Sun front page- iPads for Train Drivers

[Bantamzen]

Meanwhile, on planet earth, most workers just deal with changes in the workplace and get on with it. Can you imagine shop workers demanding extra pay every time a new piece of technology is introduced?

Unfortunately some unions are stuck so far in the past even moving from fountain pen to ballpoint scares them. Although the truth be told from my time as a union rep I found that some people within the movement enjoy the drama, regardless as to whether it is good or bad or their members and their industries.

 

[bahnause]

Meanwhile, on planet earth, most workers just deal with changes in the workplace and get on with it. Can you imagine shop workers demanding extra pay every time a new piece of technology is introduced?

Throwing stuff at people without a proper plan and a shared understanding what it is for and how it can be used doesn't make your company more productive, it makes your company waste money (and opportunities). Maybe that explains the lack of productivity that the UK suffers from today.

Wie startet using Netbooks for the drivers in 2002, in 2024 we are using iPads. At (almost) every stage it was clear to the employer and the employees what the rules of the game are. But even now I often have to remind people, that what a lot of my company's staff does during their normal office hours like updating their Laptop, installing, updating and configuring software, setting up accounts etc. has to be done by the driver during their spare time, often outside their working hours (unless you want us to do this during driving...). So yes, this has to be compensated somehow.

 

[43066]

Anecdote doesn't make data but my experience is of recruiting into a workforce almost entirely made up of PhD level STEM professionals with decades of experience in a cut-throat globally competitive commercial context. Remuneration is a reasonably generous salary, the legally mandated minimum employer's money-purchase pension contribution and nothing else whatsoever.

It’s always interesting to compare different industries. I’m surprised that you can remain competitive for people of that calibre without offering decent extra-salary benefits. What field are you in, out of interest?

Everyone has to maintain their skills - for which read, essentially adapt completely every few years. Anyone trying to rely on their skills and knowledge from 10 years ago now would be as much use as a newborn baby. The principles of physics and mathematics don't change, but the day to day reality of doing the job is unrecognisable. You do this at your own expense and to a significant degree on your own time. If you don't, you'll be history in short order. Replaced by someone brighter, harder working, and these days quite often a (usually frighteningly impressive) product of the Chinese university system.

The “staying current” aspect of train driving is keeping up to date with changing driving policies, resignalling schemes etc. which can fundamentally change the landscape of the job. No extra payment is made for these, as you’d expect,

Don't think that I haven't considered it, normally in my drunker moments or when facing an all-nighter to finish a report

I think one of my drunker moments was when I filled in the application .

I have a slight concern about rolling this into a payrise as it's then forever. Is it is a one off incovenience then a one of bonus is sure more appropriate. If it is included in base salary then it should mean that all future training requirements for new fleets do not require additional remuneration - which we all know isn't going to be the case in 10 years time when the next generation of flying trains is introduced.

I mean more that it’s one aspect of the overall negotiation, rather than that any particular % increase in pay can be attached to it.

 

[LBMPSB]

Meanwhile, on planet earth, most workers just deal with changes in the workplace and get on with it. Can you imagine shop workers demanding extra pay every time a new piece of technology is introduced?

This is exactly what Signallers have to do,adapt to new technologoy with no extra payment. Cab Secure Radio, GSM-R radio all came in with no extra payment. Moving technologies, eg fro NX to Workstations, taking on board new signalling tech like ARS or ETCS. Increasing workload because working practises are changed by RSSB or Management, eg Rule changes, new Rule processes. The only thing with workload, there is the availability to apply for an upgrade of the position you are in, but that is limited and has a ceiling.

 

[C.T.P.]

View attachment 151501
Why on earth would a Train Driver need an iPad for

 

[Bantamzen]

Throwing stuff at people without a proper plan and a shared understanding what it is for and how it can be used doesn't make your company more productive, it makes your company waste money (and opportunities). Maybe that explains the lack of productivity that the UK suffers from today.

Wie startet using Netbooks for the drivers in 2002, in 2024 we are using iPads. At (almost) every stage it was clear to the employer and the employees what the rules of the game are. But even now I often have to remind people, that what a lot of my company's staff does during their normal office hours like updating their Laptop, installing, updating and configuring software, setting up accounts etc. has to be done by the driver during their spare time, often outside their working hours (unless you want us to do this during driving...). So yes, this has to be compensated somehow.

