Rail industry preparing for national strikes

[yorkie]

Sad thing is all of this could have been completely avoided if people (including many rail staff btw) hadn't voted for the clown in 2019 just to get Bre*it done....

Yes the RMT messed up there.

Didn't RMT recommend members to vote 'Leave'? The 2019 election was almost, in effect, a second referendum so voting Conservative then to ensure it 'got done' should have been the logical thing for them to do?

They did indeed.

That said if anyone would like to discuss the matter in any detail it would need to be a dedicated thread.

The IT industry isn't, and has never been to my knowledge unionised in any significant way. I never felt I was suffering as a result in either pay or conditions and I was in it for many years.

Indeed, the best paid jobs I've had have been the least 'unionised' ones.

It'll become more normal for people to travel 100+ miles and stay in a hotel for a couple of days every couple of weeks rather than daily commuting to London. If you don't want that business, well, I guess you could look for another job

Not suitable for traincrew, definitely suitable for professional office work.

Yes it is true that some jobs involve remote working nearly all the time, with occasional trips which could easily be 100+ miles to meet colleagues; this has been the case for a few years now and pre-dates the pandemic, but the pandemic and perhaps other factors have accelerated that. A strike would have no real effect for anyone in that position as they'd simply re-arrange their meeting around the strike days.

The strikes would disproportionately affect lower paid workers who rely on public transport and need to be able to make those journeys daily. The RMT doesn't care about such people, of course. But then their members will no doubt argue 'why should they?' but then we're back to what I said earlier regarding how customers of the railway are treated and taken for granted. And the circular arguments continue.

 

[bramling]

And some of us work in industries where the employer-employee relationship tends to be much less adversarial and can see the benefits of that. Without placing blame on either side, and from outside observation only, I think the relationship between employer and employee on the railway is not only adversarial but utterly poisonous. I don't however know how that can be fixed.

Two issues really.

The relationship between frontline staff and their immediate local management can often be pretty good, especially where the local management is “old school”, and by that I mean have a good understanding of the job themselves (regardless of whether they’ve actually done the job or not). But by the same token there are managers whose people management is utterly abysmal. I remember taking a visitor into a train crew depot, where the manager on duty proudly proclaimed “if someone messes me about, the way to deal with it is to make everyone else suffer, they then sort out the problem person” - just how to piss off your good people in double-quick time. The industry seems to have a knack for putting these bad-apple managers in positions, and not doing anything with them once they’re there. Look at Euston/Green Park for a topical example of this.

The second issue is a complete disconnect between the operating side of a company and the middle and senior management. This can be absolutely toxic, and again seems to be a particular speciality of the industry. The influence of the DFT has simply added an extra layer on top of this.

 

[High Dyke]

Equally watching the news just now they are saying that in addition to pay rises which in fairness everyone wants with the horrendous rises in the cost of living the Union is also asking for ‘job security’ how true or not this is I don’t know but who ever had or has ‘job security?’

The news reporting may not be as factual as portrayed though!

In previous pay discussions there's always had been a request for 'no compulsory redundancies'. This agreement ended in either 2019 or 2020, I believe, with Network Rail refusing to renew that part of pay talks. I don't have the documents to hand, sorry.

I can't advise what the situation is at the TOCs

 

[ungreat]

Just to help clarify matters, can someone state the position if what employees right to withdraw labour means termination and what would be the phrase to use when an employer withdraws the means of work from the employees. I think what occurred eons ago when millworkers went on strike and then the employers refused to allow the millworkers to work in their premises.

What decade are you referring to?

 

[Class 466]

A sense of security and some kind of payrise would be nice. Not a big earner here at all and living in the South East of England that 'huge railway wage' that we all earn (if you believe the media) was just enough to get by in 2019. Come 2022, the rental market is stagnant, the property I'm currently living in is about to increase by £160 a month, food costs are soaring, energy bills and council tax too and the idea of ever owning property or a full drivers license are now a pipe dream for me as my ability to even put a bit away a bit a month is now nigh on impossible. I'm not in the RMT because they don't represent my area of work and I'm not in a financial position where I could afford to strike at all. But I fully support those that are and I hope that this does make a difference and at least get both parties round the table. I am in the position though that even if a deal was struck with the RMT, it might not actually make any difference to my own situation or Annual salary.

