Tube drivers get £50k+ a year, 38 days annual leave and work 36 hours a week?!?!!

There will be no workers left mate when they have automated them all

What people like you want down a T

Robots don't say no sir I can't take any more beatings

I think it would be more accurate to say that robots don't need beatings because they actually do their ****ing jobs

More rhetoric

Wait till you're without a job is all I can say. Your stability is just an illusion.

They used to have jobs for life

Do you know what rhetoric is?

Why are you making assumptions about my employability?

What does that have to do with anything anyway? The tube drivers do have jobs. Very good ones. The issue is they're not doing them because, once again, they want to stand in the way of progress and hold us all to ransom in order to continue with what they see as their /entitlement/ to their present situation.

I might have some sympathy if they didn't do this every time any progess is proposed. As it is i just want them gone -- and yes, replaced by driverless trains that will serve the public consistently.

If I one day decide that I don't like the conditions I'm working my job, I live in a free country and I am well within my rights to tell my employer to go **** himself. My friends/colleagues are then free on their own accord to decide whether or not they want to join me. A union is just a slightly more organised version of this. I don't see how someone can be "against" unions, it's like being "against" my right to walk out of a park.

Would you mind explaining your position? I'd be curious to hear from anyone else who is "against" unions here too!

If I one day decide that I don't like the conditions I'm working my job, I live in a free country and I am well within my rights to tell my employer to go **** himself. My friends/colleagues are then free on their own accord to decide whether or not they want to join me. A union is just a slightly more organised version of this. I don't see how someone can be "against" unions, it's like being "against" my right to walk out of a park.

Would you mind explaining your position? I'd be curious to hear from anyone else who is "against" unions here too!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/politics-blog/11725850/How-well-off-are-Londons-tube-drivers-and-why-are-they-striking.html

Disgusting greedy socialist bastards!

It is ridiculous - £50k to press a few buttons. It costs the economy and is a drain on the commuter. A forty minute journey yesterday evening took me 2.5 hours.

The worthless sacks of **** should all be fired and replaced by machines which can do their job better, quicker and don't go on strike.

Be careful whom you curse. Be careful of whom is on who's payroll. It's only a matter of time before you wish other employees were standing up for your working conditions and job. And there's some upstart saying you're a lazy bastard who needs to be worked harder for twice as long

"But no it's my job I need it, I need it to feed my kids"
"WELL MOVE THEN!!!!"
"But I can't..."
" You're obviously useless then I hope you and your kids die, bye"

Get ready for the future. This isn't how it's going to be forever.

Are you denying that £50k is not too much already for a tube driver? I cannot wait until all lines are driverless like the DLR.

Let's not forget that we pay for these wastes of space through ridiculous public transport fares in London.

The tube drivers days are numbered and I believe they have played into the hands of the government by calling this strike. It has allowed them to tell the short-sighted, self interested public about how unions are all bully boys while pulling the wool over their eyes about who is ****ing them over on a daily basis and has been doing so for a very long time now. Gaining particular momentum after the smashing of the post-war consensus.

That is why this thread is now full of short sighted people whining about their commute being longer than it usually is (FYI I commute by rail and detest strike action having to take place). Not realising that this kind of discourse is gradually plunging most of the population into financial uncertainty and discord while the Tory apologists laugh at the social mayhem they have caused.

They are not striking against Central Government, they are effectively striking against the commuter who subsidises the overpaid bastards £50k for a job that a machine could do 10x better and more reliably.

It is a disgrace how maths and science teachers are paid more than £30k when these button-pressing ****ers are paid £50k.

Get Homer ****ing Simpson to drive our tubes - he'd still be doing a better job than the unionised people currently doing the job.

Well yeah that's true, but if Maths and Science teachers want better wages and working conditions, they ought to engage in trade union activity to fight for them? What genuinely do they gain from beggaring the RMT's workers? Because I assure you, despite their rhetoric, the Tories wouldn't lessen the bill for that. Some arms customers out in Iraq's pockets would no doubt do that extra bit of bulging or a bit more of pointless DWP bureacracy to be paid out for, at the cost to the British taxpayer.

