GREEDY, BOLSHIE, LAZY AND OBSOLETE
As they reject a £75,000 pay offer and announce a new three-day strike, a damning indictment of the dinosaurs behind the endless misery and chaos on Southern Rail
What a surprise. Southern Rail drivers voted yesterday to go on strike for three days at the beginning of august and are about to bring the network to a grinding halt.
tens of thousands of commuters and small businesses will once again find their lives appallingly disrupted.
aslef, the militant train drivers’ union, announced its decision just hours after the Department of transport fined the owners of Southern Rail — Govia thameslink Railway — £13.4 million for its ‘poor performance’ in 2016 when no fewer than 60,000 trains were cancelled.
But while there are grounds for harsh measures against Govia, it is the aslef and RMt unions that are the real villains in this sorry story. the latest walk-outs, which will result in the cancellation of almost all services on Southern and Gatwick Express, will take place on tuesday 1st, Wednesday 2nd, and Friday 4th of august.
the union’s venal strike action — there have been 38 walkouts by aslef and RMt since the dispute began 14 months ago — has led to misery on an unprecedented scale on one of Britain’s busiest rail networks. and now they are at it again.
Last month, when an investigation by Network Rail chief Chris Gibb concluded the industrial action had triggered a meltdown in a system which should be able to cope with 300,000 passengers a day, the union barons’ response was — you’ve guessed it — to demand more strikes.
the new strike is separate from but linked to a long-running dispute over the role of conductors (Southern wants to replace them with ‘on board supervisors’ who would check tickets, etc, but no longer be in charge of closing doors which would be the drivers’ responsibility).
a quarter of all daily services have already been cancelled for an indefinite period owing to aslef members’ refusal to work overtime over the train guards dispute.
But the unions are also making exorbitant pay demands for their members, who are already very handsomely paid.
this latest action, for example, follows the unions’ rejection of a deal with Southern Rail that would have taken annual pay to a staggering average of £70,000 a year once overtime is included — and possibly thousands more on top.
AMoNGthe commuters who’ve had their lives turned upside down by the unions during the dispute are nurses, junior doctors, civil servants and many, many others who earn far less than a train driver, and yet find themselves expected to sympathise with this overpaid, mollycoddled and bolshie workforce.
(It’s a shame that Southern Rail didn’t offer the drivers a few thousand a year, taking them to £80,000. that would have put them in the top five per cent of ‘ disgustingly rich’ earners whom Jeremy Corbyn wants to tax at 45 per cent.)
of course, in common with all unions since time immemorial, aslef insists that the dispute and strike action is about safety and absolutely nothing to do with their members’ greed. It claims drivers are really striking on behalf of us, the public, insisting we’ll all be at risk if Southern Rail is allowed to make drivers responsible for opening and closing the doors as well as driving the train.
It is utter nonsense. Driver-only operation trains have been running safely on the British Rail network since 1982 when they were introduced on the St Pancras to Bedford line. and no, driver-only trains weren’t dreamt up by a nasty, capitalist rail company — they were introduced by the now- defunct British Rail, the nationalised body lionised by Corbyn & Co.
the fact is that Southern Rail doesn’t even want to shift to full driver-only operation. It wants to retain a guard on board almost all trains but to change their responsibilities to more on-board duties — such as checking tickets — rather than operating the doors.
having a driver open and close the doors — aided by CCtV — is tried and tested technology. In fact, Southern lags years behind the rest of the network.
one third of Britain’s trains are driver- only operated. the more driver- only trains there are, the safer the rail network has become. It is now more than ten years since a passenger last died in a rail crash in Britain. taking into account travellers killed falling from trains or falling off platforms, the accident rate per billion passenger kilometres has fallen to less than a fifth of what it was in 1982.
Britain’s two rail safety quangos, the Rail Safety and Standards Board and the office of Rail and Road agree that the system proposed by Southern Rail is safe.
the former concluded last year that having the driver open and close the doors could, in fact, be safer than having a guard do the job, as currently happens on most Southern Rail trains.
‘the removal of any possible miscommunication, which could exist between driver and guard could, potentially, deliver some safety benefits,’ it concluded.
and much as aslef tries to convince us that its members have a terribly tough job, I’m afraid it just doesn’t wash with me. In 2007, the union allowed a Guardian journalist to shadow a driver for a day. the driver, Simon Weller, was on aslef’s executive committee, but that didn’t stop him being honest about the job.
he was attracted to become a train driver in the 1980s, he said, when a friend told him: ‘Get a job on the railway — it’s a skive.’
Lounging on a sofa in front of a large tV right next to the fruit machines in the drivers’ quarters at Brighton station, he went on to say that the job had become even easier since then, as it had been radically deskilled by technology.
‘these days,’ the Guardian writer reported, ‘the main enemy is not uppity guards, but monotony, as the repetitive nature of a fairly easy job tends to numb the brain into inattention.’ hence the fruit machines to keep their minds occupied, presumably.
So what does the job entail: there is no steering wheel in a train cab, just four forward gears and four levels of braking, as well as a ‘dead man’s handle’ — with which the driver is in constant contact and which stops the train if he or she falls asleep or loses consciousness.
Yet, as the job has become easier, the unions have managed to extract ever more ridiculous pay packages. In 1997, when trains on the London to Brighton line were privatised, the basic pay of a driver was £11,000. By 2007, it had climbed to £34,000. Under the deal that aslef has just rejected, it would have been pumped up from £49,000 to £60,700 over the next four years — a 24 per cent increase at a time millions of public sector workers are subject to a cap of 1 per cent a year.
that is for a basic four-day, 35hour week: by working overtime for a fifth day, drivers would be able to earn £70,000 a year, and possibly up to £75,000.
Yet aslef still has the cheek to claim its members are the victims of ‘austerity’. there are, of course, many workers who really have had their pay squeezed in recent years. Perhaps aslef can explain why they are paying ever more for their tickets and in their taxes to subsidise fat-cat train drivers?
the union can hardly claim high salaries are justified by market forces. When Virgin advertised 78 jobs last year, it received 15,000 applications. train drivers don’t need any formal qualifications — but they cannot be colour-blind.
a few months’ training is followed by 200 supervised hours in the cab before they are able to drive a train by themselves.
It is bizarre that this huge explosion in pay has occurred under privatisation. Wasn’t that largely the point: to introduce private sector efficiencies into a flagging nationalised industry?
TRoUBLEis that the rail operating companies have never been fully exposed to market forces. Under the franchise system they have been granted local monopolies — and can put up some fares as much as they like.
Moreover, the rail system continues to soak up public subsidy — to the tune of £4.8 billion in 2015-16. Part of it is in the form of ‘revenue support’ grants that compensate companies if passenger numbers turn out lower than forecast.
Yet Southern Rail has an even more favourable deal, in which the Government bears the full risk of a shortfall in income from fares. Because they are bolstered by the taxpayer in this way and not subject to market efficiencies, train companies find it far easier to cave in to union demands.
the irony is that today trains don’t really need drivers at all. the driverless car is imminent, but we still have drivers on the railways, which are a much easier form of transport to automate.
the technology exists and anyone who has safety concerns should take a ride on the Lille metro in France, where trains have operated safely without drivers since 1983. at least 50 other cities worldwide now have driverless rail systems.
Britain once led the world in this technology, but the public has been taken for a ride for too long. It is time we started to fully automate our rail system and put Britain’s greedy, overpaid train drivers out to grass for good.