresses. No doubt if it all goes pear-shaped the unions will get the blame, when of course the real issue is weak management and a certain mayoral fares freeze policy...
To be fair , an element of RDW is always going to be inevitable because even if you have a full compliment and a ratio of spare cover there will always be times when more than the average number are off sick , or taken off driving because of incidents etc . These things are unpredictable so the ability to use RDW to plug these gaps will result in better reliability .
If it is becoming the Norm to rely on RDW just for service delivery then yes absolutely the compliment needs looking at , the ratio and distribution of spares might also need altering or it could be that there is a deficit of route or traction knowledge . This is something a lot of people forget to consider when looking at compliments , yes in theory a depot might have the right number of drivers for the numbers of booked jobs and ratio of spare cover . But if there are gaps in route knowledge with numbers of drivers not signing routes or traction in their link then whilst the compliment for the depot is correct the numbers of actually fully productive drivers is not , and it is the latter number which is IMO more important .
Another time when RDW can be useful is for training purposes , a lot of TOC's at the moment are getting new fleets , some of them operating over new routes . Obviously whilst a driver is off training new units or new routes someone needs to be doing the job they would have been doing . Its not practical to increase compliments temporarily just to facilitate training so usually RDW is sanctioned to cover training .
The Leeds and Manchester parts of Northern were, we (the user group) were told, talking to each other to arrange these extra stops but maybe they have forgotten (again) to tell the drivers.
Yes there are tight turnround times at Victoria but nearly an hour at Leeds, so an extra 8 minutes each way will not affect departure times westbound.As poor as the situation is, the Calder Valley now has tight turnaround times at Victoria so by adding in extra calls can lead to the eastbound working running late throughout too.
Have Northern made any progress with an agreement to bring Sunday's inside the working week since the proposal a few weeks ago? It seems the situation won't be resolved until this is in place
I doubt it’s that straightforward, considering the old northern (Serco Abellio) , whom it’s pretty much universally acknowledged treated the unions with kid gloves throughout their tenure, still had to endure substantial periods without a RDW agreement in placeRdw relies on good relationships between employer and union.
It flies in the face of the "let's flog them into new contracts or sack them" mentality displayed in here by some.
Sheffield - Picc services are at risk of cancellation on Sundays, since they're worked from the Manchester end.
I would say that sounds shocking but isn't really as we have got used to this level of service on Sundays with planned (and unplanned) cancellations every Sunday (there have been a few without planned cancellations) for over a year now. It's been the same for Blackrod and Adlington (and much of the west of the Northern network) where the planned and unplanned cancellations have been on the local stopping services rather than the semi-fast services. Replacement bus services don't seem to run to schedule and frequently people are left stranded or told to walk to the next station with a train service. Personally, I think that they should only make the planned cancellations where all stops on the route are also served by another service each hour or cancel one diagram on a few more routes (obviously I would prefer it if they had sufficient staff and improved staff morale to make staff more willing to work Sundays)There were lots of very infuriated passengers on Wigan North Western yesterday afternoon as I arrived to catch the 1630 to Euston. Trains to Liverpool Lime Street, Manchester Airport and Barrow-in-Furness had all been cancelled - with the cause being 'a shortage of train drivers' - all within 15 minutes of each other. Passengers were being told to join the 1611 to Euston and change at Warrington to get to Liverpool - the only trouble being that the vestibules of the 1611 were already full of standing passengers.
I myself have pretty much given up on using the Northern service to connect to Wigan North Western on a Sunday since I can't be sure if my train will run. It's been going on far too long and it needs to be fixed. It's starting to really irritate me, and I'm a great advocate of rail travel, I can't imagine what ordinary punters make of the situation.