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>> No. 14457 Anonymous
13th June 2022
Monday 12:19 am
14457 Strike action
The news keeps talking about the impending big train strike, and the economic landscape looks like a fertile place to give rise to many more strikes in future. So I'm going to start a thread for assorted strikes now, and assume everything's going to go full 1970s very shortly.

Here's a link saying the government will allow agency workers to replace rail workers if the rail workers will go on strike: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-61773437

I assume the general britfa.gs attitude to union action will be largely positive. But train companies are wankers. The striking workers are already very well-paid, and if the bosses surrender to all their demands (hurray), then that won't mean less money for shareholders; it will just mean higher ticket prices because trains are still a monopoly and they can charge the rest of us whatever they want (booo). So I am less supportive of this strike than I would be of, say, Amazon or Uber or Deliveroo. I'd love to see all the train companies be nationalised, but that wouldn't stop the workers from striking, and they might even strike even more since they would then be the entire rail network.

Are either of you planning any strikes?
Expand all images.
>> No. 14458 Anonymous
13th June 2022
Monday 12:51 am
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Arriva Busses are on strike in town, but with Arriva you never know if your bus was cancelled because of a strike or if it's just business as usual.

We've found out that a similar department to ours at a different site within the same trust is getting better pay so we might be going on strike if we don't get brought up too, when we ostensibly do the same thing only with a higher workload and more responsibilities. I think it's on the cards anyway though, there are a lot of problems it would solve if they just bumped everyone up a notch, and then the lower grade staff could do some of the things they're perfectly capable of but not paid for or audited on; then it doesn't stretch out the smaller number of "qualified" staff.

Realistically I think we're heading for a Labour government who will whack the minimum wage up to fifteen or twenty quid anyway, depending how bad inflation keeps up, so a lot of this will end up being irrelevant.
>> No. 14459 Anonymous
13th June 2022
Monday 1:08 am
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My union voted for industrial action but didn't get a sufficient percentage of votes for it to count or something. There's a fair chance I'll be on my first strike come the summer though.

How does that work anyway, do I just not show up at work or do I need to fill out a form?

>Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told the Sunday Telegraph a potential change in legislation could allow companies to hire temporary workers to cover some roles and prevent disruption.

That's quite Machiavellian if you think about it, there's no issue with the trains if everyone's on strike anyway.
>> No. 14460 Anonymous
13th June 2022
Monday 1:10 am
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>>14457
>The striking workers are already very well-paid
Since when did that have anything to do with it? They're striking because, among other things, their employers keep asking them to work 12-hour shifts on their days off.
>> No. 14461 Anonymous
13th June 2022
Monday 1:15 am
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>>14459
>How does that work anyway, do I just not show up at work or do I need to fill out a form?
Effectively you just don't turn up, though you may be asked after the fact to verify that you didn't turn up, and at some point the relevant amount is deducted from your pay. Your employer gets to decide how to do that: with some UCU previous UCU strikes adding up to a significant number of days, some unis sensibly spread the deductions over 2-3 months while others decided to retaliate by making the entire deduction immediately in one go.
>> No. 14462 Anonymous
13th June 2022
Monday 1:51 am
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>>14460
https://www.rmt.org.uk/news/rmt-launch-strike-ballot-over-pay-freeze/
>over-pay-freeze/

>"Train Operating Companies have praised our members for being key workers during the pandemic but have refused to keep staff pay in line with inflation and soaring living costs.
>"As a result, thousands of railway workers have seen their living standards plummet and have run out of patience.
>"The way for trade unions to effectively take on the cost-of-living crisis is to stand up for their members at work...

They sound pretty concerned about wages to me.
>> No. 14463 Anonymous
13th June 2022
Monday 1:55 am
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>>14462
>among other things

Not that there's anything wrong with people being concerned about their wages.
>> No. 14464 Anonymous
13th June 2022
Monday 7:47 am
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>>14461

Some unions will provide payments to members on strike, so it's always worth checking in with your rep to see if you can claim anything.

>>14462

The members are supporting the strike over pay, but Mick Lynch is really setting up a broader dispute over the future of the railways. There are loads of issues at play, from low utilisation of many routes post-pandemic to reductions in ticket office staff due to the shift to mobile ticketing.
>> No. 14465 Anonymous
13th June 2022
Monday 9:00 am
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It's the same people bringing up specious arguments against the strikers as bring up similarly specious arguments against anything positive. That's all you need to know really. Solidarity to the strikers.
>> No. 14469 Anonymous
20th June 2022
Monday 5:12 pm
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It's official, strike is on.

One thing I noticed is that Netwirk Rail are accusing the RMT of "Spabish practices", which apart from being quite bigoted in that quaint 70s grandad kind of way, is oronic, considering Spain has one of the most exemplary networks of high-speed rail in the world.

Anyway, teachers, burses, binmen, and even barristers are all on about striking within the coming months. Meanwhile the airlines have shagged it because they made too many of their staff redundant over the pandemic, and now they can't recruit again fast enough.
>> No. 14470 Anonymous
20th June 2022
Monday 9:12 pm
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Here's an interesting point which nobody seems to have brought up:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/61840077

>The trouble with using the figure for train drivers in a debate about the strikes is that the drivers are represented by their own union, Aslef, which says that 96% of train drivers in England, Scotland and Wales are its members, and most of the remaining 4% are not union members at all.

>Aslef will not be taking part in the national strike, although they have action of their own taking place at the same time, with drivers at Greater Anglia striking on 23 June. A strike on Hull Trains on 26 June has been cancelled. Aslef are also balloting for action on several other lines.

