Do you sympathise with the strikers?

[TheDoveFromAboveCooCoo]

I'm afraid it's a no from me.

We are in West Yorkshire and we are just entering week 3 of a full bus drivers strike from one of the operators.

It's costing £75 a week in taxis to get my daughter to and from school. It's 6 miles away so too far to walk and I'm disabled and can't drive.

For my eldest daughter to visit her girlfriend it should be a 15 minute bus journey. Now it's a bus to Bradford Centre, then another one to Leeds, then another to her town.

My husband works in a minimum wage job and some of his colleagues who cannot drive are having to take unpaid leave as they can't afford taxis to get them to work and back.

I'm pretty frustrated and wish they would just bloody agree on something!!

Interested to hear other peoples thoughts and opinions especially with all these other potential strikes coming up.

I'm torn. I support them but the timing sucks with exams. DS is doing his A levels and we will have to fork out £120 on taxi fares this week as he takes the train to college and neither of us can take him. What about people who can't take their DC and have no money for taxis? It's very worrying.

easy to support strikes if it isn’t fucking you over

I think this is accurate. I would be interested to know how many would still support it if they were having to take two weeks(more now) unpaid leave from work or pay huge taxi fares impacting their ability to pay for their rent or put food on the table and not knowing how long this would go on for.

Yes. I'm affected and using AL and walking one day, also have had pay freeze for 3years now likely to be 4.
People don't strike for fun and I see America and their horrible conditions and worry how eager the UK seems to be to replicate that.
Full support here.

Yes, I do support the strike because I agree with what they are fighting for - better/safer working conditions for their staff and the general public and fair pay.

On a related but slightly different note it's been interesting to see how the 'you're selfish' brigade have now moved onto calling out the RMT instead of unvaccinated/unmasked/socialising people. I wonder who will get the 'selfish' treatment next? It's become the 21st century version of 'she's a witch' in some quarters I think 😂

It's not just about pay rises. I've read that a major issue is safety but also introduction of new technology. Scrapping trains that are relatively new costing millions to rush in heavily automated ones. Appreciate this might not be the full story.
Some of the vox pops on radio/tv complaining about the £50,000 salaries of train drivers don't realise that they aren't actually the ones striking, it's the guys working on signals, repairing the tracks, ticket clerks who earn way less...

This post isn’t about the trains? It’s about the bus strikes. People aren’t reading the thread.

Yes, I support them. I’m a train driver, and whilst we’ve been looked after, the people at the bottom (who are represented by RMT) have been well and truly shafted for the last 3+ years.

A lot of the Train Operating Companies (TOCs) have been scrapping out to improve their shareholders/parent companies, but when Covid happened and they weren’t going to make a profit, they handed back the keys and the DfT stepped in, so it’s the government who are responsible, hence trying to deflect the blame.

There was £££££ being thrown around for their mate’s contracts during covid, but now the people who worked throughout want a rise because they’ve taken a real-terms cut for the last three plus years, forget it.

I’d also be sceptical when they claim to be offering 12%, because let’s face it, you’d jump at that, oh, unless it came with a massive cut to your T&Cs so it actually wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

Everything seems so chaotic - trains, planes and automobiles and cost of living. Just don't seem to get a settled period these days.

Yes, I support all workers rights to strike and I'm not surprised they're starting now. I think we're in this for the long haul.

Do I wish the strikes didn't affect normal people, trying to go about their lives? Yes, but then the strikes would be pretty pointless.

I think this is the beginning of people waking up and saying no to the way the current government are doing things. The more people that find their anger, the more likely something is to change. And change is definitely needed.

Sorry it's affecting you so much, it sucks.

No. Public transport is an essential service and it punishes those who need to physically be at work - shop workers, hospital workers etc. my neighbours who work in banking, government etc will be able to comfortably work from home. It doesn't affect them, it affects people like me who are on zero hours contracts or self employed and don't get paid if we can't get to work. I'm stressed and anxious at the thought of this week.

Oops, sorry OP!!

This. I am inclined to support industrial action even if it is majorly inconvenient for me and others - the right to withdraw labour is important, and it’s never done on a whim.

Yes I do ! They have been driven to this last resort measure.

I support them. I wish everyone had a Union to support them, especially those on minimum wage.

Put the wage rise into perspective:
The first advert I saw for a railway cleaner was offering £11 an hour, based on a 40 hrs week thats £22,880 a year.

A 10% pay rise is £2288 meaning they get £25168.

MPs received an pay increase of £2212 this year. Maybe we forget percentages and give every public sector worker the same £ increase as the MPs get. They will still be nearly £60k better off than the cleaner they are blaming for striking.

Grant Schapps needs to grow up, stop playing with people's lives and do the right thing for the country rather than trying to distract from Johnson before the by-elections!

No. We all need more money. We aren’t all striking. My mum’s carer isn’t striking. My dog walker isn’t striking. The canteen staff at work aren’t striking. What makes the strikers think they deserve a raise when everyone else is equally desperate but nobody else is getting one?

Absolutely in support of the strike

Yes. As a pp said, it's not a race to the bottom. The right to strike and withold labour to ensure optimum working conditions, safety and income are imperative to all areas of employment,. particularly those which don't involve cushy offices, liquid lunches and bankers bonuses.

As they say, weekends etc happened because of the unions. Strikes won't ever leave folks happy, because if they did, they wouldn't work. We need to support our workers the best we can, even when it means things are temporarily harder for us all.

And I say this as someone who needs trains to get to a hospital appt this week. Yes it's hard. But yes I support them. Government should be doing more.

Did you read the OP,? this isn’t about the trains.

the OP states at the end of their post ...
Interested to hear other peoples thoughts and opinions especially with all these other potential strikes coming up

So yes it is about Train strikes too.

The Unions are striking for us all, why should MPs get a 20k pay rise since 2010?

If the unions just role over, then no one else will get a decent pay rise....Teachers, Lecturers, AHP,s Care Workers...

what happened to Johnsons "High Wage, High Skill" economy? more BS.

Why should the low paid always be the ones who have to make the sacrifices? yet the people running (badly) these businesses, award themselves 100s of '000s in pay, pensions and bonuses.

It’s really interesting that so many people are responding regarding the train strikes which haven’t even started yet instead of reading the OP where it is clearly talking about the two weeks of bus strikes that are ongoing. Amazing really.

Thread title just mentions strikes.

Go to any news outlet now and top story is train strikes. These will probably spread to other sectors too. Although the op talks about bus strikes, at the end of the day it’s all public transport and the effects are similar whether you travel by bus or train.

I support all workers who want to strike. Bus drivers, train drivers, cabin crew. It's not a race to the bottom with wages.

I do.

Yes true.

I'm finding it equally frustrating that nothing has been mentioned on the news until talk of the train strikes affecting London. Yet an entire county has been sat here 15 days without buses.