Tube Drivers Offered Four-Day Week by Sadiq Khan’s TfL to Call Off Strikes
Tube drivers have been offered a four-day week by Sadiq Khan’s Transport for London in return for calling off strikes. The Telegraph has the story.
A letter from Nick Dent, the TfL Director, to the Aslef trade union on Tuesday pledged to “set out a proposal for delivering an average four-day working week”.
The condition for opening discussions on a four-day working week was accepting a 3.8% pay rise and calling off “all pending industrial action”. Aslef’s strikes, which had been planned for November 7th and November 12th, were suspended that day.
In January, Tube workers were given a 5% pay rise by Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, that cost the taxpayer £30 million, prompting accusations that he had found a “magic money tree”.
The Conservatives called the deal a “total capitulation” to the unions, and questioned how much the plans would cost London taxpayers.
Tube drivers agreed to accept a pay rise that will take their salaries to just shy of £70,000 per year, and after the new Labour Government offered public sector workers pay deals worth about £10 billion.
Tube drivers currently work a five-day, 35-hour week. The four-day week plan would see no overall change in working hours, but sources said that in practice it would mean longer working days.
Underground drivers also enjoy 43 days holiday a year, thanks to a previous deal that saw time spent on shift but not working rolled up into extra holidays.
Walkouts by the RMT, the other Tube drivers’ union, were suspended last week after shop stewards said they had secured a “significantly improved offer” on pay and working conditions. No details of that offer have yet emerged into the public domain.
Worth reading in full.
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They should be offered a zero-day week.
As it would be perfectly possible to automate the London Underground (cf DLR) they should sack the lot.
But now they know that Khant will cave in to their every demand we can stand by for more threats of strikes, more pay rises and more privileges.
Hmm … I have 40+ hour week distributed over six days, no holidays and the so-called rise in ’employer’ NI contributions will doubtlessly directly translate into less money after taxes for me. What am I doing wrong, Ms Reeves?
Can’t we offer them ‘work from home’..?
Time to automate the Tube system. The technology exists and is well tried and tested.
Why isn’t it being done?
Well it’s the Socialist notion that economic activity exists only to provide jobs, rather than serve consumers.
In a Socialist system there is no need for consumers, which is why in the USSR and ComEcon Countries, factories made their tractor quotas and left them in fields to rot.
Or having been tasked with making a certain weight in nails just made one effing huge nail and then chilled out.
Because only people who have really no clue about software believe that something like this can be done, let alone can be done easily. Tale from the real world: Last Sunday night, I was travelling back from London. This was a gruesome process due to numerous stops on the journey because of all kinds of faults in automated systems. The most obnoxious one was to have to wait for at least half an hour somewhere around Maidenhead because a train whose computer system had ceased to cooperate was blocking the railway in front of us. GWR personnel kept rebooting everything in circles until the system – for some reason nobody understands – chose to work again and both trains could again move. That’s how this “well tried and tested technology” works in the real world. Without GWR stuff trained in kicking all this broken software back into function for now, we’d likely have sat there until well into Monday morning as some contractor would have needed to be brought in and these people don’t usually work 2am in the morning. Meanwhile, highly paid “system developers” (not enough sarcasm in this world to employ here) are playing around with another new… Read more »
Wait.
They currently get 43 days holiday per year – presumably, plus 8 bank holidays (or time off in lieu). 51 days holiday. Just short of one day of holiday per week.
They currently work a 5 day/35 hour week… So, seven hours per working day. This offer will give them a four day week. Take off the one day a week average holidays and they’ll be working on average 3 days per week with an average 8.75 hours per day. I’ll bet that rules will say that 8.75 hour working days are too dangerous and they need more breaks.
You forgot to factor in the sick leave and the pension.
Wow, 43? The usual for private sector is 25 days plus bank holidays. Yep, I agree. Automate their roles as soon as possible; they no longer deserve our largesse. Two tier economy. Parasite blob vs host (=us)
I bet their pension is better than mine as well.
Cancerous blob. Perfect analogy.
A 25% pay increase by stealth. And when we obviously need 25% more drivers then we end up paying.
We have to somehow stop the ruling t**ts acting like this money is their own.
Saddik is treating this as a moral crusade, when he’s just a thief.
The cancerous blob must die. It’s metastasised and will eventually kill the country.
I guess it is quite gruelling. Ploughing through the bowels of the earth a few fathoms beneath the filthiest cesspool and swamp that has ever existed on earth. Reluctantly towing carriages full of disgusting phone zombies most of whom make a compelling case for euthanasia. And then returning home to some flatulent troll of a wife. We may scoff at tube drivers but how many of us could tolerate such a life for even a day.
As many as four days a week???
In pleasant contrast, here’s what a London workers’ lunch break looked like a few decades ago:
Peter Lloyd on X: “England before: FGM Grooming gangs Pro-Hamas rallies Mass stabbings Islamic terror attacks Gaza-obsessed MPs Teachers in hiding No-go areas Acid attacks Machete gangs Sharia law What changed? https://t.co/WAuRGpXRw6” / X
We must learn to embrace our psychopathic deranged brethren. If he comes to cut off my head I bend forward and say yes please.
I used to like going to London because it was a friendly and positive place. These days I only go if I have to and I feel a dullness and sickness entering me when I enter within that rail network. Just a feeling of nastiness all around. Like the barrel of a gun protruding through a toilet bowl. I can’t wait to get out. Leave them to it because the supply of foreign tourists is going to dry up very quickly I assure you.
Perhaps farmers will start applying for tube driver jobs. They are a lot easier a lot cleaner, a lot less arduous and skilled snd a lot better paid.
Also they get a big pension.
Ah, I forgot. Farmers are generally the wrong ethnicity for Khan to recruit them.
Actually teachers could apply and earn more. Architects could do so.
Don’t talk to me about it. You are dealing with dark entities. If you can’t see them I suggest you ask one of your mates for a knock on the head.