But I guess train engineers and the like might also be on unsympathetic wages, and they'll be in the RMT. It certainly should embolden a few more deserving workers to consider striking too, though, if the RMT is also ticket plod and cleaners.

I hope nobody was planning any train journeys in the near future, by the way. Just think what a payday it will be for employees in other jobs if the strikers are successful. Much as I hate anyone involved in privately-run rail transport, it would be in all of our interests for the RMT to be successful, because then we can all follow their lead and get the money we deserve at last.
>> No. 14471 Anonymous
20th June 2022
Monday 9:30 pm
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>>14470

The government are obviously trying to muddy the waters, but I had thought it was reasonably well known that drivers and other staff are represented by separate unions.

The RMT's own figures suggest that the average pay for their members is significantly above the national average, which I'm not sure is likely to engender much sympathy.
>> No. 14472 Anonymous
20th June 2022
Monday 9:45 pm
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>>14470
>I hope nobody was planning any train journeys in the near future, by the way.
Fuck sake, I've got to be in Manchester Crown Court next Monday!
>> No. 14473 Anonymous
20th June 2022
Monday 10:33 pm
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>>14471
>The RMT's own figures suggest that the average pay for their members is significantly above the national average, which I'm not sure is likely to engender much sympathy.

What, do they get paid in pistachios?
>> No. 14474 Anonymous
20th June 2022
Monday 10:43 pm
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>>14471

>The RMT's own figures suggest that the average pay for their members is significantly above the national average, which I'm not sure is likely to engender much sympathy.

All a matter of spin really.

On one hand you can look at it as though train people are already pretty well off, so why should we give in to their demands. It's a fair point. But on the other hand the alternative is that they get worse off, with their wages not meeting inflation. If you were in their shoes you'd rightly be unhappy- And like any other industry or business, there's only so long you can underpay people before they fuck off to a different job, and then we're fucked because there will be nobody to drive the trains.

And it's not just that, what the press are largely ignoring is that the "modernisation" and "efficiency improvements" the execs want mostly just means "sack a load of people".

Either way we have a big problem brewing right now, because private sector pay is massively outstripping public sector pay at the minute, and that's coming on the back of over a decade of wage stagnation already. Most public sector workers have taken a real terms pay cut year on year every single year since 2008. The NHS already struggles to recruit and it's haemorrhaging valuable staff, who've worked themselves to the bone through the 'rona only to be rewarded with a big fat middle finger from the government.

If the public sector can't recruit because the pay is such shit compared to the private sector, services are simply going to collapse, and most of them are already on their arse after the years of austerity this government has put them through. People area already fed up with this government, and all of this will do them no favours.
>> No. 14475 Anonymous
20th June 2022
Monday 11:17 pm
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>>14474

Railway workers are (technically) private sector employees. Most people are getting worse off at the moment, because we're in an inflationary crisis. If rail workers deserve a raise because everyone deserves a raise, then we're just going to drive up inflation even more. We've been here before and it did not end well for the trade union movement.

> If you were in their shoes you'd rightly be unhappy- And like any other industry or business, there's only so long you can underpay people before they fuck off to a different job, and then we're fucked because there will be nobody to drive the trains.

>And it's not just that, what the press are largely ignoring is that the "modernisation" and "efficiency improvements" the execs want mostly just means "sack a load of people".

Those two statements are essentially contradictory.

Management wants to sack a load of ticket office staff, because most people buy their tickets from a machine or through their phone. They want to sack a load of maintenance staff who spend their time walking up and down the railways to check for faults, because they've got machines that can do it better. They want to sack loads of ticket inspectors, because you don't need as many people checking tickets where your stations have barriers. People who are actually necessary to run a railway are going on strike to protect the jobs of people who don't do much of anything useful.

That's their prerogative, but it's to the detriment of the railways as a whole. Passenger volumes are down, fare revenues are down, the government is propping up the industry and their patience is wearing thin. Clearing out some dead wood won't necessarily lead to higher pay for the people who remain, but at least it becomes a more plausible proposition.

Mick Lynch is playing politics with the livelihoods of RMT members. He's gambling that this strike will force the government to intervene, but they're just as likely to wash their hands of the situation and leave the rail industry to fend for itself. Chaos on the railways is politically unappealing, but opening the door to wider strike action is far more dangerous.


>> No. 14476 Anonymous
20th June 2022
Monday 11:37 pm
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>>14475
>They want to sack a load of maintenance staff who spend their time walking up and down the railways to check for faults, because they've got machines that can do it better
Wait a minute, I've seen this episode before!
>> No. 14477 Anonymous
21st June 2022
Tuesday 1:09 am
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>>14476

Then you clearly weren't paying attention. The proximate cause of the Hatfield crash was fatigue cracking of the rail. The risk of fatigue cracking was greatly increased by poor welding practices, which was largely a result of inadequate training and poor safety management at Balfour Beatty.

The human factors issues were broadly remedied with the 2003 Railways and Transport Safety Act, which amongst other things established the ORR and led to a comprehensive set of standards for Network Rail and subcontractors. Network Rail now has one of the best integrated safety systems in the industry and the best safety record in Europe.

The technical issues regarding the identification and remediation of fatigue cracking have only partly been addressed. Fatigue cracking is basically invisible until it becomes dangerous, so monitoring for it requires the use of non-destructive testing equipment, specifically eddy current and ultrasonic testing.

Commercially available NDT vehicles can perform these checks at 30mph, while simultaneously using LIDAR scanners to check the ways for obstructions. These vehicles are widely used across Europe. The union doesn't like these systems, so we still have people on foot to "inspect" track that has already been inspected.