I'm sure the London Underground bosses and shareholders take some quite tidy sums, and I'd be surprised if everything else isn't ready to go when they aren't quite hitting target. Don't know it is over there. But Network Rail and franchisees provide a disgraceful service (and we have nothing to do against them - no genuine competition in privatisation) saying any staff pay increase would come from fare payers rather than the pockets of the shareholders making money off the back of the tax-paying, hard working public!!!

You may eventually come to want to push buttons for a living. Better than rioting with the other members of the underclass for bread thrown from the balcony of the gated community, stuck with nothing.

Perhaps they could re-train as engineers and design more efficient machines to drive the tubes that they themselves are clearly incapable of doing?

Then how are the current lot of engineers going to deal with the market saturation of engineers?

Go on strike to defend pay and conditions, perhaps...

Edit: Retraining them into new jobs is the ideal solution for any mass lay off.

They are not striking against Central Government, they are effectively striking against the commuter who subsidises the overpaid bastards £50k for a job that a machine could do 10x better and more reliably.

You know I actually agree with you on the fundamental points.

What I was trying to make is 'be careful whom you wish to lose their job, as it could be yours next'.

I know nothing about your employability. And even less about my own. All I can foresee is in a few decades time, most retail/admin/clerical (bottom/middle end) jobs have been automated (as the entire industrial base went in the 80s/90s, when many of them were saying they'd have jobs for life in the 60s), this equals very large, very angry underclass, and several different classes of Tory supporters all going 'bah, it's ok, I'm fine, **** everyone else. the people unemployed deserve it. **** them'. Massive social unrest, no benefits system to accommodate for them. You think social harmony, understanding will come for this? Or rubber bullets and tear gas?

That's about the sum of my grand approximations. I am waiting for the more optimistic counter argument. Please deliver if you have it.

The problem is that the engineering market is too small in this country.

Striking is never the solution - if the unions take the piss too much (i.e. do this again any time soon), they will either be replaced by machines or be laid off.

The choice is theirs! Stick with the ridiculous overpayment for manual labour, or stuff it.

Exactly this.



I think technology has shown a tendency to create jobs as much as it destroys them. I think, as I said above, that there is a perversity in mourning the fact that menial, repetitive tasks are shifting to be carried out by machines, saving humans the trouble.

Perhaps, over time, we'll have to take steps to address the fact that a lot of humanity has been rendered unnecessary by machinery. Perhaps we'll simply see an increase in creative, interactive, and machine-supervisory and upkeep jobs, whilst seeing also a decrease in typical working hours. Perhaps we will see a mixture of the two.

I'm not equipped to speculate on the future of machinery. I'm not particularly well informed on either economics or technology. All I know is that, here and now, in the present moment, the tube drivers are taking the utter piss, are costing more than they're worth, and are not serving the public properly. In the long term, they are fundamentally opposed to any progress, because progress tends either to render them less relevant or to require more input from them. As TFL improves services they're going to fight every step of the way, and this when they're basically unnecessary components in the service. Can we just be rid of them and be done with it? There's no reason at all for the capital to tolerate these constant inconveniences, particularly not when we're paying so much for them.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/politics-blog/11725850/How-well-off-are-Londons-tube-drivers-and-why-are-they-striking.html

Disgusting greedy socialist bastards!

I see this future as being underpinned by some kind of Negative Income Tax system that provides for those who cannot find regular work. But that model cannot work within the current framework of relentless austerity and punish the unemployed. This isn't sustainable in the long-term.

IIRC, in the late '60s they were proposing that by now we'd have seen a complete retreat in manual labour with 30-hour weeks. What I see is a neoliberal package with a standard full-time job being a strange simulation of the factory life. Productivity is relatively poor here.

As I said, the tube drivers are numbered, and public opinion wise their support is limited. Even the modern-day left has almost forgotten the trade unions.