 

[Siggy1980s]

The IT industry isn't, and has never been to my knowledge unionised in any significant way. I never felt I was suffering as a result in either pay or conditions and I was in it for many years.


... and what is the kind of salary they are on? 4.1% of a low wage may not be much in cash terms. What increments have they had over last few years? Arrives may just cancel services, buses often don't turn up without any explanation anyway.

Signalling grade starts at around 25000. We're not all mega rich signallers.

 

[Class 170101]

With you all the way about Sunak and the "government". I find it incredible that Sunak was popular merely for handing out payments for people to lie on their sofas on furlough when he had absolutely no choice. People really are superficial.

Could have also gone the American way, I don't recall they had furlough, just lots of people at the dole office?

Notice that MP’s have had inflation busting pay increases in recent years, with definitely NO increase in productivity or the calibre of employee, (quite the opposite in fact, particularly in the Cabinet). The tax payer has always afforded these.

£2000 pay increase as the BBC noted

MPs to get £2,200 pay rise next month

The 2.7% increase will come in the same week millions of workers face a National Insurance hike.

www.bbc.co.uk

MPs will get a £2,212 pay rise on 1 April, seeing an MP's basic salary go up to £84,144 a year.

Whilst there is an independent body perhaps it needs to survey the public to see what they think on a regular basis, I wouldn't pay the MPs / Peers any increase right now.

 

[Bald Rick]

In previous pay discussions there's always had been a request for 'no compulsory redundancies'. This agreement ended in either 2019 or 2020, I believe, with Network Rail refusing to renew that part of pay talks. I don't have the documents to hand, sorry.

It ended 5 months ago. AIUI it has been tabled again for maintenance as part of the deal, so long as the proposed changes are agreed to. It seems a quite straightforward choice to me, but then perhaps I’m simple. Elsewhere in NR there will be no redundancies (of any kind) in front line operations or at stations.

 

[gazzaa2]

It may not happen at all, the only person who has decided it's going to close the railway for "months on end" is you. I'd be staggered to discover any of the RMT members want it to drag on for any length of time, although I do accept that there may well be political will on the part of the government to make that happen. For someone whom it can "quite easily not affect" there's been an awful lot of keyboard-mashing this afternoon, which considering nothing you say can influence any part of the upcoming negotiation (which hasn't even commenced yet), implies there's more than a hint of "the lady doth protest too much" going on, here. I've never felt compelled to turbo-post on any social media platform over matters which don't affect me.

The problem for the government though is they've been banging the drum of 'get back to the office' for months now, under pressure from donors and commercial property interests. If the trains are out of action then that means widespread homeworking (especially London), where possible, at a time when people are getting back to offices.

It's not like the Tories can be stubborn and advise people to "work from home" without causing a fallout there.

 

[bramling]

The problem for the government though is they've been banging the drum of 'get back to the office' for months now, under pressure from donors and commercial property interests. If the trains are out of action then that means widespread homeworking (especially London), where possible, at a time when people are getting back to offices.

It's not like the Tories can be stubborn and advise people to "work from home" without causing a fallout there.

The problem is they haven’t really banged the drum on anything, which is why things have drifted this far.

At one point is was “back to normal as soon as the vulnerable are vaccinated”. Things ended up dragging on way longer than that, then there was the Omicron debacle just before Christmas where it seems we only just avoided more restrictions thanks to Fraser Nelson, and we still ended up with enough to screw over businesses once again.

Since then we still have this oddness of being supposedly back to normal, yet you don’t have to go far to see signs of abnormality, even if no one takes any notice.

Johnson has been too busy trying to save his skin to be worrying about such insignificant little things as acting as the leader of a country. This will likely to continue, as I doubt the whole partygate saga is over for him.

