What do people think about rail strikes?

[ITUnurse]

I cannot find any threads on the rail strikes / opinion of them.

I personally do support the strikes. We in the NHS will face a similar struggle shortly. I support the rights of workers to strike. Conditions at the moment are dire.

However, if England is so right wing and strikes aren't supported and the Tories continue to be voted in. I've not seen much public support online except from a few and I'm at risk of being in an echo chamber.

Ultimately if England is so under the thumb of the tories, I'm not sure what the long term solution is. The rest of the UK doesn't return the Tories in such numbers.

If you don't support strike action, what do you think the rail workers, NHS workers etc should do? We've already got people leaving enmasse. It's difficult to comment on the conditions of a job you don't work in and nurses regularly get gaslighted on here I am genuinely concerned as to what is going to happen to the public sector of the UK with this right wing stranglehold.

Thanks

Hardly any rapists get arrested in the first place, never mind make it to court.

@Dotjones

Your solution to striking, eg withdrawing of labour on planned days with a clear negotiation process to prevent it, is that everyone quits their jobs. You're saying you disagree with people withdrawing their labour temporarily and instead they should withdraw their labour permanently. This is a much more destructive action than strike action. Think about it.

What services are worse?

Once again, Wales is not run as a separate country, so comparisons with a Labour Westminster Govt are pointless.

CT is not clear cut, those areas that are better off, tend to have lower CT because the council has less poorer people needing help, be that CT support, social services or funding social care/care home placement.

Under which party has this sorry state of affairs arisen?

More generally, since Boris Johnson, Brexit and CV, this country seems to be falling apart.

The latest is an all out Barristers strike, 8 days of limited imports into the UK, 18% inflation and £24,000 tuition fee's.

Healthcare, education, transport... And if it were the case that it's all Westminster's fault, then services here would only be equally bad, not significantly worse than those across the border.

This sorry state of affairs has been developing for decades, spanning multiple colours of government.

Sobaridiot
"So all these reasons are completely logical from a business perspective. What is striking meant to achieve? Try and get the company to change their minds and stick with the 'old ways'? Why would they? It would be foolish for the business."

As I said, and you either ignored or missed, the railways, despite our politicians best efforts, is a public transport system and should foremost be service. It shouldn’t be seen as just another business and the profit motive shouldn’t be upper most. To close the majority of booking offices will deny a sizeable percentage of the population access to what is supposed to be a public service.

As for workers deciding if maintainance schedules risk safety. Well when getting your car maintained would you prefer to trust a mechanic, an accountant or a share holder? But heck what do the guys and gals on the ground know about anything, they’re just workers.

In some cases it may make sense to do track inspections overnight due to traffic levels. But imagine if either you or your partner got a letter saying from now on, like it or not, it’s permanent nights or the sack. Oh and I forgot to say, no extra pay for doing it.

But really you just come across as being deliberately obtuse about all this

@FunnyBeaux

The NHS is in the midst of the biggest staffing crisis they have ever faced due to those leaving. Are the government fixing this by increasing wages? No instead they sit back and let hundreds of avoidable deaths happen due to lack of staffing. Don’t pretend for one second that leaving does anything to help wages under a Tory government desperate to see it fail so they can push privatisation.

The Tories made that form of strike illegal.

As I said, and you either ignored or missed, the railways, despite our politicians best efforts, is a public transport system and should foremost be service. It shouldn’t be seen as just another business and the profit motive shouldn’t be upper most.

You really are delusional if you actually believe this.

My cousin is a former barrister and she says the last 10 years has seen a dramatic fall in convictions for all crimes and a real terms fall in funding for legal aid and removal of entitlement.

Not too mention pay.

25% of criminal aid Barristers have left that sector in the last 5 years, with an avg wait of 18months before a case gets to trial, 3 years for rape.

But even if we accept you re right and the situation developed 20 or 30 + years ago... the Tories have been in for over 12 years and have done nothing, nothing at all to improve matters, its getting worse and worse.

Under privatisation, yes its a business, in most of Europe, its seen as a service first.

