Train Strikes

While I can’t deny I’m pleased to see that the current train strikes that have been affecting us in Norfolk/Suffolk have been suspended, in a lot of ways I think it’s a great shame that National Express East Anglia have capitulated to the union’s demands at all.

Interestingly, neither the RMT or ASLEF sites actually detail what the deal was that they were trying to get. That in itself says to me that they know it was unreasonable – after all, why not try and gain support and understanding from the public if they’re really so hard done by?

The BBC mentioned some of the requests in one story, as follows…

National Express managers say the unions want a 2.5% pay rise, a four-day working week and a 4% increase in the number of train drivers.

Although as that’s from National Express managers, I can’t really say it’s 100% accurate, obviously.  This story from the Guardian in 2002 suggests that the average train driver’s salary was around £30,000 seven years ago, along with 35-40 days holiday a year. MySalary estimates an average train-driver’s salary in 2009 as £35,000.And that’s before we consider overtime etc. as well.

That £35,000 is a good figure. In this area (excluding Cambridge) the average salary is around £19-20,000. Hard to have sympathy for people striking about wanting more money when they’re already on nearly double the regional average, isn’t it?

Additionally, the strikes of the last three weeks have been counter-productive in other ways. I don’t know of anyone who’s had sympathy for the train drivers, and I wonder how many people have decided that actually it’s more reliable to use their own transport (or car-pool or whatever) rather than relying on the train “service”. If that’s the case in a significant number of people, the train service has fewer paying customers, reducing the income to the company – which reduces their ability to pay the drivers.

How much have the strikes cost National Express? I don’t know – but again it’s going to be a significant figure. It has to be, due to dropping all but a handful of services. (I think they ran six to/from Norwich each day, instead of the usual 60+) Roughly speaking, that’s 10% of the income they would normally get. Yes, I know it’s a rough figure, but it’ll do.

If I were on the board of National Express, I would do three things.

1. Tell the unions to get stuffed, that their actions had cost National Express £x00,000, so that was the figure that we’d be cutting the salary budget by.
2. Look at how I could get extra drivers in (even perhaps train-drivers from the continent, or ones who had retired, but wanted some extra cash for a few days work) in order to run the service still. Hell, I’d possibly even look at organising a pool of standby-drivers – casual labour, but trained up and fully current.
   I wonder whether you could get away with offering train-drivers a cash sum or extra money to break the strike and do their job. Not a salary-rise, but just a loyalty-bonus for sticking with the company. That one would be fun…
3. Finally, I’d have been completely up-front, and made it highly public about what deal National Express were offering, vs. what the unions wanted. I’d put the entire deal in the public eye, and see what the reaction was then.

I think that if those things had been done – and particularly number three – it would’ve made for a really interesting situation, where the unions could see what the public thought of them.

Mind you, that’s probably why I’ll never be on the board of a company like National Express – I suspect my way of handling things would be a bit confrontational for their tastes.

It’s still a pity that they seem to have compromised to any degree with the demands, though.