For all those who support the strikes

[chopc]

Where do you think the money will come from for all the pay rises? Are you personally willing to pay more tax?
We all saw during the pandemic it is the poorly paid essential workers that kept the country going and they totally deserve more money than the claps they got. However will YOU be prepared to contribute to the pot ?

If not where do you think the govn will find more money from?

The crux of the matter is some services are better provided by private entities, (The post office)

I doubt the victims of the Horizon scandal would agree with you plus POs aren't on strike. Royal Mail was sold off cheaply & has sent billions over seas and in dividends, it also has to provide a universal service which is price capped, would Evri etc do so well if it was forced to deliver a letter to anywhere in the UK for 68p ?

and (some rail workers' jobs are becoming automated)

The rail strikes aren't about bring back ticket operators and conductors, its about pay AND safe operation.

and some ideals the services are based on are no longer fit for purpose re the NHS

What services aren't fit for purpose?

if the service is crap now, how will raising pay resolve the issue.

In the case of health and education, by recruiting and retaining staff. I can't speak for rail services or postal services but one of the major issues in poor health and education provision is lack of staff.

Looking at the summaries of these from a Google search, Price’s law seems irrelevant to the question of whether parasites with no obvious allegiances rise to the top of society. It also appears to have been taken out of its original context (publication of scientific papers) and applied completely inappropriately to all sorts of scenarios where it is clearly so out of context in its application that it cannot be taken seriously.

The Matthew effect, on the other hand, certainly resonates.

Sending physical mail is becoming obsolete. As people and business move to other formats of communication.
All ticket offices will be "repurposed" within 18 months, and all tickets will have to be purchased online or via a machine. Rail operators also object to inefficient working practices, use of drone footage for track inspections, for instance, walking time, and rather than having 9 people on standby only using 1 to do a singular job.

The NHS much like pensions was not designed to see people through their lives an extra 20-30 yrs. So no the NHS is not fit for purpose.

NON of the services are fit for a modern society.
More pay or striking doesn't change these operational monetary facts.

The finance industry is a prime example of rewarding the wrong behaviour. Strange how such a dysfunctional industry should command such high rewards.

NON of the services are fit for a modern society.
This is true, but privatising them hasn't helped.
The idea that rail workers (except the ticket office) are being replaced by automation is laughable. There are significant parts of the network still running on antiquated Victorian infrastructure because dividends and profits have to be paid before investment is made.

Correct - and not just in banking - finance directors of relatively small outfits are raking in gut-wrenching salaries.

Ticket machines in railway stations seem deliberately designed to rip off the customer, by making it almost impossible to work out where to find the cheapest fare for the journey. Too much “profit” these days seems to be derived from hoodwinking people into spending more than they needed to, for a service that isn’t appropriate to their needs, rather than in providing a better service than your competitors. It’s dire management at the top - the idiots making the decisions on what is and is not efficient and worthwhile and disseminating a pretty vile culture.

I would be, unfortunately it then relies on politicians keep their promises and put money where it’s meant to go.

or they could stop spaffing it left right and centre as @PAFMO said! MoD mismanagement cost billions this year in cancelled contracts, Im sure that money could’ve made a dent

What the leaders of these big businesses have basically concluded is that people are their problem - both customers and employees. Don’t give customers access to people to talk to, because customers are a pain and messy and complainy, and just cause problems if you give them access to people, as people have to respond to them, whereas machines can just unhelpfully spew out whatever suits management, which is generally a big fuck off to the customer.

If NHS staff were better paid then there wouldn't be so many vacancies and so the reliance on agency staff would be reduced- so the overall bill for wages would be lower.

Also, MPs could stop handing expensive contracts to their friends, or wasting money on non-existent/sub par PPE, or paying for Boris' legal bill, or subsidising MPs' food/alcohol....

We are seeing changes you’re right. Rail demand is also down due to decrease in commuting post pandemic.

Change is hard when it comes to people but technology and working patterns force it in the end.

Personally I would be more than happy to pay more tax - if our politicians made a fair call and agreed to a wage cut and to pay for their own fucking dinners at work like the rest of us. I am also angry that the social care levy was axed - such a short-sighted move when the social care crisis is responsible for a fair amount of the NHS issues.
A huge amount of working people are entitled to top-up benefits which tax-payers are essentially paying for. Fairer wages would mean less top-ups surely.

An investigation by the Labour Party showed that during 2021-22 60 trusts in England spent more than £800m on temporary staff and the total spend on bank staffing exceeded £1.7bn.

With vacancies at a record high and shifts a struggle to fill, trusts were forced to break framework agreements that cap their spending on agency staff rates—something they are permitted to override in exceptional cases.