Imagine you're out on the track trying to fix a problem with some signalling equipment. You aren't sure how to proceed, so you want to call someone back at the depot for advice. It'd be quite handy if you could use a video call to show them the problem, but RMT rules don't allow you to - there hasn't been a specific negotiation, so it isn't permitted.

The RMT have recently negotiated a new agreement with Merseyrail over the introduction of new Class 777 units. The Train Manager (formerly known as a guard) performs safety critical functions, so safety regulations dictate that no passenger movements can take place without a TM on board. The Class 777 is based on the Stadler Metro platform, which is operated successfully in several other countries with only a driver. Glasgow's SPT have ordered several Metro units with full driverless capability.

Why do Merseyrail trains require a Train Manager when essentially identical trains in Berlin don't? There's a display in the driver's cab that indicates when all of the passenger doors are shut, but ASLEF say that the driver can't look at it. There's a rear view camera to check that nobody has fallen between the train and the platform, but ASLEF say that the driver can't look at it.

RMT and ASLEF are the worst sort of old-fashioned trade union bullshitters. They've created a bizarre alternate universe in which staff cuts would jeopardise safety solely because their staff won't use safety equipment that could lead to staff cuts.
>> No. 14478 Anonymous
21st June 2022
Tuesday 8:19 am
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Wow, I didn't realie Grant Shapps posts here.
>> No. 14479 Anonymous
21st June 2022
Tuesday 1:11 pm
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I find all this train-tech-fetishism quite far-fetched given how many decades it took to retire Pacers.

>>14478
Right now he's too busy trying to find someone to bully the strikers to suicide.
>> No. 14482 Anonymous
21st June 2022
Tuesday 4:09 pm
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>>14478
Dear Anonymous
I wouldn't go around making accusations like that unless you can substantiate them.
Yours, Michael Green.
>> No. 14483 Anonymous
22nd June 2022
Wednesday 4:08 am
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>>14477
Absolutely fantastic post.
Note how no-one has replied to you with a rebuttal but have simply thrown tearys.
>> No. 14484 Anonymous
22nd June 2022
Wednesday 5:50 am
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>>14483
Heard you the first time, Grant.
>> No. 14485 Anonymous
22nd June 2022
Wednesday 8:44 am
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>>14483

It frustrates me that the only voices being given a platform are the RMT and the government. The RMT are saying that the dispute is about both pay and working practices, Network Rail and the TOCs are saying it's about working practices, but nobody in the media is seriously trying to address what those issues are. Those issues are too dry and technical for the news, they can't be summarised in soundbites and vox pops, but they will ultimately determine the future of our railways.

We've been here before in '84 with the miner's strike. In the popular imagination it was a battle between the miners and the government as mediated through Scargill and Thatcher, but nobody was actually talking about the fundamentals of mining and coal. If you actually look into those issues, the meaning of the strike totally changes.

Britain had already exhausted most of our shallow coal reserves by the late 1950s, but that wasn't a catastrophic problem. The cost of extraction increases with depth, but so does quality. Russia, Germany, Australia and the US have vast and easily mined reserves of soft and impure lignite, but we have unusually large reserves of purer bituminous and anthracitic coals. It cost us more to extract our coal, but we could charge more for it because it burned hotter and cleaner. That quality advantage slowly became irrelevant, which is essential to understanding why we needed coal, just not the coal we were capable of producing.

The switch to diesel locomotives was a massive blow. Obviously steam locomotives burn coal, but less obviously they require high-quality coal to minimise smoke and ash and maximise the efficiency of the boiler. Most steam boilers cannot run on low-quality coal, because they'll choke on the ash within minutes. During the age of steam, we were exporting coal to countries with plenty of their own coal, because they didn't have the quality of coal that we could provide.

The discovery of North Sea Gas massively reduced the demand for coal, but the journey is a bit surprising and roundabout, via the Clean Air Act of 1956. In response to the deadly Great Smog of 1952, the government passed a range of measures that would accidentally stick a knife in the back of British coal years later.

Smokeless fuel became mandatory in urban areas. This gave a short-term advantage to British mines, but the development of better processes for producing smokeless fuel briquettes from cheaper coals quickly nullified that advantage. Smokeless fuel is much more difficult to light than coal, so to encourage the switch, the government provided funding for local authorities to install a gas poker at the main fireplace of every home - a simple gas outlet and burner to ease the process of lighting smokeless fuel. At the time, it didn't occur to anyone that they might want to install a gas fire because of the significant cost difference between town gas and coal. Ten years later when we discovered shitloads of dirt cheap natural gas under the north sea, the Government quietly realised that they had accidentally paid for most of the installation costs of a gas fire when they gave everyone a gas poker.

The shift in energy demand towards electricity in the late 1960s doesn't obviously seem like it would affect the demand for coal, because until quite recently we generated most of our electricity with coal. Again, we come back to the minutiae of coal quality. Coal power stations don't burn solid coal, because that'd cause stoppages due to a claggy accumulation of ash, clinker and tar. Instead, they burn pulverised coal dust that is blown into the boiler with high-pressure steam. The fuel burns in mid-air and waste products are continually blown out of the furnace. This method makes the quality of coal essentially irrelevant and actually gives an advantage to softer coals which are easier to pulverise.

One by one, the economic pillars holding up the British coal industry were undermined by technological change. It happened subtly and slowly without any great fanfare, but those pillars still fell. By 1984, the industry was being propped up by hope, subsidies and good will.