Updates on network devices can be configured to run in the background, and usually require users to simply restart their device when convenient. This isn't 2002 anymore.

 

[bahnause]

Updates on network devices can be configured to run in the background, and usually require users to simply restart their device when convenient. This isn't 2002 anymore.

This is not how an update process with safety critical software on a device works. Certainly not in an environment with numerous in-house developments and corresponding test protocols.

 

[357]

Updates on network devices can be configured to run in the background, and usually require users to simply restart their device when convenient. This isn't 2002 anymore.

At my previous TOC we were told to turn that off, with a printed notice saying please don't update iOS as it breaks our apps

 

[mpthomson]

Ticking “I don’t get this so no one else should have this” off the forum bingo card

No, just pointing out that this is unknown outside of the rail industry. I've been working in my industry for 30 odd years and the tech has changed out of all recognition. I've never once received a pay rise for learning how to use the new kit, and nor would I expect to. On the vast majority of occasions I've said 'ooo shiny..!', then learnt how to use it and appreciated how much easier and/or safer it makes my job. That's the same in just about all industries.

 

[Bantamzen]

This is not how an update process with safety critical software on a device works. Certainly not in an environment with numerous in-house developments and corresponding test protocols.

Are we talking about safety critical software though? If these tablets are to simply replace paperwork / notices etc, then the only updates that will be critical will be those that update those notices, and of course anything required to secure the device. These can all be done either in the background, or quickly on a secure VPN made available in places like messrooms, or over home connections via VPN.

At my previous TOC we were told to turn that off, with a printed notice saying please don't update iOS as it breaks our apps

Bad dev syndrome...

 

[RPM]

It's all very well getting on a high horse about "Spanish practices" or expressing righteous indignation about the perceived unreasonableness of this issue, but it changes nothing. It is written into the current terms and conditions. Whilst that remains the case, it would be negligent of ASLEF *not* to push for delivery of what those Ts&Cs specify.

 

[mpthomson]

Yes, but come on, you know as well as I do that the car allowance thing is a bit of a red herring. You were a commercial lawyer if I recall correctly, so obviously that was just another inventive way your employer found to throw even more buckets of money at you and your colleagues !

Possibly a tax-efficient one for both you and them at the time, and one which likely isn't used any more because that opportunity has been tinkered with since. It wasn't an incentive to do anything in particular, it wasn't linked to anything in particular, it was just even more money in a ludicrously remunerative niche that only exists within a London bubble almost completely detached from the rest of "normal" society.



It's a sweeping generalisation that those are default benefits in most private sector jobs and it belongs in the same class of sweeping generalisations as the one that says it costs your employer £100kpa+ to pay you £60kpa+ merely to get you to push a few buttons for 35 hours a week.

Pretty much 100% of commercial jobs come with money purchase pensions for a start, often with a "Here's 5%, beyond that you're on your own, now f off" sting in the tail. The comparative costs of any sort of Defined Benefit alternative are enormous, rarely understood and widely ignored. Try building up the £750k+ fund needed to replicate a decent DB equivalent with minimal contributions from your employer for an instructive start.

Anecdote doesn't make data but my experience is of recruiting into a workforce almost entirely made up of PhD level STEM professionals with decades of experience in a cut-throat globally competitive commercial context. Remuneration is a reasonably generous salary, the legally mandated minimum employer's money-purchase pension contribution and nothing else whatsoever.

Everyone has to maintain their skills - for which read, essentially adapt completely every few years. Anyone trying to rely on their skills and knowledge from 10 years ago now would be as much use as a newborn baby. The principles of physics and mathematics don't change, but the day to day reality of doing the job is unrecognisable. You do this at your own expense and to a significant degree on your own time. If you don't, you'll be history in short order. Replaced by someone brighter, harder working, and these days quite often a (usually frighteningly impressive) product of the Chinese university system.

This might look like veering wildly off topic - but it isn't. Viewed through that lens, expecting to be paid off for just continuing to do your job in a way that's compatible with current practice looks completely surreal.

And actually it's a bit of a con, it's a way of increasing non-pensionable pay and car allowances are still subject to tax/NI. When I moved to my current job I had one that wasn't necessary and insisted that it was removed and made part of my salary as the company weren't paying into my pension for that amount.

