Topic: Do you support the strikes?

[Red-Soldier]

fixed

The people with the least, should be getting the most.  Surely?

[Red-Soldier]

It's broadly accepted in public sector circles that the NHS is the best funded of the sector and the staff are the best paid of the sector.  The kind of cuts routinely dished out to the other departments have never gone the way of the NHS.

I was working at a local authority when Puiblic Health teams were transferred from NHS to councils and the discrepancies in pay, pensions and redundancy terms were a sticking point for about a year.  Many of the staff secured other jobs within the NHS during that grace period and when I left there was a constant problem of the council recruiting and training people to be Public Health professionals and then shortly after losing them to the NHS.

Care workers are at the extreme end of it and it's amazing they can retain any staff.

That said, it's not an argument against pay rises for nurses and others within the NHS.  It's just an indictment of how badly the Tories have wrecked our public sector.  Death by a thousand cuts.

It is.  I know many who are leaving the sector, as the pay is so bad.

Of course, it isn't an argument against pay rises for nurses.  However, I'd like to see the people with the leasy pay, get the biggest rises.

[TSC]

I'm not sure I'm right wing. Id say I'm mostly liberal with pro capitalist views.
I can see we aren't paying lots of public servants enough, but where is enough?
Capitalism seems to be the best mechanism for allocating resources. Clearly it's far from perfect, nurse and footballer pay for example. Oddly, it's a non capitalist system that's keeping down nurse salaries i think. Private sector nurses and teachers anecdotally have it better financially and works stress wise. ( I don't know anyone in the private world doing those jobs so happy to be corrected).
The problem is we want these services to be good and we value the people doing them so we need to pay them appropriately , but how do we figure out what is appropriate?

Rather than it being a ‘non-capitalist’ system keeping salaries down, peer below the surface to note the beneficiaries of using private firms (eg NHS spend huge amounts on private firms for agency workers).  Ideology (greed) driven.

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/opinion/revealed-the-links-between-tory-mps-and-the-people-profiting-from-nhs-privatisation-213827/

https://www.thenational.scot/news/18255016.revealed-links-conservatives-private-healthcare/

[Red-Soldier]

All these strikes just highlights how shit my sector treats it's workers.

Most of the strikers get paid a lot more han me.

[reddebs]

All these strikes just highlights how shit my sector treats it's workers.

Most of the strikers get paid a lot more han me.

Not sure who you work for but from my experience most environmental and conservation type jobs are usually through charities where the fat cats get paid shed loads for doing fuck all apart from brown nosing the even bigger cats but the minions are either volunteers or low paid despite the vast qualifications they have.

[TepidT2O]

All these strikes just highlights how shit my sector treats it's workers.

Most of the strikers get paid a lot more han me.

what sector are you in mate?

[Nobby Reserve]

James Felton
@JimMFelton
Cool to have a government that, rather than settle the dispute by paying healthcare workers properly, advises citizens not to die

Quote Tweet
BBC News (UK)
@BBCNews Dec 20
Avoid risky activity during ambulance strikes, says minister https://bbc.in/3Vbqb6o
2:25 PM · Dec 20, 2022



In the comments underneath:

Ally Gray
@72AllyGray
Replying to
@JimMFelton
I’m assuming a lot of Tory donors are suddenly setting up companies selling cotton wool and bubble wrap…



https://twitter.com/JimMFelton/status/1605207867828600834?s=20&t=KskAhp4LkQ_dJnTD6E8wgw

[Riquende]

James Felton
@JimMFelton
Cool to have a government that, rather than settle the dispute by paying healthcare workers properly, advises citizens not to die

Bloody nanny state, 'advising' us not to do things.

[Red-Soldier]

what sector are you in mate?

The environmental sector: nature conservation.

You've got employers like RSPB and National Trust, as well as the various local authorities etc.

Starting salary for an entry level ecologist or equivalent, is approx 20-22 k a year.  It's one of a few, really big issues.

I don't think it's sustainable long-term, not with future generations coming through (unless you're from an affluent background, of course).

Which leads on the one of the next big issues, it's one of the most least diverse and least inclusive sectors in the UK too.

[Jiminy Cricket]

Wot? No one? Not even Tepid?  I guess I am not half as funny as I think I am!?

Interestingly, one of the big things the Tory twats have been talking about on the TV interviews is how the nurses are lucky because they got a pay rise last year when other public sector workers didn’t…

Yeah…. Claps don’t pay the rent by the way…

Anyway, that’s surely going it come back and bite them on the arse when other staff go on strike in the new year….
There will be a huge teaching trike for one, and they should throw it back in their faces, “you said nurses didn’t deserve Andy more as they had a pay rise last year, so what about these guys who got no pay rise last year?  How do you think they are coping??”

