Trainbike46
Established Member
Do you work in IT by any chance? because I think that is the main industry that isn't unionised where workers do genuinely have the option of negotiating individually. In many industries, including universities, the royal mail, the civil service and the railways this simply isn't true; in those industries we need unions. If, in the future, there is an excess of IT workers I suspect that industry will also change to make individual negotiation harder/impossible.if railways didnt have unions then you wouldnt need negotiations with them.
Employees would be able to raise by their merits, rather than by someone negotiating for the good of the whole.
I agree the railways need to do more to encourage passengers to return, but the main problems I see are caused by staff shortages (e.g. Avanti), and teasury interference (making adaptations to the expected new passenger flows much harder). In addition, the DfT effectively preventing negotiations with the unions is genuinely making everything worse, not betterThe problem for rail is it is now in competition with Road and IT. In my world suburbia roads are more busy than ever since covid.. if they bought an extra car in Covid its 3-5 years before they sell it. Similarly the well trodden working from home.
Railways are not doing anything to encourage passengers to return, indeed in London it feels like they are doing the opposite, and hence justifying that extra car bought in lockdown.
Part of it is that things like the Avanti mess are much more impactful on passengers than the strikes to be honesti’m similarly not reading many complaints about the strikes, not like the old days where it was a 72 hour media feast covering before, during and after..indeed I dont know anyone who cares about the strikes.. they just wfh / drive the car.
I don't think this is the best place to talk about tax policy in detail, but in short, I read somewhere that while the headline corporation tax was reduced in the UK, the actual rate paid was about the same, as the government simultaneously removed tax rebates for investment. I was proposing to (fully or partially) reverse this to promote investment in the U in a revenue-neutral manner, to increase productivity.Raise corporate taxes, just encourages off shoring of profits but also on shoring of global losses… Was it Goldmans who onshored all its global losses onto its UK entity ensuring it has no UK tax to pay for around 60 years back during Gordon Browns tenure ?
It is true that it is hard to raise productivity, but that doesn't mean it's impossible; more passengers per train is one route, another is fewer staff per train. Which is more realistic will depend on the locality. And we don't necesarily have to raise productivity on every line, if the average productivity goes up, that would be a start.Raising productivity on railways is a hard thing to do, you cant make the train go faster and simply earn more profit Like in other industries efficiency is volume… on my line the weekend service has been cut by 2/3rds, the train length by half… it is still rammed to standing as a consequence, on Monday its back to full service and full length, its still rammed to standing, except in the afternoons and later evenings. Theyve cut the early morning, and the last 3 at night.. yet its still running at a record loss, if you believe what we are told.
This isn't true, before covid many TOCs, including those that didn't run truly rammed very often (such as LNER), returned premiums to government.if its the case the only way a train minimises its loss is to be at 3x seating capacity throughout… then something somewhere is broken.