 

[Bantamzen]

It's all very well getting on a high horse about "Spanish practices" or expressing righteous indignation about the perceived unreasonableness of this issue, but it changes nothing. It is written into the current terms and conditions. Whilst that remains the case, it would be negligent of ASLEF *not* to push for delivery of what those Ts&Cs specify.

As I understand it we are talking about moving paper based information to digital, with perhaps a little upskilling for some.

This is not some massive change in T&Cs, Molehills into Mountains much?

 

[bahnause]

Are we talking about safety critical software though? If these tablets are to simply replace paperwork / notices etc, then the only updates that will be critical will be those that update those notices, and of course anything required to secure the device. These can all be done either in the background, or quickly on a secure VPN made available in places like messrooms, or over home connections via VPN.

VPN? It's not 2002 anymore... Going to the mess room? Shouldn't the iPad make it possible, to update without having to go to the mess room? That would be a big step towards more productivity versus just spending money on a device.

Bad dev syndrome...

No, daily business in today's "agile environment". Like VPN-Clients with automatic updates that stop working after every third update.

 

[Bantamzen]

VPN? It's not 2002 anymore... Going to the mess room? Shouldn't the iPad make it possible, to update without having to go to the mess room? That would be a big step towards more productivity versus just spending money on a device.

Well if you want to ensure downloads complete correctly, a static location with access to a VPN isn't a bad start. Or you could hope that the UK mobile network holds up with the data connection en route...

No, daily business in today's "agile environment". Like VPN-Clients with automatic updates that stop working after every third update.

Again, bad devs. If updates fail that is the fault of the devs.

 

[Facing Back]

This is not how an update process with safety critical software on a device works. Certainly not in an environment with numerous in-house developments and corresponding test protocols.

It is exactly how it works in many corporate environments where critical applications run on ipads. Ios updates are controlled and app and data updates are forced once testing has completed. If the end-user is impacted - which is not the case with the majority of updates, then an appropriate roll-out strategy will generally (in my experience) be adopted, ranging from an email saying that the colour of a button has changed all the way through a piloted followed by phased deployment...

I'm really not sure that driver instruction updates are generally safety critical in the way I think the IT industry defines it. It the Ipad provided real time information on which the driver relied on during a journey then perhaps. But in that case I'd expect a more robust solution in any case.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 1 Feb 2024 ==

Well if you want to ensure downloads complete correctly, a static location with access to a VPN isn't a bad start. Or you could hope that the UK mobile network holds up with the data connection en route...


Again, bad devs. If updates fail that is the fault of the devs.

Or the testers, or the integration function, or the release management function. Or in some cases user or process error but user error is generally all but eliminated in critical systems by not allowing them to get involved - which is a different issue.

 

[bahnause]

Well if you want to ensure downloads complete correctly, a static location with access to a VPN isn't a bad start. Or you could hope that the UK mobile network holds up with the data connection en route...

VPN has way too many security risks.

Again, bad devs. If updates fail that is the fault of the devs.

How does this help you as an employee who is trying to retrieve his information you need for work?

 

[Bantamzen]

VPN has way too many security risks.

How does this help you as an employee who is trying to retrieve his information you need for work?

I'm going to be honest here, I'm not sure what point you are making here?

 

[Facing Back]

VPN has way too many security risks.

Many corporates use VPNs as a matter of course to eliminate security risks (reduce them not eliminate if I'm honest). Private or free ones posing a risk? Possibly...

 

[357]

I'm really not sure that driver instruction updates are generally safety critical in the way I think the IT industry defines it. It the Ipad provided real time information on which the driver relied on during a journey then perhaps. But in that case I'd expect a more robust solution in any case.

So a notice saying "No trains to exceed 60mph due to excessive heat" is not safety critical?

 

[6Gman]

Exactly - it’s a little like when the Daily Mail found out about agreed walking times.

That was hilarious wasn't it? Presumably they thought traincrew should teleport instantly from place to place?

 

[bahnause]

I'm going to be honest here, I'm not sure what point you are making here?

The point is that automatic updates are a bad idea, if you rely on a system to get the job done.

 

[Facing Back]

So a notice saying "No trains to exceed 60mph due to excessive heat" is not safety critical?

I'd agree that that's fairly important. This thread however was about IPads being used to replace paper based book. Not as an interactive device providing real time information and my comments are based on that premise.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 1 Feb 2024 ==

That was hilarious wasn't it? Presumably they thought traincrew should teleport instantly from place to place?

