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lol I'm trying to do this but failing - to be fair, to an outsider it is very easy to mix the two up. I will try harder
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Network Rail makes new offer to the RMT union
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RailUK Forums
Annetts key
Established Member
Just to be clear, the Network Rail and RMT dispute includes:
- Network Rail maintenance staff,
- Network Rail CAPEX/Works Delivery staff,
- Network Rail signallers and other operational staff, such as crossing keepers and MOMs,
- Network Rail Telecoms staff,
- Network Rail Central Services staff,
- Network Rail station staff.
I would be no more in favour of that than anyone else. But you cannot really complain about the Treasury being involved when they are the only ones who have kept you in a job!
Along with the rest of the economy including most fully private sector businesses via furlough. Yet you single front line railway staff out as if they should be grateful…
So did everyone on furlough, yet the government has yet to insist their terms and conditions be up ended. I think that fact that they have spent more on fighting the unions then on the pay deal it’s self speaks to how ideological this is.
Furloughed staff had no protection against being made redundant or any T&C changes. When I was furloughed from the travel industry (initially "asked" to take 8 weeks unpaid leave before furlough was a thing) me and my team got letters saying we were at risk of redundancy and many got made redundant despite being on furlough. I jumped ship and got another job, not especially easy during lockdown 1. I did this before I got to find out if I was for the chop, whilst on furlough, as I was losing a lot of money and didn't fancy sticking around.
At least railway staff knew their jobs were safe and were doing something useful with their days for a few people at least, the "fun" of furlough wasn't quite as good as it looked on paper, I don't know how others felt but being told you're "not essential" didn't actually feel that great when jobs were being cut.
It's worth highlighting that is the total cost of the pay increase, however some of that cost would have been incurred anyway because pay would go up by something.
For example let's say there's 10 people earning £100, the cost to pay them an extra £5 is £50, they aren't happy so go on strike for an extra £6 costing the company £70 because of the strike.
Not only has the company lost £70 but even if the strike is dealt with and they all agree £55 of staff costs (£105.50 per year) the actual cost would be £125. £125 is several years worth of the extra 50p per person per year, even if it was and extra £2 per person (£20 in staff costs) that's still nearly 6 years of the extra costs (due to compound growth is unlikely to be as simple as divide 125 by 20).
Cutting costs without understanding the impact of that is folly.
The rail industry could cut costs significantly by not reinstalling the line near Hook due to the land slip, chances are by bit doing so it would cost the rail industry a lot more than it would cost to rebuild it.
Whilst that's true, as I highlighted above, the EXTRA cost is likely to be quite small compared to the TOTAL cost, as there would have been some level of pay rise if the unions accepted the first offer made.
As such the future cost isn't really the TOTAL cost, rather the EXTRA cost. The EXTRA cost is likely to be small enough that the TOTAL cost could find it for several years before you used that pot of money up.
Just because a crazy increase in pay wouldn't be viable, doesn't mean that all increases in pay would result in the same outcome.
Also it's worth noting that with public sector workers making up ~18% of the workforce, if all staff were paid £65,000 the vast majority of that extra cost would fall on private businesses and so wouldn't harm the governments ability to pay their staff a good wage as for every company which did so there would be an uplift in taxes.
What the union leader was saying though was this shouldn't be a race to the bottom.
The problem the government has is that there's a shortage of staff in the country. This is impacting lots of industries and they are all trying to recruit from each other. There's basically two ways to fix it, pay everyone more (so you make it attractive enough for just enough people to come here to work) or you allow more people in from overseas (so you keep a lid on pay increases). However few are likely to move here unless the pay is reasonable.
There's been reports suggesting that many of our working poor would be better off moving to an Eastern European country as they would have a better standard of living. IF that is the case then actually have freedom of movement may actually make our shortage of workers worse than it would have been. It's certainly not going to make people think that the UK is somewhere they want to move to for work.
Yes the railways were protected, however in part that was because (unusually for a government) someone understood that if the railways shut down the economy would follow suit and that without it other key workers wouldn't be able to do their jobs.
It's an understanding that isn't well recognised now.
Let's say National Highways staff went on strike, how many would be suggesting that we could just let the trunk road network go into a period of decline?
We don't need all of it, as there's plenty of other roads which can be used instead and it would certainly cut costs to the country of we weren't having to fund them. There's only about 32,000 miles of major roads, this is fairly small compared to the circa 220,000 miles of minor roads were have in the UK.
If we halved the number of major roads that's only 7.5% of all roads we'd be cutting and most people don't even live within 2 miles of a motorway junction. However I'm not even talking at the whole major road network, just the motorways, which we could have in length from 2,300 miles and it be just 1% of the length of roads.