The best we can say of Scargill is that he didn't understand the industry he claimed to represent and was fighting a doomed battle to save an industry he sincerely believed was viable. If we credit him with knowing how coal was mined and used, then the only reasonable conclusion was that he was using the miners as pawns to advance his own personal or political aims. 362 days of strike action didn't prove that mining was essential to the British economy, it proved the exact opposite - the remaining customers of British Coal didn't collapse, they just found other suppliers and other fuels. Thatcher certainly didn't give a shit about the miners, but the intransigence of Scargill in opposing all redundancies turned a gradual decline into an abrupt end. We could have planned that decline, we could have spread the pain out, we could have used retraining and job creation schemes to stop entire communities from failing, but Scargill simply refused to negotiate any outcome that involved job losses. He turned the dispute into an all-or-nothing gambit and lost, at terrible cost to the miners.

Obviously I'm not suggesting that the entire rail industry could end up being shuttered, but you would hope that Mick Lynch has some knowledge of the Beeching Report. Between 1962 and 1967, more than half of the train stations in Britain were permanently closed, despite massive public opposition. More than 5,000 miles of track was decommissioned forever. The longer and more disruptive these strikes are, the less Lynch will have to bargain with. If rail commuters start buying cars and rail freight customers invest in road haulage, it'll be very difficult to win them back. If further strikes are all but guaranteed, then the threat of a strike becomes hollow and management have very little incentive to cooperate. The government have been looking for an excuse to stop subsidising the railways; their willingness to drop the axe and the number of people willing to support them increases with every day of disruption. Unless the RMT can put forward a realistic proposal that serves the interests of their members while also ensuring the sustainability of the railways, they might find that they don't have much of a railway to come back to.
>> No. 14486 Anonymous
22nd June 2022
Wednesday 12:43 pm
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>>14485

So, pray tell. How are they supposed to negotiate when the government won't even meet them for talks?

I don't doubt that a lot of what you're saying is true, but you're giving the government entirely too much good faith. You know as well as any of us they're not interested in creating jobs to ease the pain of the layoffs, any more than they were in the 80s with miners. So what else are those people to do, just roll over and accept redundancy? You wouldn't if you were in their shoes.

What our railways could do with is, frankly, renationalising and drastically modernising. Instead we just have the ongoing disaster of half of HS2.
>> No. 14487 Anonymous
22nd June 2022
Wednesday 1:28 pm
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>>14486
HS2 is a great example of this government's attitude. They recently announced they were going to pull a section that would have allowed HS2 services to bypass the already-congested hub at Crewe, to replace it with a better option. I can buy that there may be better options than what was originally proposed for it, but we all know they won't actually bother replacing it. I suspect they have figured out that they might not be able to personally profit off the enterprise quite as handsomely as they originally thought.
>> No. 14489 Anonymous
22nd June 2022
Wednesday 3:23 pm
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>>14487
But think about how quickly I'll be able to get from my home where I work to my... oh, oh no... no.
>> No. 14490 Anonymous
22nd June 2022
Wednesday 3:38 pm
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>>14485
I've noticed that a lot of the arguments now seem to be over whether we should all accept getting poorer in real terms this year in exchange for things being better next year. When you put it like that, I'm totally in favour. But: inflation isn't going to undo itself. We're not going to get 10% deflation in 2023. So we're all being told to not demand 10% raises this year, but I haven't heard anyone ask if there will be 10% raises next year if we obey and stop asking for them this year. The lower wages in real terms, for everyone, are going to be permanent because we all know that wages don't go up by 10% ever. So it might seem greedy for these overpaid flat-capped Hoxhaists to demand raises close to inflation this year, but really, it's our only chance. It very much looks like now or never.
>> No. 14491 Anonymous
22nd June 2022
Wednesday 7:37 pm
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>>14486

The government do not run the railways. This is a negotiation between the RMT, Network Rail and the TOCs. The government might be able to step in as an intermediary, they could bribe or coerce the rail industry into ceding to the RMT's demands, but I don't think they're inclined to and I think that further industrial action will only harden the government's resolve and weaken the RMT's position.

Mick Lynch wants to negotiate with the government, despite the fact that the government don't actually have direct control of the terms of employment of anyone who works on the railways. Read into that what you will. The government could renationalise the railways, but given the pay and conditions of public sector workers at the moment that would likely be a massive own goal for the RMT.

>So what else are those people to do, just roll over and accept redundancy?

Faced with the choice between fewer redundancies and more redundancies, a responsible trade union would choose fewer redundancies. Lynch believes that no redundancies is a possibility, but I think that's a complete fantasy for reasons I have outlined at length. There's nothing noble about a futile and self-defeating struggle. Trade Unionists like to chant "the workers united will never be defeated", but history has proved that slogan wrong on many, many occasions. If the RMT are truly acting in the interests of their members, they should be working with management to secure the future of the railways rather than playing into the hands of a government that really doesn't want to keep pouring money into the industry.

>>14490

The problem is that 10% pay rises this year all but guarantee 10% inflation next year. Inflation is fundamentally a problem of the economy as a whole having more money than stuff to spend it on. Right now, that's mostly a short-term problem due to a shortage of stuff, but it could easily become a long-term cycle due to a surplus of money - wages go up, so costs go up, so wages go up.

We've had a long period of relatively low inflation, so we've largely forgotten how utterly miserable sustained high inflation can be. Inflation was above 10% for most of the 1970s, as were interest rates, but it took incredibly drastic action (i.e. Thatcher) to bring it down.

If interest rates have to rise to match this level of inflation, someone who is currently paying £800 a month on their mortgage will end up paying £1,800 a month. The government might be able to soften the blow of this winter's gas bill, but there's fuck all it can do if half the country can't afford to pay the mortgage. Ironically a massive recession triggered by a collapse of the property market might be enough to stop inflation, but it's a more painful endgame than any of the alternatives.
>> No. 14492 Anonymous
22nd June 2022
Wednesday 7:53 pm
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>>14486

What we need is our own Yakuza. Look at all the amazing infrastructure the Japs got 80 years ago - Bullet Trains, Underground Motorways, train drivers who would be ashamed to be two seconds early - drilling through mountains for new roads in a matter of weeks, changing the elevation of a section of underground railway track in an evening, and rebuilding like there's a knife to their collective throat after a landslide or earthquake. And everyone is scared of being a cunt in public.