Who has the best and also the cheapest railways?

The Swiss have the best by many measures. Certainly not the cheapest though, they put an enormous amount of public subsidy into it.

But even if we accept you re right and the situation developed 20 or 30 + years ago
That's not quite what I said. I said that the situation had been developing for several decades. The criminal justice system has been dysfunctional for a long time, focusing on the rights of the offender at the expense of the victim. Politicians of all hues have been to blame - both Theresa May and Sadiq Khan have been responsible for the plummeting stop-and-search rates in London, which has resulted in a huge increase in violent crime. Courts are far too soft (possibly encouraged to be so by the MoJ because of the lack of prison spaces). Police officers are hampered by an avalanche of paperwork, one heaped up by every new government.

Off topic but my mum went around Switzerland by train in the 1950s before she started her nurse training.

I ve used the French and Swedish railways, they were very cheap.

You re a rail buff aren't you, so i wont argue with you!!! lol!

I support the strikes. I wish more workers were unionised and could strike and therefore negotiate more effectively. Every striker is doing it for their whole union but in a way they're doing it for everyone else too. None of us benefit from a race to the bottom. We can't all work for the best pay and conditions but if some unions are working to keep standards off the absolute floor it's good for all of us.

Disappointed maybe.
Like Oscar Wilde once said there are some who “know the price of everything and the value of nothing”

It isn't delusional (and shouldn't be thus minimised) to expect utilities to be there for the benefit of the majority of the citizens of a country. And so it was thus before public transport became a profit-making machine, according to a capitalist ideology - what is clear is that there needs to be a re-set, back to a nationalised public service. That will be challenging to achieve, but if we stay stuck in the same groove, nothing will improve.

Competition, incentives towards profit only, isn't working, so these strikes could just tip the balance towards a system that works for the majority. Mostly it will mitigate the greed and lack of accountability that has been allowed to persist for far too long.

^ to @Sobaridiot comment

I don’t support the rail strikes, I think they should do them Japan style where the rail workers refuse to charge people money for travelling, so the company still loses the £££££ but travellers can still get to their jobs and other essential services aren’t hit.

(Tbh pretty much all the rail workers I’ve ever met have been rude power trippy and unhelpful, the sort of people who the police would reject, certainly our local station master is overpaid whatever he’s getting. Shuts ticket office when he feels like it so he can sit round the corner smoking and pretending he can’t see the queue of people missing their train because the office is shut. I look forward to the day when computers run trains! I don’t know what they’re striking about this time and haven’t bothered to check so I doubt it’ll get them much sympathy. I use Southern who’ve been striking on and off for years, we’re used to it.)

Whatever the rail strike is supposed to achieve, it won’t.

The NHS is a completely completely different issue, mostly full of wonderful people working way over their contracted hours in horrific conditions, successive governments have deliberately underfunded it to create pressure for an American style system and then treated them like shit during the pandemic and something has to be done. I’m not convinced strikes are the answer, I’ve held a job in the past where it was illegal for me to strike and I expect the government will simply extend that to NHS workers.

Im not against rail strikes but I don't think they're being effective which is why Lynch is having to increase them. Even during normal working, it's common to not have trains turn up so I'm used to inconvenience.
Ultimately, passengers will end up having to pay higher prices to compensate for losses. Always the public that lose out.

I think they have every right to strike, and it's appalling that salaries don't cover the cost of living. I also thing the cost of living is a wider issue though and sympathise with those who are frustrated with the strikes. The strike hasn't affected me but I think the state of this country, and the poverty, the discrepancy between the rich and the poor not only in lifestyle but also in fair ess and rules is utterly insane.

If they followed your advice they'd have a criminal record as that's illegal under current laws.

How are computers going to assist disabled passengers btw?

How are computers going to assist disabled passengers btw?

I’ve never seen staff assisting a disabled passenger.

Our station doesn’t even have rumble strips or ramps from one platform to the other - the only way is over the steps. Completely inaccessible.

Ticket office is rarely open either and everyone somehow manages. We just don’t rely on people to be there. It’s a commuter station too.