Highly-paid bosses are reluctant to confront the unions
JUST as the rail companies are urging travellers to get back onto trains with reduced ticket prices, drivers’ union Aslef is determined to undermine its own service by inflicting yet another strike on us this week.
It’s the same old story – drivers on £60,000 salaries want more, even though the railways were subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of £12billion over the last year alone.
Exasperation at self-harming public sector strikes led the Government to pass legislation last year, not just for train companies but also for ambulance crews, fire and rescue services, radioactive fuel management and the UK Border Force.
The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023 requires them to provide enough staff during industrial action to guarantee at least 40 per cent of normal services.
Under the new law, employ- ers are able to issue notices to people “who are reasonably required to work to ensure minimum service levels are met”.
Unions must “take reasonable steps to ensure members identified with a work notice comply” with the guidance.
PREDICTABLY, the legislation caused an uproar from unions, who slammed it as “unworkable” and “undemocratic”.
Indeed, this week Aslef warned it would respond to any enforcement with more strikes.
Yet it is moot, as none of the rail companies appears to be using the new legislation.
“They’re available for train operators to use,” says Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, “a key tool that train operators themselves have asked for – to reduce the impact of disruption on passengers. They should now use them.”
Exactly, but as with so much legislation, there is a lack of will among the firms running our services to deploy these legal weapons.
Yet again, it appears the Tories are in government but not in power.
It is doubly frustrating considering ministers had already reached a deal with the RMT, TSSA and Unite unions to end their strikes. RMT members, including guards and ticket office staff, voted in November to accept a pay offer, which promised a backdated pay rise of 5 per cent for 2022-23, as well as job security guarantees.
This week’s walkout – with Aslef members refusing to work overtime until February 6 – will impact 16 rail companies, hitting some of the country’s busiest commuter routes.
All of this costs the economy and private enterprise dearly, but the unions don’t care, as they get their money from the public purse. And while it should have triggered minimum service legislation, instead the new law itself has become a bargaining chip for unions to threaten further disruption.
Across the board, highly-paid executives in the NHS, Home Office and rail companies are reluctant to do the heavy lifting of confronting unions, even when the Government has provided them with the tools.
A lack of nerve appears to be among the reasons for not confronting the unions. First Group bosses, owner of Great Western Railway, shared £1.3million in bonuses last year, while senior executives at Arriva enjoyed 61 per cent pay increases, despite rail chaos.
No doubt both sides of the battle are counting on a Labour government coming into power later in the year and repealing the new legislation. Anything for a quiet life – and anything to keep taxpayers’ money flowing into the bank accounts of public sector workers and their fat-cat management. It is quite frankly a racket, in which the public sector is extorting the taxpayer for more and more money, knowing current and future governments are more inclined to raise taxes than crack down on profligacy.
MR SUNAK is rightly furious at the widespread reluctance to deploy minimum level service laws. But it is yet another demonstration of the sector’s disrespect for the Government that writes their cheques and the voters who pay them.
Paradoxically, it is this government’s current impotence that will encourage electors to desert the Tories and vote for a party that will, according to recent history, be even more inclined to cave in to public sector demands for money.
Paying more and more for less and less appears to be our national fate, until some political figure arises with the courage to say enough is enough. But that will be the toughest battle of all, against an entrenched, ever-expanding army of overpaid managers and their well-cushioned workers.
It is a new Battle of Britain and the wrong result will see us go bust.
’It appears the Tories are in government but not in power’