Bring back the likes of Krays and the Mad Frankie Fraser, I say. Teach the arsehole in No.10 that you can't get things done if you sleep in your clothes and expect your wooden puppet of a wife stand in for your dead Mum.
>> No. 14493 Anonymous
22nd June 2022
Wednesday 8:46 pm
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>>14491
Doesn't really matter. With pay freeze when inflation was low, who's to say that won't be the case again when inflation goes back down? Just suffer a year on year effective pay cut for a decade. Might as well secure raises now. Nobody can be trusted not to shaft workers.

Also, Pensions is going up by 10%. Surprising how that doesn't have a knock on effect on inflation...
>> No. 14494 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 12:41 pm
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>>14491
>The problem is that 10% pay rises this year all but guarantee 10% inflation next year. Inflation is fundamentally a problem of the economy as a whole having more money than stuff to spend it on.
I find it hard to take this line seriously. I can accept that wages are a component of inflation, but acting like they're linked 1:1 immediately feels like a disingenuous attempt to hold down wages with inflation simply acting as a fig leaf. In a world where wages don't make up 100% of costs, and we don't supply anything like 100% of domestic consumption it's very difficult how to see you'd get such a link. In a world where such a link doesn't exist, different people will be advantaged and disadvantaged by different trade-offs. (for example, if a choice was to arise between tackling inflation quickly with a real terms pay cut, or tackling inflation slowly but with real terms pay increases.)

As for mortgages: why not just legislate against reposessions, or legislate for controls on bank lending that'll let you raise rates on lending for new mortgages while leaving old ones as they were? (effectively handing existing lenders a big fat subsidy and a big fat profit if they sell up.) Why not interfere with lending rates based on the purpose of lending (and its inflationary implications) more widely, rather than sticking with the base rate and hoping the market will figure it all out?
>> No. 14495 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 2:24 pm
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>we want the government to step in.
>no not like that!
sick of these cunts
>> No. 14496 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 2:26 pm
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>>14491
>The government do not run the railways.
On the contrary, despite the trappings of privatisation, the government effectively does run the railways. All the private operators have ever been there for is delivery. All of the policy decisions have been made by government, even at a low level. Recently, Southern withdrew a fleet of old trains, because DfT said they had to be withdrawn. They've replaced them with ... well, nothing, because DfT didn't say they could replace them.
>> No. 14497 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 3:59 pm
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>>14494

>hoping the market will figure it all out?

Well, I mean, that's what modern conservative ideology is all about. That's the be all and end all, the alpha and the omega. If the market wills it, then we simply have to adjust the best we can to deal with it.

The annoying thing about the railways is that there's definitely demand to increase services. There's demand for more trains more often. The only reason people don't get trains is because frequently there simply isn't one to serve their needs. The conservative angle is that the trains are between a rock and a hard place because ticket sales are down and bla bla bla, but of course they are when services keep getting cut and all the useful local stations were closed in the 60s and 70s.

They need to reopen those stations. I live in a little village near Leeds and it takes an hour on the bus to get there, versus what would be a ten minute train ride, if only the station still existed. People here would commute via train, the village would grow, Leeds would have more workers, everything would prosper. But the conservative dogma is committed to the idea there's simply nothing we can do and it's totally out of our hands and the free hand of the invisible market has our bollocks in its grip.

Bullshit. Frankly it shouldn't even matter if trains make a loss, they should be a public service that benefits everyone. It would benefit businesses to have workers and customers who can make it into city centres without having to drive or get on a bus that takes twice as long as it should and only comes once an hour.

People like trains. Trains are good for the economy. We should see trains as a loss leader for investment in the wider economy. But we don't, because conservative people are fucking retarded.
>> No. 14498 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 6:05 pm
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>>14497

>The conservative angle is that the trains are between a rock and a hard place because ticket sales are down and bla bla bla, but of course they are when services keep getting cut and all the useful local stations were closed in the 60s and 70s.

In 2019, passenger volumes were at an all-time high, having more than doubled since privatisation.

>Frankly it shouldn't even matter if trains make a loss, they should be a public service that benefits everyone.

Railways don't and can't benefit everyone. Rail infrastructure is inherently expensive and inherently takes up a lot of space, so pretty much everywhere in the world it's used to join cities to cities and suburbs to cities. Trains don't run to industrial estates and distribution centres. You can't take ten sheets of plasterboard on the train. Rail passengers as a demographic have significantly above-average incomes even in countries where ticket prices are heavily subsidised; those subsidies are highly regressive.

>Trains are good for the economy.

That's an extremely marginal argument. Most of the analysis for HS1 and HS2 suggested that they could have an economic benefit (assuming that they came in on budget, which they obviously wouldn't) but that benefit would mostly accrue in London at the expense of the North.

Buses definitely have an economic benefit and are definitely used by people on lower incomes, but I almost never see people talking about buses. We have good, cheap solutions for massively improving bus services - bus lanes, guided busways, traffic light sequencing, even very basic stuff like building more shelters and repairing bus stop signage.

>>14496

>Recently, Southern withdrew a fleet of old trains, because DfT said they had to be withdrawn. They've replaced them with ... well, nothing, because DfT didn't say they could replace them.

