http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-33440369

FYI...

Something I didn't know before this was the average salary of a tube driver is £50k. My heart bleeds for their struggle!
</sarcasm>

1. They work (and live) in London.
2. I would imagine that being a tube driver is hardly a 9-5 job with weekends off.

They sit still and tell people to get out of the way of the doors.

I do IT Support. I sit at a desk and ask people if they've tried turning it off and on again. I do not remember the last time that someone killed themselves, (very messily) by jumping in front of my terminal, thus forcing me to watch their demise.

Just saying...

Thanks I was totally ignorant of that fact, let's give them all 100k a year.

What are the first aiders getting paid?

They get paid very well for sitting on a mainly automated system.

If they aren't happy with the money they're welcome to find another job.

Try finding another job with 43 days holiday a year & a 36 hour week paying that sort of money.

They provide a service (driving tube trains) that a lot of people require and, if not want to, then at least are willing to pay for. From a simple market perspective they therefore can and indeed should use that 'market value' to maximise their profitability i.e. how much they get paid. It's exactly the same logic by which the pay of city traders is justified - they're paid that much because they're worth that much. Yes, in theory there are people out there who will do it for less but the fact is those people aren't there *right now*, and I doubt the population of London is willing to sit around for a few weeks with no working tube system while those people acquire the training they are legally required to have to transport the public safely.

It will be interesting to see if the government holds true to it's ethos in this regard or decides to intervene in this market and impose state control. Which of course is the thing they always accuse the opposition of doing and have equated roughly with eating kittens.

Yes, lets indulge in a race to the bottom in pay for all jobs

Has anyone actually done any investigation into the unions position here? They aren't opposing night running of the tube, they are opposing night running without sufficient staff (so requiring an increase in hours - on night shifts how does one long weekend in 27 off sound?). This tied into any deal on pay, which by the way is also well below inflation. It's also no just the RMT this time, it's all of the union on the underground, at least one of which hasn't been on strike for nearly a decade so that should tell you something about how dodgy the proposals from TFL are.

Yes, a tube strike is massively inconvenient but that's kind of the point of going on strike in the first place. If withdrawing your labour doesn't cause any disruption then you have no bargaining power in the first place.

This is classic Tory and newspaper divide and conquer stuff. Pointing out how much someone is paid for doing a specific job to make people jealous regardless of circumstances.
It's not just the tube drivers that are on strike is pretty much everyone. Why shouldn't any employee stand up to protect their pay and working conditions, whatever they are? There's apparently nothing we can really do about bankers protecting their pay but when it happens to be a civil servant, train worker, teacher or nurse it's all about how evil these people are for wanting to hold onto what they've got and inconveniencing other to try and do so.

They need to think carefully, it surely can't be long before the Tube's automated. It's got to be on the minds of the management.

It's been on their minds for quite some time - clickety

We had a post strike and pilots strike over here. They wanted about 5%, I think. Heck, I'd like that too, they have all had pay rises for the last 5 years, during that time my wife had 3 pay cuts and I haven't had a single pay rise... So I think I feel justified in not feeling sorry for them not getting the full payrise they <i>want</i>.

The question to ask is pretty simple. 'Is them going on strike more hassle than giving them more money". What anybody else earns is irrelevant. Plenty of people are massively overpaid, plenty of people are massively underpaid. Our society is not objectively 'fair'. If we're going to try to make it so, TFL staff are not the place we need to start. if we're not bothered about that, then they have every right to ask for as much as they can get.

What this government may do instead is reclassify TFL drivers as 'essential services' (despite the fact 90% of the population of the country doesn't use their services hardly at all) and remove their right to strike. Because, you know, London = the whole country #NorthernPowerCut.

I guess we'll see.

I persoanlly witnessed the chaos that was caused as I had to come in to London for a party last night. When I was on my way home (I allowed an hour and 10 minutes to do a 20 minutes bus journey) the streets were still rammed and loads of people were unable to get on buses. This meant people would've missed their last train home and possibly ended up stranded in London.

The strike was supposed to be just 24 hours yet the tube was not active last night.

On a positive note when I was getting a bus from Liverpool Street Station it was all very well organised and I managed to get on the second bus that came in.

I hope they get what they ask for and this doesn't happen again any time soon.

I've never considered it, but I wonder do a lot of tube drivers get the tube to work?


From what I've read, the strike is mainly about the implementation of night service and how many night shifts the staff (because it's not just the drivers on strike, it's everyone who works on the tubes in pretty much any capacity) are being required to work. Something like 14 weeks of night a year or such? TFL could solve the issue by hiring/training more staff to cover the nights specifically or just add them to the pool so each staff member had to do fewer night shifts - along with fewer shifts overall; it would be very interesting if TFL told their staff 'OK, we're going to hire more staff to cover nights more evenly, but they'll have to work during the day too, so you'll all be getting the equivalent of one less shift a week and thus less pay'. If work/life balance really is the issue, that's actually a fair offer...

Either way, if TFL try to impose change there'll be more strikes, that's the only thing that's pretty much certain.