This is another key point, framework, that design is such a nonsense, provision for flexible, incentivized pay should be one of the tools used at times to alleviate pressure.
However, I stand by my point the NHS was not designed for indefinite lifespans or for a sizable portion of the population to be ill or need treatment.
It's not tenable.

I think quasi-private-public with the benefit added by employers to cover will have to be used.
At the moment UK employment benefits are cycling to work, a few cakes, butties, and a perk box with vouchers for a branded outlet.

Perhaps a perk of some student debt paid off at each year between 5 and 10 years service would also help, along with a payrise

I'm not sure it would- at current tuition fee levels and salaries, most NHS staff won't pay their student loans off before they're written off, so this wouldn't actually make any real difference- the only difference would be on paper.

When it comes to incentivised pay, most people can see that it is seldom fairly rewarded and often incentivises undesirable behaviours (eg focusing on work that is noticed and benefits the employee more than the organisation, or worse, actually actively harms the organisation in the long term, but looks good enough for long enough to get that person their promotion out of there so that others have to handle the inevitable fallout). It also doesn’t work when those at the top are given patently unjustified rewards and incentives for appallingly bad management. Nobody is properly incentivised by a plainly rigged system, it just brings out the worst in people. Unfortunately, we have far too few good leaders of business to recognise that - there is a massive dearth of managers with any comprehension of how to handle human beings as opposed to economic units.

If the government have to pay more, it will hopefully encourage them to be more careful with existing resources and not waste them the way they have done now.

The government apparently think the country can afford to pay the defence costs for inquiries into Hancock's and Johnson's behaviour regarding their times in office.

Their defences are likely to run into millions. Funny how there is money for that, isn't it?

We're doing what now?!

This was the first post of the thread and really there didn’t need to be any more - this says it all

Tell me that you haven't a clue about railways without telling me you haven't a clue.

Pray do tell me how a drone can tighten a loose fishplate bolt or insert a pandrol clip. We do have inspection trains which use cameras and pattern recognition to detect potential issues in the track. When they detect something they drop yellow paint to mark it for closer inspection by a human. Half the time the human finds that there was nothing actually wrong, it was a false positive. The other half of the time the human had already spotted and reported the issue.

If no one uses ticket offices (as is so often claimed) then why are there always queues when I need to go in and grab some change for my float? Everyone just ignores the vending machines and goes to a human. Yes, lots of people buy online but often find themselves being stung by me because they bought the wrong ticket - not that the government is planning to do anything about the hideously complicated fares system.

Have you mastered the art of disapparation? I haven't so unlike you when I need to go from somewhere to somewhere else I need time to do so. You wouldn't plan home help care without allocating driving time to get from one house to another so why shouldn't I have time allotted to account for the four minutes it takes to get from the depot to the platform? I'm not cutting my break short, if I had an incident and it transpired that I hadn't taken my full break I'd be in the shit.

Oh yes, the management love the fact that they can charge the customer twice by making the system absolutely Byzantine. They of course aren't the poor sod on the ground who has to deal with the angry customer. All sorts of TOC-specific fares for operators who run a couple of trains a day, just to fiddle the ORCATS system (the algorithm that allocates revenue to different operators when they both cover the same route).

There's a lot more to rail demand than just commuters. On some days in November demand was at 97% of the equivalent day in 2019, which is particularly impressive considering that 2019 was a record year. Sadly the government arrogantly ignored the advice of the MDs and CEOs back in April and decided to do their best to make the service so unreliable that demand is being stifled.

If you understaff your operation to the extent that you are heavily reliant upon staff volunteering to come in on their days off, and on them doing favours for the roster clerk by swapping shifts or staying late to keep the service going, the last thing that you want to do is to piss them off.

@PrincessConstance Hot air, you said nothing, no solutions.

Sending mail is not obsolete nor about to be and it doesn't answer the question why is the RM hamstrung but Evri etc isnt?

NR don't use inefficient working practices, they use safe ones, why should one man in a van be sent out in to the middle of no where to work on a track, to do 3 different skilled jobs? which is what the Govt wants.
Whilst you or i might be able to navigate a ticket machine or the internet, millions either can't or don't.

As for less passengers? so we cut services and staff and then when demand goes up we do what exactly? which as we get back to removing more cars from the roads will happen.

Seems some have learnt nothing from the airlines fiasco.

When you say the NHS isn't fit for purpose, again, not true!
it has been run down & not just staff, its equipment and buildings too, perhaps the Tories on here can tell us all what has happened to 40 new hospitals?

Thats before we get to social care, which has been deliberately made a national min wage job, done by women, with an exploited workforce, after car costs (why do they have to use their own?) they work for well below nmw and if they have a work related car issue, it costs them to work for us, yet despite mass staff shortages, wages are still low.

Tories ideologically hate public services and thats at the root of all the issues we see in the UK.