Maybe we could start by cutting some of the less used motorway junctions and looking for those lengths of motorway where once we've got rid of several motorway junctions is not really worth keeping the rest of the road as so much of the travel is between those junctions that it's not worth the medium sized town at the end still having a motorway.
It's not like road charges (not taxes, they don't count as they are too reduce fuel use and not a charge to use the roads, it's why, as an example EV's don't pay VED) cover the costs of the motorways. Too long motorway users have been subsidised by hard working tax payers.
WFH means that fewer people need to travel for work, so it's not like it's going to harm business if we close some of the notary network down.
Motorway use in 2021 was 85% of that pre pandemic but with still all the same costs as when it was running at 100%. There needs to be cuts!
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Rightly so anyone making that argument (and all the numbers are correct for the motorways, including the 85% use in 2021) would be shoot down, so why is it that the railways (which are just as important to the viable functioning of the economy as the motorway network) get singled out for cuts?
It's because many people see the users as others, rather than as people like them, as the people saying it don't use the railways so don't think that the railways benefit them.
If we could shut the railways down overnight, those road users would soon realise just how much they benefit from people and foods being moved about by rail, as traffic congestion would get a lot worse with quite a few more lorry movements on the roads as well as a load of extra buses and cars.
Even with WFH being an option and there's being some rail services road congestion on strike days is generally worse than other days.
fishwomp
Established Member
We need to be far more critical of that government claim of £31b support during lockdown. "£300,000 per rail worker" over the period, etc etc.
Reality includes servicing Network Rail debt, servicing contractual leasing charges on rolling stock. Given the government is on the hook for those, contractually (section 74 guarantees, IIRC for rolling stock), not to mention exorbitant leasing costs for the 80x fleet (Tory government decision...) ,
If the government had pulled the plug, they could not have avoided these costs. It's not support, it's called being on the hook.
According to https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/finance/rail-industry-finance/ ... That is 2.8bn (NR debt financing), and 3.0bn for rolling stock, per year. So, 11.6bn over the two years.
None of that changes what I’ve said above. Railway staff were given no choice in the matter so to suggest that we were done some kind of favour we should be grateful for is complete nonsense and frankly quite offensive.
Absolutely.
Nobody has said that? But railway workers weren't particularly special either, supermarket workers and anyone else who had to go in weren't given a choice. Well, I guess the choice was do it or know you where the door is, a bit like any other working day for any other worker really.
Indeed, it also illustrates why the likely best outcome is to resolve the strikes and set about trying to get as many people to use the railways as possible.
That suggestion was made above that we are “biting the hand the feeds” by daring to stand up for ourselves. That is nonsense because the support wasn’t an act of benevolence.
Almost all employees in all sectors have benefited directly or indirectly from government support as, had it not been made available, far more businesses would have gone bust. Nobody seems to be suggesting other groups should expect to suffer changes to their Ts and Cs and just lump it as a result.
I think if those supported businesses became so unprofitable in the long term that the government had to step in and take over the day to day running of them after the pandemic, then the government would want to make savings, including changes to T&Cs.
In reality many businesses have simply gone under despite furlough, or had to make their employees redundant and both cases the employees would be looking for other work. Railway workers are effectively working for the DfT now and are going to have to compete with other public sector workers for pay rises, and the government are going to look for savings.
Except that, as we know, the government’s financial position would be better if they simply resolved the disputes. Nobody has ever established what actual long term savings are expected to be realised by the changes (clearly no actual calculation has been done).
The railway also isn’t supposed to turn a profit…
The same old “zero sum game” dogma. It’s the Ts and Cs that are the issue, not the amount. I get the sense I’m wasting my breath because it is clear from your posts that you have an entrenched dislike of unions and will just go along with whatever the government tell you…
Well clearly they have a different opinion on that.
I'm pretty sure it was supposed to eventually when it was privatised? The fact it didn't really work doesn't change that.
I'm simply stating the fact that the government are going to look for savings on a system where costs have increased dramatically and people are not buying as many high priced tickets they used to be forced to buy for work. The railway doesn't seem to want to face this fact and adapt. Perhaps the T&C changes they are proposing won't save money but clearly someone thinks they will.
I don’t think it was ever intended to system wide. Just as GP practices are private and highly profitable but the NHS as a whole isn’t.
So why haven’t the proposed savings been published? Has it occurred to you that the government might have other motives for wishing to prolong a dispute?
Again you’re blaming “the railway” (whatever that actually means) and appear to be assuming the government is in the right by default.
it was, albeit benevolence to key workers who still had to get to work; healthcare, retail, etc. That was very clear In my discussions with the powers that be.
oh the calcs have been done alright. Obviously not for publication!
So, as I have been saying, nothing to do with being benevolent to railway workers specifically, everything to do with keeping an important service running.
