Strikes, strikes, strikes (try saying that one fast). You’d think that at a time when redundancy is the order of the day the rail unions would be doing all they could to keep their members’ jobs safe.
But no. Drivers on East Midlands Trains are striking for six days, on three consecutive Fridays and Mondays, making for some nice long summer weekends (funny how it never seems to happen in the winter) because the above inflation pay rise they were offered wasn’t good enough.
Did you get that? Above inflation.
How can that not be good enough?
And on my line, too, there are eight days of strikes on the cards for National Express. Everything went suspiciously quiet for a while, but today the rail company put up a page on its site explaining that it still looked likely to happen, and that if it did then they ‘would not expect to be able to run any train services’.
Again, an above inflation pay offer was rejected and, to seal the deal, the unions demanded better conditions, too.
A statement on one of the union sites succinctly summed up its position: ‘This company [National Express] has made half a billion in profits out of our members over the past decade, it’s a scandal that they are offering their staff peanuts in return.’
The point they seem to be missing is that pay rises have to be met by us, the travelling public, many of whom have had their pay frozen this year. And the effects of strikes, too, are felt by… yes, us, the travelling public, so we lose either way.
As such, the best the travelling public can hope for is that the train operators call the unions’ bluff and refuse to give in. I’ll happily put up with the disruption until the union members realise that there is another way.
National Express is a publicly-listed company and, as such, the workers can buy some of the stock and share in the benefits of the company that has made half a billion in profits out of the union members’ hard work. Perhaps then they’d be happy to moderate the pay rises and avoid the kind of strike action that could lead to financial penalties that will impact their dividend payouts.
Oh, and yes, the company may have made a profit out of its workers, but those workers have also made a profit out of selling their labour to the company. You don’t see the company going on strike on account of the profits that its workers have made by selling their time and skills.