 

[ungreat]

This has already been answered:


Agreed and I will firmly assign a significant chunk of the blame to the RMT, and I don't think I will have any sympathy for those who voted for it.

This has already been answered:


Agreed and I will firmly assign a significant chunk of the blame to the RMT, and I don't think I will have any sympathy for those who voted for it.

Where was it answered?
I might need glasses in my final years on the railways but didnt see it!

 

[vicbury]

As a customer, until we have:

• A railway without mass cancellations every Sunday.
• Guards who don't spend their whole journey hiding in the back cab of the train.
• Staff who treat customers as customers, not as an inconvenience.

It is very hard to have any sympathy with those who strike.

 

[Carlisle]

I think the relationship between employer and employee on the railway is not only adversarial but utterly poisonous. I don't however know how that can be fixed.

Indeed, i wonder if any talented manager can actually improve industrial relations & achieve a decent level of modernisation or is the only way forward essentially the old SWT model of running a clean & reliable railway very successfully on a day to day basis whilst kicking challenging reforms almost permanently into the long grass.

 

[GRALISTAIR]

As a customer, until we have:

• A railway without mass cancellations every Sunday.
• Guards who don't spend their whole journey hiding in the back cab of the train.
• Staff who treat customers as customers, not as an inconvenience.

It is very hard to have any sympathy with those who strike.

I am sure I read in the 1980s a perhaps anecdotal quote from a railway manager "If it wasn't for passengers we could run a really good railway". I have seen elsewhere that the railways are not truly customer focused.

The other point of view is one from Lord Branson and I wish I could find the link --
1) Put your people/employees first.
2) Happy and respected employees will take care of your customers.
3) Your customers will take care of your shareholders.

Sadly Virgin Trains is no longer and some in unions didnt/dont like him because he is rich.

 

[Gems]

It's very painful to watch. I don't want to stuff my colleagues who do strike. I may join them.
That said, my views on the RMT are pretty much unprintable on here.

I’d be really interested in anybody’s thoughts or advice on what action to take after this strike announcement. I’m really torn about what to do.

I joined Network Rail 4 years ago and decided to join the RMT as it seemed to be widely recommended by sensible people as the correct decision to make to protect me should anything happen with the company. I’d not been in a unionised industry before, or been a member of a union and so my only exposure to the RMT was Bob Crow and the Tube Strikes from the news.

We’re now clearly in the situation that the membership has overwhelmingly voted for strike action that I believe (possibly erroneously) will be massively counterproductive and lead to a ruinous confrontation with a government who are desperate for a bogeyman to be able to pin things on. Obviously the members want to go on strike and it’s a valid ballot so they shall go on strike. I just can’t see it ending well and my conscience is telling me that it would be wrong to go on strike, both for me personally and for most employees of the company.

So my options as I see it are to stay in the union and go on a strike that I think is wrong, or leave the union now and do not participate in this industrial action. I understand that if I leave the union I will be unable to rejoin at a later date in my railway career. What I am concerned about is the reputation that unions have for ugly behaviour towards people that don’t go along with strikes and the like and also whether I will come to regret not having the protection of the union at a later date. So I have a couple of questions:

How true are the rumours of victimisation of those not participating in industrial action, with respect to the RMT? Or is that some fantasy 1970s thing that I have stuck in my head?

What am I truly giving up if I leave the union? The policies of Network Rail seem quite robust and I don’t see my immediate management as being particularly antagonistic from my admittedly short time on the railway. I am aware that these strong HR policies may only be there because of the existence of a strong union and that’s one of the reasons I’m struggling with this decision.

Clearly there is no definitive answer to either of those questions but I’m interested to hear the opinions of people on these boards. I’m trying to make the most pragmatic decision for me and my family whilst also not shafting myself for years into the future. Thanks.

If you don't want to strike, don't strike. I for one would never fall out with a colleague who decided on the opposite to me. But just don't rub their noses in it. Don't take on additional overtime.

That's my advice.

 

[NI 271]

The problem for the government though is they've been banging the drum of 'get back to the office' for months now, under pressure from donors and commercial property interests. If the trains are out of action then that means widespread homeworking (especially London), where possible, at a time when people are getting back to offices.

