Greater Anglia "harmonisation" deal for drivers

[387star]

Thought it would be confidential, most things of this nature tend to be though it will be interesting to see what is agreed if/when a deal is reached. I wouldn't be surprised if the recent Thameslink/Southern deals have given drivers something to aim for, especially with GN not too far away.

Regarding the £60k, the London weighting tends to be fairly small, best bet I reckon is to try and line up an internal transfer to a non-London depot, easier to do at some places compared to others of course.

My point is a driver who isn't tied down will surely want to move somewhere cheaper given the same wage is on offer.

I'd hate to live in London personally but each to their own

 

[whhistle]

No. There are at least three of us on this thread who have the nice glossy booklet with the full deal, I can bet my bottom dollar that none of us will be posting those on a public forum.

And thus... discussion over.
It's clear there will be a thread full of people who "don't know what they're talking about" because there's nothing to talk about! :P

 

[dk1]

And thus... discussion over.
It's clear there will be a thread full of people who "don't know what they're talking about" because there's nothing to talk about! :P

Discussion is over because harmonisation is over. Nothing more to say than that. Where both sides go from here we will just have to wait & see.

 

[Panupreset]

Be interesting times ahead

 

[Class 170101]

In terms of Sunday trading the big stores may not be open to customers all day to buy goods however the store is still working before opening and after closing, I should know I used to work for one of them starting a shift around 7am without enhancements. However 6hrs was enough. Sunday afternoon was mine.

In terms of drivers conditions Sundays is now more difficult to cover on overtime as drivers earn sufficient from Monday to Saturday to not need Sundays as overtime in order to live which was the case in the past. Arguably this is a failure of management not to agree Sundays as part of the working week when many of the enhancements were swept into higher basic salaries at privatisation.

 

[Panupreset]

As I explained earlier in the thread, even though Sunday's are outside the working week, certainly on the GE side, rostered Sunday's are compulsory overtime. So even though they are outside the working week, it isn't optional to work Sunday's, it is mandatory.
The problem comes when you have someone who is off the road due ill health or because they have had an incident and thus can't work their rostered Sunday. Then you need to find someone to cover that job on a volunteer basis because we don't have spares on a Sunday generally. Or with the endless weekend engineering work additional Sunday jobs get created because diagram hours get eaten up having to taxi drivers from depots that are within a possession to work trains elsewhere on the network and you need volunteers to run the service.
What actually seems to happen is it's harder to cover the work on a weekday because Monday-Friday a far higher percentage of your drivers are already at work, the pool of people who are off who can work overtime is much smaller. And the number of jobs you need to cover can soon snow ball.
Let's say Driver Bloggs has had a minor incident, and today is the incident review meeting. Bloggs job needs covering, he has his union rep present to represent him, so union reps job needs covering too. H&S rep has a meeting with company management that day, so that drivers job needs covering too. You also have 2 drivers on annual leave days that day and one driver off sick following a fatality. You also have a DI training new shunters in the yard so the DI's job needs covering. Now you got 7 jobs you need to cover that day! You might have 3 spare drivers that day so you still got to find 4 people willing to work their day off. And that's why sometimes the 'xx:xx is cancelled because a member of traincrew is unavailable'.

 

[Dave1987]

Some forum members sound a bit salty that they did not get to pass judgement on the whole thing

 

[driver_m]

Some forum members sound a bit salty that they did not get to pass judgement on the whole thing

Very much so. I totally get why some people would want to know, just so they could breathe fire and brimstone about us greedy, undeserving drivers, but unfortunately the corporate confidentiality culture also means that the rest should understand why we can't . Anyway, I'm sure we'll have these talks over and over a few times, before someone eventually gives up like they did at Northern .