Well. This will surely improve the quality of your commute to work.

[Red-Soldier]

Wot? No one? Not even Tepid?  I guess I am not half as funny as I think I am!? ;DWell. This will surely improve the quality of your commute to work.

It's never good to highlight your own jokes 

[Jiminy Cricket]

It's never good to highlight your own jokes 

Oh, I know. But then I had already lost.

[ScottScott]

Million per cent behind nurses and ambulance staff striking, meanwhile literally no class from the Daily Mail and other right wing rags in trying to publicly flog them.

The whole debate around salary/wages and job roles is a minefield. For me nurses, ambulance staff, fire, police all deserve to be rightly rewarded for the role they play in society. Emergency service workers should not have to be working two jobs to keep their heads above water.

I had a mate (who sadly took his own life) who worked as a Train Manager for Virgin Trains before they were taken over by Avanti. I remember him bragging about how much he was on, sometimes with overtime he was taking home £60/£70 grand a year. He used to tell me train drivers were on about £70k per year starting salary too.

No offence to any train managers on here at all, but essentially his job was checking and selling tickets, yet he earned in excess of what a police inspector or fire service officer was earning.

No offence mate but that bolded bit is absolutely bollocks and you come across as a bit of a c*nt for even saying it. This is a play straight out of the Tory playbook as well, get the workers to argue and hate each other because some get paid more than others, it stops you from pointing your ire at who is actually responsible and instead fighting between yourselves

[Red-Soldier]

Not sure who you work for but from my experience most environmental and conservation type jobs are usually through charities where the fat cats get paid shed loads for doing fuck all apart from brown nosing the even bigger cats but the minions are either volunteers or low paid despite the vast qualifications they have.

Yes.  The industry would absolutely fail without the vast number of volunteers there is.  We are definitely low paid, considering how qualified we are.  It's an accepted way of doing things.  However, times are changing and I don't think it's sustainable anymore, not to mention the questionable morals too.

[reddebs]

Yes.  The industry would absolutely fail without the vast number of volunteers there is.  We are definitely low paid, considering how qualified we are.  It's an accepted why of doing things.  However, times are changing and I don't think it's sustainable anymore, not to mention the questionable morals too.

That's good to know mate. 

I'd have loved to work in your field but could never have afforded to due to the need for a degree and to relocate for just entry level jobs.

[Terry de Niro]

We need a massive general strike and show these Tory bastards what we're made of.

Fuck it, let's have a revolution and throw them all in the  Thames.   

["21C or 70F?" SchizoidWeatherMan!]

So childbirth cases will not be attended to. Given the potential life threatening complications associated with childbirh, I really feel for expecting mothers.

This just doesn't feel right.

[McSquared]

So childbirth cases will not be attended to. Given the potential life threatening complications associated with childbirh, I really feel for expecting mothers.

This just doesn't feel right.

They said they would come off the picket line for a life threatening emergency

[Andy82lfc]

So childbirth cases will not be attended to. Given the potential life threatening complications associated with childbirh, I really feel for expecting mothers.

This just doesn't feel right.

Yeah it’s terrible and the Tories are to blame for every single thing that goes wrong during the strike. Not just that but for all the tons more other deaths they have caused by under funding and cutting services throughout the last 12 years.

Blood on their hands indeed.

[PaulF]

They said they would come off the picket line for a life threatening emergency

The the that would worry me is the time to scramble from the line and how long it would take to identify as a true emergency. That said is sounds like part of the problem is that ambulances be are often attending non emergency events already. Just as an aside, do you think a broken leg at a Sunday league have needs an n ambulance or not? I don't know where I sit on that one.
Also, it seems more and more it should be the care workers going out on strike to get decent pay first. NHS would probably benefit two fold. Better care services to keep people out of the NHS. And a chance to look for a pay rise by maintaining parity.  Though I'm not sure that makes much sense for pay negotiations.

[Andy @ Allerton!]

Imagine if all IT Support Staff across the country went on strike.

[rob1966]

Imagine if all IT Support Staff across the country went on strike.

Imagine if all HGV drivers went on strike, that would bring the country to its knees within days.

[tubby]

As a translation project manager, I feel like I'm right at the very back of the queue of workforces that would make any difference with a strike.

[Yorkykopite]

Bloody nanny state, 'advising' us not to do things.

Ha! That was my first thought too.

I really believe that these right-wing culture warriors, who presently run our government, will have spent longer debating with each other about the ethics and optics of 'advising' the public than they will have spent trying to come up with a solution to the strike.

 

[Andy @ Allerton!]

Imagine if all HGV drivers went on strike, that would bring the country to its knees within days.

Yeah it would mate.

But I honestly don't believe that people would understand what would happen if all IT Support people went on strike. It wouldn't affect an industry or an area or a city or an element of government.