The Class 455s were withdrawn as part of a scheduled stock upgrade programme, because they're well over 30 years old. They didn't quite meet the Technical Standards for Interoperability - Persons with Reduced Mobility specifications, but the DfT provided a dispensation to continue using them after a consultation with the Disabled Persons' Transport Advisory Committee. They were due to be replaced with the Class 701 starting in 2019, but their entry into service has been delayed partly due to the pandemic and partly due to defects in the 701 that were revealed during Southern's acceptance testing. 455 diagrams are currently being filled by 377s. Neither the decision to withdraw the stock nor the failure to deliver replacement stock has anything to do with the DfT.
>> No. 14500 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 6:32 pm
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GB_Rail_Subsidy_1985-2019.png
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>>14498
>In 2019, passenger volumes were at an all-time high, having more than doubled since privatisation.
coincidentally, having had their subsidy about doubled as well...
>> No. 14501 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 7:44 pm
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>>14498

When I used to work for Maplin, who went out of business for very good reason (because they were shit and managed by total fucking morons), there was one common complaint from regular customers: Why do you only ever have two of a given component in stock? Why do you have a billion and twelve resistors behind the counter and a big pile of shite Chinese tablets nobody wants, but only ever two red LEDs or two zener diodes, or whatever?

The answer is because of the way the stock ordering system worked- If sales were low it reduced the stock level, if sales went up it would increase them. Promotional offers were exempt from it and resistors were completely arbitrarily kept in bulk, but all the rest of the components were subject to the whims of this very primitive automated ordering system. But this led to a problem on some kind of products- People rarely ever just wanted one, so they would come in, find out we only had two, and say "Oh, nevermind, I'll just go to RS."

So the sales never went up, because nobody ever wanted to buy just two. And despite the fact the demand was definitely there, no matter how many times we pointed this out to higher ups at regional/head office, they would simply say "But we've looked at the figures and the sales are low. It's not worth increasing stock levels on those." It was a cycle of stupidity that would have been very easy to break if anyone with the influence to do so was able to think like a human for a minute, and not like an Excel spreadsheet. That's one small, specific example, but ultimately I think it characterises exactly why that place ended up going under.

Your line of reasoning reminds me very much of that situation.
>> No. 14502 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 7:52 pm
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>>14500

As your graph suggests, most of that rise is accounted for by investment in Crossrail and HS2, which obviously couldn't have influenced passenger volumes because they hadn't opened yet.

The proportion of franchised rail industry spending funded by government fell from 32% in FY11-12 to 21% in FY18-19, with most of that spending going on infrastructure. In most years, TOCs pay more in to the treasury than they receive in subsidy.

Dividend payments represent on average about 2.5% of total fare revenue, which rather puts into perspective the argument that the railways are being bled dry by shareholders.

https://www.orr.gov.uk/sites/default/files/om/gb-financials-2012.pdf

https://www.orr.gov.uk/sites/default/files/om/uk-rail-industry-financial-information-2018-19.pdf
>> No. 14503 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 8:38 pm
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>>14501

I don't understand what you're proposing as an alternative.

Trains are very expensive but carry lots of people, so they only make any kind of economic sense if they join cities with other cities. Higher earners are disproportionately likely to live and work in cities, so they're more likely to use trains - this remains true in countries where fares are extremely cheap or even free due to public subsidy.

If you live in Wakefield and work in a big office in Leeds or Sheffield, you can get the train to work. If you live in Royston and work in Dewsbury, you can't get a train to work. We could build thousands of stations and countless miles of rail to join up all of the small towns, but it'd be cheaper to pay everyone to commute by taxi.

I just don't understand why people are so sentimental about trains. They're basically just massive buses that can't steer. That's fine, they have their place, but not being able to steer is a pretty severe limit on how much of a country's transport needs can be fulfilled by them.

Buses are really useful because they're like super-cheap little trains that can go pretty much anywhere using cheap infrastructure that we've already got. They receive almost no public subsidy and hardly anyone in public life cares about them, because they're full of poor people doing poor people things like "going to work in a location that isn't a city centre" or "coming home from work to a place that has cheap houses". I don't understand why so many people who call themselves socialists want to further subsidise a means of transport that is overwhelmingly used by the well-off, but ignore a means of transport that is overwhelmingly used by the poor.
>> No. 14504 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 8:48 pm
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>>14502
I wouldn't read too much into the rise from 2011 or 2016-ish to 2019. I'm more interested in the way that, post-Hatfield, the government has never dropped subsidies back down to BR levels. In that environment it seems fairly plausible to say that it's jumping the gun to credit privatisation with the increase in passenger numbers over BR when BR was surely being starved of cash. You're stuck with the unanswered hypothetical of "What if we never sold BR and just gave it £5bn instead?"
I'd effectively look at government infrastructure spending, plus network rail borrowing as representing a subsidy to TOCs. Sure, they pay track access charges - but if those represented full economic cost there'd be nothing to subsidise, and if those tracks weren't there there'd be nothing to operate the trains on. Not that TOCs should pay the full cost - we're fine subsidising the railways - but it feels like a bit of a shell game when we hold up the profitable, successful TOCs against rusty old British Rail, setting aside that BR had to do the job of a TOC, a ROSCO, and Network Rail all under one umbrella while (presumably) being underfunded to do so.

