A job should attract a salary commensurate with the skill and responsibility involved. In the case of train drivers, for example, that means they are well-paid and rightly so.
Why rightly so? What is this high skill and complexity they alone deal with?
On this forum I’ve seen drivers stating that passengers on a terminus platform is too risky and they can’t safely drive into it. That isn’t a skilful or complexity mastering person managing risk and deserving of a high wage - it’s someone in a sinecure who needs a reality check.
They are also dependent upon signallers, upon dispatchers, upon maintenance engineers - all of whom also have safety roles and complex jobs. All of whom are dependent upon nurses, doctors, street cleaners and so on.
The “I’m at the pointy end of the spear and so deserve the riches” is what you hear from hedge fund manager ****s etc. and is risible from anyone frankly.
Do you also consider that airline pilots are overpaid?
Actually many aren’t highly paid, although I do laugh at directly comparing a train driver to a pilot given the obvious difference in the scale of a pilot’s responsibility with an unconstrained platform in a 3D world!
Perhaps drivers should pay for their training as most pilots do, and indeed graduates, do - after all, that training is what enables them to be high earners…
I'm sorry if the facts are inconvenient for you.
What facts have you provided? Or are you childishly trying to repeat what I said?.
Again, I’m sorry if my facts did inconvenience you, noting you appear unable to argue them.
What people exactly are retained that technology has proved we don't need?
Guards, drivers in some cases already and more in the future. Many signallers too. Remember the strikes about APT/HST being single driver trains…
And please don't bring up the subject of driverless trains or similar nonsense as you will just be providing further evidence of your ignorance.
What is ignorant is thinking such trains do not and cannot exist.
If other public sector workers are paid less than some railway staff then their Union should be fighting on their behalf. No doubt certain roles should be better paid but that is hardly the responsibility of railway staff.
As I said, its the railway unions abusing their power in order to feather their nest at the direct cost of everyone else.
I love this ideal world of yours where everybody just fights all the time. That wouldn’t be exhausting or self-destructive at all for anyone.
As I said, the union types and the bosses/rich are all the same type of person: selfish, greedy and hypocritical.
No, it's a reality that in many households with a car, not everyone has accesd to that car all of the time. In what way do you consider this statement to be factually incorrect ?
In the same way that the OP stated the poor can’t afford cars and are dependent upon busses and yet demonstrably that is untrue since the overwhelming majority of the “poor” do have one (as per the definition, which seems a reasonable one). Which you are deliberately trying to obscure by now arguing about the number of people and number of cars, notably providing no facts at all other than a generalisation.
Meanwhile my point that the fuel tax is extremely regressive is borne out further by the multiplicty of evidence that the costs of motoring have significant impacts upon the poor in terms of the proportion of their income taken. As would road pricing (another reason to avoid that like the plague). Hence why we see that whilst income tax has reduced for the poor, their actual overall tax rate (incl VAT etc.) is higher than for the well off and rich which seems grossly immoral to me.
In the last 10 years the situation has notably improved with much greater car access for the lowest quntile (from 40% without access down to mid 20s). Notably fuel has not been ramped upwards in that time as the (no doubt comfortably off) here demand it should be.
In reality the “freeze” on the fuel tax has gone hand in hand with much greater equality of both travel opportunity and outcome for the poorest portion of society.
Hence I suspect why Labour did not raise it.
Notably this escalating tax scheme was introduced by the Tories as a way to avoid politically damaging income tax rises on their supporter base, and New Labour turbocharged it either out of stupidity or because they valued the same MO more than they did the poor.
www.health.org.uk