It's not like the Tories can be stubborn and advise people to "work from home" without causing a fallout there.

Good point, there's no way members of this government would do anything that would open them to claims of hypocrisy, is there?

 

[the sniper]

As a customer, until we have:

• A railway without mass cancellations every Sunday.
• Guards who don't spend their whole journey hiding in the back cab of the train.
• Staff who treat customers as customers, not as an inconvenience.

It is very hard to have any sympathy with those who strike.

So you're saying you sympathise with a lot, probably the majority, of those who'll strike, in a roundabout way? Those who don't have Sundays outside the week/uncommitted, have nothing to do with Guards and/or have no contact with the public, plus those that do who don't treat customers as 'an inconvenience'...?

I am sure I read in the 1980s a perhaps anecdotal quote from a railway manager "If it wasn't for passengers we could run a really good railway". I have seen elsewhere that the railways are not truly customer focused.

Well, it literally is a lot easier to run a railway with no passengers. I can certainly imagine someone making that statement in jest, as the flaw in that observation is entirely obvious to anyone. I'm not sure it could sensibly be considered a mission statement.

Sadly Virgin Trains is no longer and some in unions didnt/dont like him because he is rich.

Funnily enough, it wasn't the unions that saw him off the rails...

 

[Carlisle]

Sadly Virgin Trains is no longer and some in unions didnt/dont like him because he is rich.

He may be a thoroughly decent guy but it was more luck than anything else he joined the railway’ during a privatisation honeymoon period after BR’s wages had been low & ridership was growing & new trains were on order, So essentially it was quite hard for for him to fail.

 

[Bletchleyite]

He may be a thoroughly decent guy but it was more luck than anything else he joined the railway during a privatisation honeymoon period after BR wages had been low & ridership was growing. So essentially it was quite hard for him to fail.

I think he did abjectly fail on XC, though, it's never been right since. It'd have been hard to make a mess of West Coast - almost anything would have improved upon what it was in the 1990s.

 

[Facing Back]

Nobody said workplace bullying
is tolerated - it absolutely isn’t. If people don’t like you they won’t go out of their way to make small talk with you and they probably won’t be inclined to help you out by doing things like swapping shifts, which they’re under absolutely no obligation to do. It’s entirely a matter of those individuals.

What does any of that have to do with the HR department?

It is seen as systemic or endemic then it can easily be seen as workplace bullying and many HR departments, and for that matter work councils and tribunals, have agreed and HR can easily get involved.

 

[JonathanH]

I think he did abjectly fail on XC, though, it's never been right since. It'd have been hard to make a mess of West Coast - almost anything would have improved upon what it was in the 1990s.

West Coast could have been a disaster too if the ninth cars for the Pendolinos hadn't been added (although I'm not quite familiar with whether eight car was an actual plan or just a function of how the build was planned)..

 

[Bletchleyite]

West Coast could have been a disaster too if the ninth cars for the Pendolinos hadn't been added.

The thing is they were. Then two more. XC has never been fixed.

 

[Carlisle]

I think he did abjectly fail on XC, though, it's never been right since. It'd have been hard to make a mess of West Coast -

Replacing all electric hauled services with diesels always seemed crazy even at the time, but he never claimed to be an expert on railways

 

[Bletchleyite]

Replacing all electric hauled services with diesels always seemed crazy even at the time, but he never claimed to be an expert on railways

I think that was understandable - at the time diesel was the clean fuel of the future and Sea Containers were even proposing de-electrifying the ECML.

What wasn't understandable was the lack of capacity. It was utterly obvious it would be insufficient.

The same muppetry was then repeated a few years later by TPE, though at least they now have got enough capacity, finally.

 

[Cowley]

Again I’m going to give this thread a bit of nudge back on topic before we go too far off course (I know it’s quite easy to do so obviously).

There’s lots of side subjects here that might be worth starting threads on (which obviously we’re more than happy to accommodate). But it would be much appreciated if we could stick to the subject of the potential industrial disputes in this one if possible please.