I think you could even make a pro-privatisation just-so story building on this way of looking at it: Privatisation worked because TOCs have institutional power that BR never could. They can choose not to bid for contracts to operate routes if the terms are bad, and they can donate to the campaign funds of political parties. BR might not have a choice in the former and definitely wouldn't be allowed to do the latter. Result: Even if BR would be just as good as a private company at operating trains, it wouldn't have the ability to badger the government into properly paying for the tracks they run on and it'd probably be expected to cross-subsidise a bit.
>> No. 14505 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 8:57 pm
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>>14501
Yeah when I worked there I never really twigged on that, but I used to think it was completely mad to have to sort tiny little components like that out into separate drawers, when you can order stuff like that by the reel for literal pennies at wholesale prices.
>> No. 14506 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 9:15 pm
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>>14503
Buses are something that can plausibly be handled by the market (and usually are to a degree, however poorly) or by your local council. (If it wasn't broke) The tend to be more regional than national, with all due credit to CityLink.
The result is that you wanted a big national program for buses your first port of call would be something like a card that lets you ride for free or proper funding for local authorities with a little bonus for bus services, rather than setting up a big nationalised attempt to give Brian Souter an aneurysm.

Now for the two part fun explanation: First the pedantry, that funding council takeovers of bus services and a card that lets under 25s travel for free were in Labour's last manifesto and probably won't be in its next one, they're not that neglected. Now the good one: The reason is that British socialism has tended to be quite nationalist in character. Nationalist in the sense of imagining something called 'Britain' and conceiving of it in a particular way. (Go read David Edgerton if you want a better rundown of this way of looking at it, I'll spare you my mangled words.) British Rail was a big national institution, and it's deeply associated with Britain as it was (or more aptly as it is misremembered) as a nice welfare state with a national economy circa 1945-79, something which was bludgeoned to death in the 1980s.
Anyway, buses don't really fit into this image because they tend to be regional rather than national. Even the National Bus Company (1969-88) was never really a national company in the way BR was, instead being a mess of regional subsidiary companies with no monopoly and which often competed with local authority bus services. The result is that buses don't really have a single icon that you can pine for the return of. Even if you're ideologically in favour of every local authority owning the buses that operate there and for Brian Souter to be gulaged, you're expecting a good deal of variation from area-to-area based on what the local council decides - it's more of an ideological matter, separate from that image of the iconic nationalised railway company.
>> No. 14507 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 9:41 pm
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>>14503

>I don't understand why so many people who call themselves socialists want to further subsidise a means of transport that is overwhelmingly used by the well-off, but ignore a means of transport that is overwhelmingly used by the poor.

Because the only reason they are overwhelmingly used by the well off is because we've forced them into that niche. Every town and village used to have it's own station, and if it still did, people would have a wealth of options which they simply no longer do. If people had the option, they would use it- If we had more local services people would use them. Having more freedom of choice brings more benefits than the statistics can possibly quantify.

That's ignoring the fact that even then, you're flat out wrong and loads of poor people do use trains and work in the city centre. I don't know what world you live in where the city centre is just people in suits carrying briefcases around but Pret needs people to mop the floors. Maccies and Greggs need people to serve the briefcase wankers. Capita has several big sardine can offices full of call-centre drones smack dab in the middle of Leeds. Lots of them get the bus, but lots of them get trains too. You're just looking at statistics and short-sightedly reading in the most obvious interpretation, the same way fisherpeople do when they talk about the gender pay gap, for instance.

I don't think you understood my parable about the Maplin component counter at all.
>> No. 14508 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 10:03 pm
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>>14503
>Trains are very expensive but carry lots of people, so they only make any kind of economic sense if they join cities with other cities.
U wot?
Try going to Birmingham and get the cross city line. It's always been an absolutely brilliant service and more cities need a line like it.
The biggest drawback to the line are the times it has to have pauses in its service to let the intercity trains go past. It's always packed around peak times but all the platforms are long enough that there's nothing to stop the operators adding an extra carriage to each train other than cost and not wanting empty carriages off peak.

You can also call trains too expensive but I don't think you really appreciate how much money we spend on cars and roads in comparison. Trains are absolutely fucking cheap compared to that.
>> No. 14509 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 10:22 pm
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>>14507

>Every town and village used to have it's own station, and if it still did, people would have a wealth of options which they simply no longer do. If people had the option, they would use it- If we had more local services people would use them. Having more freedom of choice brings more benefits than the statistics can possibly quantify.

As I said before, it would be cheaper to ferry everyone around by taxi. HS2 is currently on target to cost about £700 million per mile. Light rail is obviously much less expensive than that, but it's still bloody expensive.

If you're arguing that the Beeching reforms should never have taken place, fine. I'd argue that you're wrong, but it's academic now because they happened decades ago. It is now no longer a question of "should we build a railway here", but "should we demolish all of these houses that are in the way of the railway we'd like to build". Rail has to have high volumes of passengers to make any kind of economic sense, so we need rail capacity in the places where there are lots of people, which makes building new capacity ludicrously expensive because of all the stuff you have to demolish.

There's a very good case for building new towns on currently under-utilised sections of the rail network or in areas that would be amenable to branches or extensions of existing lines, but that would require a level of imagination and foresight that is beyond most governments, let alone the shit-show we've currently got in office. Building new commuter rail lines (not commuter tram lines, which often do make excellent sense) is just nonsensically expensive compared to the many perfectly good alternatives.

>That's ignoring the fact that even then, you're flat out wrong and loads of poor people do use trains and work in the city centre.

At no point did I say that no poor people use trains. If you want to provide cheap rail travel to poor people, that's easily delivered through concessionary passes and completely separate from the broader issues of rail financing. The issue is that if you're subsidising the rail industry as a whole, you're mainly subsidising people on above-average incomes, which is manifestly unfair.