Interesting how DOO was offered then removed but the pay offer stayed the same, and even increased on the NR side! Clearly the savings aren’t directly linked to the pay award.
carriageline
Established Member
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- 11 Jan 2012
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Settle something for me. I often hear the line “all maintenance will be done on nights, there will be no S&T/Pway etc fault teams etc (I don’t know enough about what their “teams” are or consist of)
How much truth is behind this? A lot of signallers are truly against this, for obvious reason. I can’t see how it can be feasible. A lot of failures in certain areas lasting all day could probably pay for a fault team for a year! It sounds like an assumption, or mixed messaging.
Well the NHS said that if it wasn't for the railway, then the NHS would have been well and truly stuffed! also had there been no railfreight, you'd have gone rather hungry too, not to mention everything else that is imported for daily use.
Well it was never going to be 100% profitable without shutting almost all of it down but I don't think a blank cheque from the taxpayer was the idea either.
Maybe? But this government looks to have little time left anyway. They might be using all this to try to push through anti strike legislation and you've got to say the unions have given them all the ammunition they need for that.
The demand from the unions is no strings pay rises in the face of reduced revenue and spiralling costs whilst at the same time the industry (DfT? TOCs? Dunno) is not really changing anything to reflect new useage patterns. I don't think people around here in commuterland are going to be spending £4-5k on monthly seasons ever again in the numbers they were. That seems like a refusal to face reality on both sides to me.
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Yes, which is why it was right to keep it going. But railway workers weren't particularly special, lots of people had to keep going. Furloughed workers weren't given much choice either though, the government ordered their businesses shut they lost at least 20% pay, in many cases quite a bit more, and there was no guarantee of a job at the end of it.
Nobody has asked for a blank cheque. I notice a blank cheque was indeed written to pay for furlough, including yours!
It was in the 2019 manifesto anyway. It’s by no means clear when it will come in or how effective it will actually be. All the more reason to take drastic strike action now!
The unions don’t want to see their members made poorer in real terms (I’ve not have a rise since 2019), and don’t want intolerable Ts and Cs imposed, it’s as simple as that! If you don’t work railway shifts you have no concept of what these Ts and Cs mean, for uncertain (at best) savings. A rise of (say) 6% would be in line with many other sectors and would have settled these disputes for less than they have cost the government, let alone the wider economy. Hence my own personal conviction that this dispute is the government playing politics at the expense of the railway, the tax payer, and the wider economy.
It’s hardly the railway unions’ fault the DfT wont allow the industry to change ticketing.
Why do you feel the need to keep pointing out railway workers aren’t special? Nobody has ever said they are. They’re just prepared to stand up for themselves, which very clearly triggers people on here.
I voluntarily quit furlough and a factor in that was not liking getting something for nothing when others had to work, I want to work for my money.
Yes it's working so well...
Well nobody wants their situation to get worse, nobody wants to lose their job, but sometimes reality kicks in and that's what has to happen.
I didn't say it was.
There seems to be an implication that railway workers were uniquely hard done by because they had to work whilst others sat at home in the garden. That's not really the case, it was a hard time for a lot of people. Sure, some probably loved it but that's life.
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Confused52
Member
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- 306
It has been clear that the savings are about more than pay. The RAIL INDUSTRY RECOVERY GROUP (RIRG) ENABLING FRAMEWORK AGREEMENT from June 21 published by RDG with RMT, ASLEF, TSSA and UNITE as parties said:
(Source: https://www.raildeliverygroup.com/media-centre-docman/12813-2021-06-efa-publication/file.html)
"This has created a major gap in the industry’s finances currently estimated circa £2bn per annum. This gap has to be addressed urgently to make the industry financially sustainable in the future. Workforce reforms and cost savings need to be identified as part of a rail industry-wide review"
So the need for and amount to be saved has been in the public domain for a long time. The fact that this is just ignored by one side of the dispute does not make it untrue, just inconvenient.
The constant carping that the government wants to close the railways or do it harm is tedious. If there was an ideological desire to close the railways then making it operate in the old way without increased subsidies and not keeping services running during covid but manning extra buses with soldiers to transport NHS workers would have been the way to achieve it. They didn't do it because the ideological obsession isn't there in government as far as I can see.
It wasn’t increased on the NR side.
Its not true; being benevolent, It’s a misunderstanding.
Very obviously, all maintenance can not be done at nights. Lots of maintenance doesn’t need to be on or near the line, and that can be done on days; most faults that occur in daytime and risk service delivery will still need to be fixed asap. Modern technology enables much inspection to be done without day time access, that doesn’t mean the work shifts to nights. Clearly some maintenance will continue to be done at night, and indeed there is more night work, but in fact that’s been happening for more than a year, as a result of changed track worker safety Rules. (Following several fatalities of our colleagues in multiple incidents In recent years).