I thank you.

 

[AlterEgo]

????. 90-95% of people who use the train have got no idea who the RMT are. They are more bothered about the rising price of tickets and how it’s pricing people out.

Do you really think the railways and the unions operate in a political vacuum?

If not, by what mechanism do you think striking is effective?

 

[43066]

You have spectacularly missed the point. Strikes = no service = people find another way to travel = not going back to using the train. So, yes, the RMT's actions will quite possibly result in fewer passengers.

Well the RMT clearly disagree with you. Probably because the fact of the matter is that they *have* come back after every other strike… Much as that clearly irritates certain people on here who want to shut down parts of the railway (at least in the posts where they aren’t calling for striking to to be banned, because at the same time as being unnecessary and irrelevant, we’re also an “essential service”).

Anyway, from your point of view, what are you complaining about? If the RMT are wrong and you’re right, and passengers never return, a load of the unionised railway staff you despise so much will get the sack…

It is seen as systemic or endemic then it can easily be seen as workplace bullying and many HR departments, and for that matter work councils and tribunals, have agreed and HR can easily get involved.

So how does HR get involved in that exactly?

There are some colleagues of mine I like more than others, therefore some I speak to more than others. There are a couple of people I won’t swap shifts with, usually because they’ve messed me about in the past. That’s entirely my prerogative. Do you seriously think “X won’t be mates with me, won’t go out of his way to talk to me or swap shifts with me” is an issue prople can run to HR about?

 

[Bantamzen]

A lot of words there, when "yes, I was wrong" would have sufficed. You said "That isn't how public finances work, there is a finite amount of cash knocking about & once its gone its gone." There isn't a finite amount of cash available, ever. That's not opinion, it's fact, at least until the Bank of England ceases to exist.

It's no good replying attributing things I've not said to me. My post was simple, if the government needs/wants cash at any time, even in times of rampant inflation, it can use QE to release it. It generally won't if it's unwise, for obvious reasons, but your post was factually inaccurate, mine wasn't, so didn't need 'correcting'.

It was me that said the cash was finite, and for context I was talking about the amount of money each department has allocated to it. These are most definitely finite, and QE for resolving an industrial dispute is less likely than QE to give every citizen in the UK a free holiday in the Med.

And some of us work in industries where the employer-employee relationship tends to be much less adversarial and can see the benefits of that. Without placing blame on either side, and from outside observation only, I think the relationship between employer and employee on the railway is not only adversarial but utterly poisonous. I don't however know how that can be fixed.

Unfortunately some union leaderships, and I include my own in this, have grand political ambitions. So they tend to lean towards a more adversarial stance, especially in the public sector when a Conservative government is in power.

 

[43066]

It was me that said the cash was finite, and for context I was talking about the amount of money each department has allocated to it. These are most definitely finite, and QE for resolving an industrial dispute is less likely than QE to give every citizen in the UK a free holiday in the Med.

My original point was that those rules have been well and truly ripped up over the past couple of years. The government has basically been on the biggest spending spree in history, all based on QE. Whoever would have believed furlough payments to millions for months on end would have been a thing a few years ago?

So it sticks in the craw a little to be told “there’s no money” when that statement is actually a value judgement disguised as a statement of fact. Recent history has shown that, if the the will is there, the money can be made available.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

In previous pay discussions there's always had been a request for 'no compulsory redundancies'. This agreement ended in either 2019 or 2020, I believe, with Network Rail refusing to renew that part of pay talks. I don't have the documents to hand, sorry.
I can't advise what the situation is at the TOCs

In recent years the RMT has been demanding "no compulsory redundancies" when any new franchise has been let (plus retention of guard roles etc).
They mostly achieved that, for the length of each particular franchise (eg 7-10 years).
Now that franchises are dead, and the TOCs are on short-term limited contracts, that is hard to achieve.
I can't think of any other industry which would or could give such guarantees.
Although the government effectively made this guarantee during the Covid emergency period (full employment with no furlough).
It's a fantasy when you have lost 20-30% of your custom and are attempting to re-size the business.