>>14504

I'm not massively against renationalisation, nor am I particularly in favour of it. I don't think it particularly matters either way. Railways are just incredibly expensive and only make sense on a narrow range of routes where you've got massive passenger volumes and you can maintain the infrastructure at vaguely reasonable cost. I don't object to rail on principle, I don't particularly care whether it's in public or private ownership, but I'm deeply sceptical that it's fair or prudent to heavily subsidise it.
>> No. 14510 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 10:34 pm
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>>14508

>You can also call trains too expensive but I don't think you really appreciate how much money we spend on cars and roads in comparison. Trains are absolutely fucking cheap compared to that.

The railways represent 9% of the total passenger miles, but 55% of government expenditure on transport. They're really, really fucking expensive.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/818399/CCS001_CCS0719570952-001_PESA_ACCESSIBLE.pdf

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/transport-statistics-great-britain-2019
>> No. 14511 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 11:01 pm
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Mick Lynch is on Question Time. The man's never off the telly now. He's like the Ant & Dec of industrial action. No wonder no negotiations are happening when the people who should be negotiating are pushing each other out of the way to pontificate on the news.
>> No. 14512 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 11:03 pm
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>>14509

>The issue is that if you're subsidising the rail industry as a whole, you're mainly subsidising people on above-average incomes, which is manifestly unfair.

I'd disagree and argue that it manifestly doesn't matter. Universal benefits are more popular than means tested ones, among all demographics, always and every time anyone polls on it- The important thing is lowering barriers to entry and making things accessible to people at all levels of society.

As a socialist (if that's the direction you wish to suggest you're arguing from) one of the important things to get a grip on is that targeted measures to help poor people often create a kind of null zone. People who are just well off enough not to benefit from the help you're giving out, but not well off enough to feel like they're not missing out.
>> No. 14513 Anonymous
23rd June 2022
Thursday 11:52 pm
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>>14512

From each according to their ability, to me according to my whims.
>> No. 14514 Anonymous
24th June 2022
Friday 12:22 am
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>>14510
This only holds if you take the more recent figures, which are skewed by HS2 and Crossrail, which are skewed by the obscene price of land and housing and by various degrees of incompetence. In 2014-15 road transport outspent rail provided you factor in a bit of "Local Public Transport" surely being local bus services.
(You could also try taking a look at it by combining both government and private spending on each mode. Road might look cheap when you just have the government paying for the roads themselves, but it'll be a lot less attractive once you bung in the cost of everyone buying and operating their own car to get the total cost.)
>> No. 14515 Anonymous
24th June 2022
Friday 12:53 am
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>>14511
Someone like him as Labour leader would be amazing.
>> No. 14516 Anonymous
24th June 2022
Friday 2:46 am
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>>14513

lalala I don't like when reality doesn't match my ideology so I'll just pretend
>> No. 14517 Anonymous
24th June 2022
Friday 3:50 am
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>>14498
>Neither the decision to withdraw the stock nor the failure to deliver replacement stock has anything to do with the DfT.
Nonsense. It was within DfT's gift to allow them to keep running until the replacements were ready. The 455s on SWR have been refitted and will be running for anything up to a decade.

>455 diagrams are currently being filled by 377s.
... which takes them away from their own services. Lots of services being removed or curtailed from 8 to 4 cars. Which Southern couldn't do without DfT approval.
>> No. 14518 Anonymous
24th June 2022
Friday 3:52 am
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>>14497
Beeching envisioned a lot of those lightly-used services being replaced with buses. Obviously, that didn't end up happening.

FWIW, general consensus among industry types that want to improve transport is that a simple "reverse Beeching" probably isn't the best way to go in most cases. Lots of places are genuinely too small for a rail connection, and extra stops need to be factored into timetabling through services on a mixed-traffic line. A useful rule of thumb here has come from the Scottish Greens, who suggest that nowhere bigger than 5k should be without.

FWIW, London demonstrates a good case of integrated transport at work, where in the outer boroughs you have bus services that will take you to rail and tube stations. This is something that's lacking in the rest of the country outside of a town's main station having a bus interchange nearby.

If nobody wants to drop a thousand or so new homes near your village, then the very least it should expect is a bus to a nearby station on the line so you might have, say, a 5-10 minute bus connecting into a 10-15 minute train service, instead of an hour-long ride on the bus getting stuck in suburban traffic. Depending on the lay of the land locally, it might be your village that gets the station that people in adjacent villages on the line might travel in to.
>> No. 14519 Anonymous
29th June 2022
Wednesday 11:17 pm
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>British postal workers, train station staff vote to strike

>British postal workers and train station staff have voted in favour of strike action, their trade unions said on Wednesday, as workers across the economy grapple with employers as surging inflation bites. The Unite union said around 2,400 managers across 1,000 Royal Mail (RMG.L) delivery offices had voted to strike in a dispute over job cuts, pay and working conditions, and said it would announce strike dates in the coming days.

>"Our members have had enough," Mike Eatwell, Unite national officer with responsibility for the Royal Mail postal group, said in a statement. "Senior management at Royal Mail has lost the support of their own managers and need to reflect carefully on their next steps. They need to come back to the negotiating table with a set of constructive proposals, otherwise strike action will go ahead causing chaos to letter and parcel deliveries across the UK." Another union representing staff at Royal Mail are also balloting their members for action.

>Further disruption on the railways is set to follow. The TSSA union said on Wednesday its members in train station roles at Avanti West Coast, which operates passenger services including from London Euston to Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow, had voted overwhelmingly for strike action. "The ballot result at Avanti is only the beginning. Our union is balloting members across almost another dozen train companies and Network Rail," TSSA General Secretary Manuel Cortes said. "If they had any sense they would come to the table and sort this out, so we have a fair settlement for workers."
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/british-postal-workers-train-station-staff-vote-strike-2022-06-29/

This is the perfect time to promise to send a package only for it to sit on a table for 2 weeks.

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