Southern Rail’s drivers are taking us for a ride – stop the gravy train

When your working life has only ever consisted of minimum wage jobs, late-night emails from your boss, and the ongoing battle to make tomorrow’s lunch at the end of the long day rather than spend more nonexistent pennies on an overpriced sandwich, the thought of a £75,000-a-year pay packet sounds, if not like sheer fantasy, then pretty appealing.

Not so for the train drivers at Southern Rail, who have rejected this very sum in their ongoing dispute over staffing that has caused some 300,000 passengers 15 months of travel misery. The deal would have seen their wages rise by 24 per cent to £61,000 for a 35-hour, four-day working week, with the possibility of further earnings from taking on a fifth day as overtime, which many drivers do.

Yes, that’s right, Southern passengers. Your train driver has just turned down 75 grand. It’s probably just as well delays are so monumental – it’ll give you the time you need to pick your jaws up off the floor.

Everyone’s entitled to a fair wage. But exploiting your power over the (considerably poorer) customers of your essential service isn’t fair, it’s a luxury most millennials can only dream of. Yes, we may blow what little disposable income we have on cleaners, as recent research showed, or holidays that look particularly appealing to Instagram pals with whom we haven’t had a real conversation in the past decade. But when salaries are so low you know you’ll never make a dent in any purchase of substance, a clean rented bedsit and a nice beach somewhere are as good as it gets.

I’m not suggesting that every 20-something deserves a 25 per cent pay rise (nice as that’d be). But given the way the Southern strikers have held passengers over a barrel for the best part of a year and a half, with disabled travellers left in the lurch, unable to board over-stuffed carriages, patients coming into London missing crucial hospital appointments, not to mention workers forced to leave home at the crack of dawn just to get to the office at all, it’s a wonder we haven’t all jacked in our own jobs and applied to become Southern Rail drivers. But of course we can’t.

So hacked off commuters are now making their voices heard in other ways, with the Tories losing seats in constituencies like Croydon and Eastbourne – areas badly hit by the Southern saga – in this month’s general election.

The party’s refusal to tackle what has been called the worst rail crisis for two decades hurt it badly – not least among us young voters, whose rail memories consist only of privatisation and persistent cancellations, and do not stretch back to the slam-door era nightmare of 1970s British Rail. With housing costs pushing under-35s out of the capital, the track warfare waged by Southern drivers means we can now barely get to the jobs we need to afford to live anywhere at all.

Politicians pontificate about how best to draw in us younger voters, shelling out thousands on awkward social media campaigns urging them to pause workin’ and ravin’ in order to focus on policies, but do you know what would have more sway at ballot boxes than celebrity endorsements and clunky hashtags? A little bit of old-fashioned fairness. Tackling the fat-cat train drivers and their unions might be a good place to start.