Carryfast:
Rjan:
[…]
What we’ve actually got is a deliberately created imbalance within the industry in which it is LOSING TOO MUCH distance work while CREATING TOO MUCH local/ multi drop zb work.Because the former is being made increasingly financially unviable for operators to want to take on.
Rubbish. It’s always unviable for operators to take on for work under good conditions, if the same work will be done under ■■■■ conditions.
What makes you think in an industry twice the size, say, and still predominated by Tory voters who are supporters of the free market mechanism and resistant to organisation and solidarity, that drivers will be any less willing to work under exactly the same conditions as now?
The end result being little if any chance of career progression from local to distance,which is how such unattractive jobs were often filled in the past and disillusionment and a collapse in employee morale.
But your problem is not progression, it’s the nature of the industry when governed by free markets, the absence of unionisation, and, certainly for the sort of easy work that you want to do, easy to find people willing and able to do it (and who can be quickly trained to do it to an adequate standard, particularly if it is high-volume trunking between fixed places along motorways).
I don’t understand why you fixate on fuel duty as being the cause of all the industry’s ills. The rail industry doesn’t have good terms because it pays no fuel duty, but because many of it’s key workers have skills that cannot be cheaply trained or easily casualised, and because all attempts at attacking them (or the immediate colleagues of the key workers) have resulted in solid strikes.
That’s not to say every part of rail remains well paid and conditioned. I gather track labourers are just as casualised as haulage nowadays, but even they must have training, experience, and a modicum of gumption and discipline to work together, to stay alive, and to keep things moving, so it is still often slightly better paid than equivalent roles outside the industry.
I grant you that if the trackbeds were ripped up in a big bang, there would be a call for all experienced hands in the industry whilst they drew in new people, but what government is going to do this, and why? It would hardly be a vote winner because you’d be attacking as many workers as you favour.
Even if it were brought about by some diktat, many of those new hands would be unemployed rail workers, which would make up a huge new reservoir of recruits, and you’d be complaining again that there are too many workers chasing too little good work.
The fact is in high-volume industries where the skills to do the work can be taken for granted, and where one man is easily interchangeable with another, the only thing that has ever delivered fruits is firstly a willingness to be solid, and secondly the willingness to vote in governments that promote solidarity and the conditions under which it forms.
Without it they’ll pick you off one-by-one, just as the Nazis gassed people in batches, small enough that their own men and guns could be brought to bear on each batch and on any individual troublemaker within a batch.
