Quote:
Originally Posted by HM181
Last week, 22/06/10, I was in London at RMT HQ, for a personal meeting with Bob Crow.
In the conversation Mr Crow said that of all the Railway companies he has to deal with, EWS/ DB are the worst company he has to deal with.
EWS/DB only want to deal with ASLEF, and ASLEF do not care who gets unemployed so long as they massive pay rises.
That has been a true all my railway service.
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First off, I don't always have a lot of time for Bob Crow. He may be a personal friend of yours but I've often been unhappy at the stances he's put up, and his latest idea that we should all go on a general strike because of government cuts has really turned me against him. If the government wants to bring in the cuts, then let them do it. The people who voted Tory and Lib Dem obviously wanted them to do it so let them go ahead. If it all goes belly up because of the cuts then fine, but don't give the Torys the chance to turn round and say it only went belly up because the unions were playing up. He isn't the only union leader I haven't had a lot of time for though, including our own beloved Ray Buckton who led us into the stupid Flexibable Rostering dispute in the early 80's. A dispute that did nothing to avert the policy and did nothing more than take two weeks wages out of my pay packet.
Having said all that, I agree that a few staff have been treated shabbily by EWS, but from what I can see, it hasn't been the norm. I'm not involved with union work though so I don't see the other side of negotiations. However, I also believe that EWS were stuck between a rock and a hard place. I used to read Ed Burkhardts interviews and his main philosphy behind creating the company was to have trainload freight in much the same way as Speedlink were doing. That was scuppered initially by Ian Brown poisoning the well when he spat his dummy out at not being able to lead RFD. If he'd left things alone, then maybe yards like Healey Mills and Tees and Tyne and Tinsley might have been able to have a bright future with lots of wagon marshalling to do with lots of staff in employment to do it, but instead, those yards are shadows of their former selves. Almost ghost towns.
Another blow for wagonload at EWS was when the numpties at Wisconsin sacked Burkhardt when his back was turned. That to me was probably the blackest day in EWS history.
Getting back to the issue of how general staff are treated by EWS, it was pretty clear early doors that very few staff other than drivers were going to be required by the company. Ever since the diesels were introduced in the late 50's it was pretty obvious that job numbers were going to be cut in the following years, starting off with the Single Manning Agreement which said goodbye to a heck of a lot of footplate staff, for the simple reason that they weren't required to shovel a few tons of coal every shift anymore. I started as a Drivers Assistant in 1978 and it was clear from day one that I didn't really have a job to do. I'd climb on the loco at the beginning of the shift, and climb off it at the end, and do bugger all inbetween, apart from watch the world go by, crack a few jokes with the driver, and sleep. Sometimes I'd do a bit of driving so the driver could sleep, but that was it. It wasn't until I became a passed man in 1981 that I could say that I had a proper job, and that was only on the occasional day when I was promoted temporally.
The only reason I was employed was so that when the time came, I could step into the driving seat. In those days, it was quite a long apprenticeship requiring 6 weeks in the classroom at the start, and then at least two years riding about on trains to get the full measure of the job before going on a six month MP12 course to get the driving ticket. These days, thanks initially to the Drivers Restructuring Initiative, which you have already said you disliked, but as I pointed out, was actually introduced by nationalised British Rail, the training period to become a driver has been drastically reduced, and rightly so.
So these days, we don't have guards on the trains thanks mainly to the wonders of modern communication systems, and improved vehicle designs. We have little use for yards because there isn't the individual wagonload traffic that there used to be, and on top of all this, EWS has to compete with companies like GBRf and Freightliner and the still nationalised DBS for traffic. The first of those two companies mainly only employ drivers because they are companies who started off from scratch and didn't need to make massive cuts. EWS has had to compete with them and their cherry picking, AND get staffing levels down at the same time. I imagine that Bob Crowe has very little to do with the new companies because very few people who work for them will be in his union in the first place.
It looks to me like its easy to criticise the company who had all the extra baggage on board at the beginning rather than the companies who didn't want to have the extra baggage. Has Bob Crowe been on at Freightliner Heavy Haul and GBRf demanding they should employ people who aren't really needed, or does he only have a go at EWS because they want to get rid of employees that aren't needed? It looks very much like the latter to me. If EWS bowed to his wishes then they'd need to pay out a load more for their staff, which would mean they'd need to increase prices (the companies coffers aren't a bottomless pit you know), so in no time at all they'd end up having no traffic at all and we'd all be out of a job. What would be the point in that? Bob Crowe still wouldn't be any happier because he'd have even less members, unless he feels that demise of EWS/DBS would be a price worth paying.