If teleportation is an option then presumably the business case for trains in general becomes quite suspect.

 

[Bantamzen]

The point is that automatic updates are a bad idea, if you rely on a system to get the job done.

They work pretty well in a lot sectors, including mine.

 

[bahnause]

They work pretty well in a lot sectors, including mine.

It doesn‘t work well in mine. But our iPad is not just a „nice to have“. And it contains safety critical data in a very powerful app.

 

[43066]

Unfortunately some unions are stuck so far in the past even moving from fountain pen to ballpoint scares them. Although the truth be told from my time as a union rep I found that some people within the movement enjoy the drama, regardless as to whether it is good or bad or their members and their industries.

That’s funny, because I was issued with an iPad at my first TOC almost a decade ago, the use of which had been negotiated between the TOC and ASLEF. Rather suggests your statement above is a long way from reality…

So can you tell us what The Sun article is actually about, which TOC is affected, and what specifically has happened here? Or are you just digging out railway unions again?

 

[Facing Back]

The point is that automatic updates are a bad idea, if you rely on a system to get the job done.

If you rely on consumer grade updates then there are risks although it works perfectly acceptably for a huge number of companies and is actually very robust - especially on IoS devices. Android is slightly less controlled but still generally very good and very highly used. If you tie the devices into a corporate infrastructure then its much the same as using a company laptop where updates are "pushed" to the device rather than "pulled" by the user requesting them.

The resilience of all of this was tested greatly during the pandemic where lots of companies had to move from a "bring it into the office if its broken" approach to ensuring it didn't break in the first place

 

[mikeb42]

We’re getting off topic. I was a lawyer by trade, then but then did an advisory role at a Big 4 prof services firm, which is where the car allowance came in. The law firm I was at previously paid (a lot) better, but didn’t offer a car allowance!

None intended . Years ago I had a car allowance (everyone did) in a job which involved no business travel. Now I do lots yet have no allowances of any kind, it's all just expensed. That was perhaps your point - it was just another way of wrapping up some general purpose remuneration.

The optics are rather different for technology allowances applied to specific changes though, surely? Cause and effect is evident. It'd be better just to wrap it all up under "Sundry Inconveniences" 1970s style, right?

It’s always interesting to compare different industries. I’m surprised that you can remain competitive for people of that calibre without offering decent extra-salary benefits. What field are you in, out of interest?

Without getting into too many specifics as it's a small world, think "Technology Consulting". I don't mean the PowerPoint and vapourware kind nor software as such. More hardcore tech stuff which indirectly ends up with actual custom physical equipment at the end customer.

To be fair, most extra-salary benefits are often correctly identified as fluff by the sort of people suited to that kind of work. They can see it's just money dressed up in fancy clothes. It's all a question of how much, and ok, how the dressing up can interact with personal taxation. On the whole though, it's simpler for a smaller employer to just offer a suitable amount of cash and let the employee decide what to do with it themselves. The exception to this would be defined benefit pensions where some/all of the risk is on the employer not the employee. However, they are mythical beasts as extinct as the dodo outside the public sector.

In real terms, the cost of the relevant skills seems to have stagnated or even fallen over recent years. Too much competition from brilliant youngsters being churned out by universities all over the world hungry for opportunity and willing to work their backsides off. Available salaries wouldn't work in London/SE. Outside, they do, helped by the fact that physical location is increasingly irrelevant (see the drop in income from commuting on the railway...)

 

[Fokx]

As I understand it we are talking about moving paper based information to digital, with perhaps a little upskilling for some.

This is not some massive change in T&Cs, Molehills into Mountains much?

A change to the terms and conditions is a change the terms and conditions regardless, no matter how small

 

[Falcon1200]

I can only envy a group of rail staff whose union is strong and determined enough to win extra payments for adopting new technology, because it certainly never happened during my railway career! Not as a booking office clerk, going from Flexiprinters and NCR 51 machines to Intis and Aptis, nor as a Controller, whether moving from handwritten to computerised logs, manual fleet control systems to Promise, Gemini and Genius, or fault managing systems, again from handwritten to Frame, FMS and F2000. Not to mention taking on Trust Attribution, a major change to methods of working if ever there was one. On the contrary, any development which increased the business's efficiency, and/or reduced its cost, not to mention making our job easier, was generally regarded as a Good Thing.