Hi,
Network Rail worker out of the midlands and TSSA union member.
I will be joining the strike next week in solidarity due to having no pay rise in 3 years.
I meet Mr Grant Shapps only last year and he told me thank you for working through Covid. That thank you clearly does not extent to paying my mortgage, car insurance, gas bill, child care, etc.
I am a band 4 middle manager on £38k.
I get no bonus
I get no overtime
I am meant to work a 35 hour week but don’t think I have ever done less than 45 hours despite only being allowed to book 35 on the company’s internal time sheet.
Network Rail is a dire place to work, let me explain why.
Putting to one side the lack of pay rises and high inflation (real world pay cut) the company is stale.
There is no leadership from above, nor is leadership or enterprise encouraged at any level.
It’s one big burecratic mess that encourages itself to be more bureaucratic under the guises of health and safety.
The comments from conservative mps are from people who have no understanding.
If they had any understanding they would know the first and most important thing they need to do it wipe out the top few layers of management.
From the board down to band 3 level the roles are stuffed with people who adore rule enforcement, bureaucracy, that are risk averse to anything and everything and with no entrepreneurial understanding or dna.
It’s a company destined to fail, that delights in its failures and the failures give the large group of senior management reason to exist and dream up more schemes that profit outside companies at the expense of the taxpayer while having no benefit to passengers.
A few years ago they had a company reorganisation, to make the routes more accountable!
The result? Hundreds of more senior manager roles all on between £60-£150k, all pushing more bureaucracy, less productivity and even more risk adverse.
I would like it if grant shapps and co would spend some time and understand the problem starts with leadership or rather the lack of.
Network rail is in need of a major cull, but it needs to be the large group of senior managers.
The same managers who spent this past week boasting how they are going to earn double time and a lieu day during the strikes for ‘pointing passengers where to go on a platform’.
Network Rail or Great British Railways; whatever you call it until it gets some clear leadership and entrepreneurs running the show and rid of the mass of senior managers laughing at the taxpayer, the sooner it will turn around.
But don’t worry, because next week all of us lucky enough to work on LNW route are being sent pronoun posters so we can talk woke to one another!