I don’t know the detail about fault teams, but AIUI there will be more flexibility on team size for the task rather than (largely) fixed teams of, for example, 3 for S&T regardless of if they need to rebuild a burnt out location case or change a fuse. I gather there will be some multi discipline teams too. Both of these seem entirely reasonable to me, but I know others don’t agree.
A pay rise on top of what? The bargaining units who have settled with Network Rail received the pay rise they settled for. I'm not sure why you're unhappy with that?
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The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme was time-limited and didn't provide full pay. If the railway industry had been given access to it on the same terms as the rest of the economy, but nothing further, every one of the fourteen operators would have ceased trading and gone through an insolvency process almost immediately. People whose employer did that at the end of the Job Retention Scheme rather than the beginning, or whose employer made them redundant just before the end of it, or the proposed end, are in no better a position now. Terms and conditions are "up-ended" rather a lot by being made redundant or having your employer go bankrupt. Also the Job Retention Scheme wasn't available from October 2021, a year and four months ago now.
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alxndr
Established Member
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This is something that needs to be fully hashed out at local consultation. The idea is that there will be a joint response team that attends faults rather than a team solely from the relavent discipline attending.
The nature of the joint response team is likely to vary by area on what comes out of local consultation, but suggestions so far are along the lines of:
- S&T teamleader
- S&T technician
- Pway teamleader or technician
- Overhead or conductor rail teamleader or technician (as required)
I can see how this looks good on paper, but I feel it's going to cause a lot of headaches (and therefore time to rectify the failure will increase). It'll probably get easier over time once we learn to start speaking each other's language and pick up little bits of each discipline, but that will take time. I know very little of pway and even less of overheads. Likewise I can't ask a pway guy to pass me a 2BA spinner/WAGO tool/or fetch one of a hundred other things and expect to get the right thing. With people changing teams all the time it'll be even harder, as currently you know in your teams the level of knowledge and ability each other has.
When I've worked with ex-pway colleagues in the past it's taken several years to stop having mutual confusion on which access point to go to! We each knew places by different local names, he knew everywhere by mileage, and I knew places predominantly in relation to signals and points.
Well I worked throughout with no furlough, as did most front line rail staff.
Yes it's working so well...
It seems to have improved the offer on the RMT side. I’m keen for ASLEF to take stronger action to improve their offer - you don’t have to agree with that or like it…
Well reality for some of us is being prepared to fight politically motivated attacks on our Ts and Cs.
That implication is in your head. Many of us find it irritating when people who have themselves benefited from government support suggest (as upthread) that railway staff should be somehow grateful for the industry being supported through Covid, and seem to take the side of the government whenever we stand up for ourselves (sadly I suspect this is down to sour grapes).
But nobody has ever actually said the proposed changes will actually save £2bn. The changes are also being altered without the offer changing, which shows they’re not inextricably linked.
The £2bn figure is also drop in the ocean in terms of public spending (look up how much has been written off as lost due to fraudulent Covid support claims!). It’s an arbitrary snapshot, which will reduce as usage increases, yet it’s being used as an excuse to introduce permanent serious and detrimental changes to Ts and Cs.
That might not bother you, but it bothers those whose lives will be badly affected and they will try to resist it.
Nobody has said “the government wants to close the railway”, it’s just obvious to many of us that this isn’t simply about saving money. Why else did the government spend months lying to the public about its own role (via the NRCs) in the dispute. It’s equally tedious that people continually refuse to acknowledge the government’s role because they dislike railway unions…
Annetts key
Established Member
Quite interesting compared to the £100 million that Modernising Maintenance was supposed to save per year…
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Can you please point to anything from the Conservative government that privatised the railways that says this. And if the frugal BR made a loss and required subsidy, and a substantial number of the then ‘new’ TOCs also required subsidies, when was the railway as a whole ever going to make a profit?
Yes, parts of it made a profit. Even now Network Rail accounts make reference to a profit. But overall, the railways have never, ever made any meaningful profit.
Can you please provide details of where costs have increased dramatically (before the increase in energy prices caused by Russia invading Ukraine, as this occurred AFTER the government decision to cut costs)?
Only when Network Rail were asked directly in the beginning of 2021, they said that costs has not substantially changed. No one disputes that due to COVID19 measures, income from fares dropped. But since then, passenger numbers have been increasing. But, and this is the important bit, not as many people are buying the expensive season tickets.
Now, in any other market or industry, if you lose part of your market, you try to adapt to regain customers or gain new customers. But under the control of the government, the railways are very limited in what they can actually do to achieve this. Only one new ticket type (as far as I know) has been introduced. Yes, the railways have had advertising campaigns, but these were mostly aimed at the leisure market.
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Yes, are all painfully aware of that. You do understand that people didn't get a choice whether their employer furloughed them right?
We just don't want the service trashed and our lives disrupted for someone else's dispute with their employer. Not hard to understand really.
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