It would affect every single facet of modern day life - from energy to government to logistics to.. well.. everything


If you went out on your HGVs and every single one of your systems was completely down and you were not able to even logon to any of them, how would that affect the HGV business for instance?

I'd say that IT peeps are probably the rulers of the universe at this point

[Circa1892]

As a translation project manager, I feel like I'm right at the very back of the queue of workforces that would make any difference with a strike.

I think Cabinet Ministers are at the back of that queue.

[Elmo!]

Yeah it would mate.

But I honestly don't believe that people would understand what would happen if all IT Support people went on strike. It wouldn't affect an industry or an area or a city or an element of government.

It would affect every single facet of modern day life - from energy to government to logistics to.. well.. everything


If you went out on your HGVs and every single one of your systems was completely down and you were not able to even logon to any of them, how would that affect the HGV business for instance?

I'd say that IT peeps are probably the rulers of the universe at this point

IIt's well worth reading about the Maersk ransomware attack to see what an IT outage can do to global logistics.

[Andy @ Allerton!]

IIt's well worth reading about the Maersk ransomware attack to see what an IT outage can do to global logistics.

If they are affected by that, they must have a weird set up.

Everything should be disposable - if our main system got attacked, it's designed to be destroyed on creation if you want. So we'd just deploy across all environments and it would be deleted and re-created.

Same as any machines to do any work - they should be entirely binnable.

[Elmo!]

If they are affected by that, they must have a weird set up.

Everything should be disposable - if our main system got attacked, it's designed to be destroyed on creation if you want. So we'd just deploy across all environments and it would be deleted and re-created.

Same as any machines to do any work - they should be entirely binnable.

This is a great write up of the whole thing - it has relevance to the war in Ukraine as well. They got really lucky by having a domain controller that was offline in Accra, Ghana that they were able to use to restore their AD.

https://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-russia-code-crashed-the-world/

[rob1966]

Yeah it would mate.

But I honestly don't believe that people would understand what would happen if all IT Support people went on strike. It wouldn't affect an industry or an area or a city or an element of government.

It would affect every single facet of modern day life - from energy to government to logistics to.. well.. everything


If you went out on your HGVs and every single one of your systems was completely down and you were not able to even logon to any of them, how would that affect the HGV business for instance?

I'd say that IT peeps are probably the rulers of the universe at this point

Totally agree.

My F/T job is in IT (Tool Hire Company), so I know how reliant just our business is on our IT systems, although we can work manually if required to serve the customers, but a lot of the business grinds to a halt if we have system issues.. Our routing software locked yesterday, that caused a load of shit for our Transport depts until it was sorted.

For the HGV's, we still carry paperwork, so can get to where we need to go if we have a load on and so long as we can ring people, we can get to pick up loads. If everyones systems were down though, we'd be stuffed.

[Andy @ Allerton!]

This is a great write up of the whole thing - it has relevance to the war in Ukraine as well. They got really lucky by having a domain controller that was offline in Accra, Ghana that they were able to use to restore their AD.

https://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-russia-code-crashed-the-world/

So imagine that scenario where every VPN, front-end system, back-end system, database, network server, router, agent or link was unsupported.

If all IT support staff went on strike, there would be nowhere to go, no one to turn to. No way of fixing anything that went wrong.

To most users things just 'work' but there is an awful lot of stuff that goes on 24/7 with every support team on every system around the world. And a lot of these systems rely on other systems doing their stuff. If one system had a problem and went down, that can affect thousands of systems. If all of those went down then before long it can be impressive just by doing nothing what can be affected

And if all your IT staff have gone and aren't coming back, I doubt that any of it woud get fixed. There is too much of it and far too much of it needs knowledge and know-how and ability to keep running.

[redbyrdz]

So far, this is mainly a public sector strike (irrespective of a lot of it being privatised). IT staff, and transport and logistics are mainly private sector. If the strike rolls over into the private sector, the country will be completely down, and historically I think the only way out of that situation is with the government stepping down, and often even constitutional-level reforms.

[PaulF]

If IT staff went on strike, I think they'd call in the army, the navy and the airforce. I am sure they are all trained in how to turn things off and back on again.

[Yorkykopite]

So far, this is mainly a public sector strike (irrespective of a lot of it being privatised). IT staff, and transport and logistics are mainly private sector. If the strike rolls over into the private sector, the country will be completely down, and historically I think the only way out of that situation is with the government stepping down, and often even constitutional-level reforms.

Other than the coal-miners bringing down the Heath government in 1974 I'm struggling to recall any other industrial dispute that has had that effect. The 'Winter of Discontent' in 1978-79 had a big effect on the Callaghan government's credibility, but it survived until the following May (when the Scots Nationalists brought it down). Baldwin survived the General Strike in '26 and the Liberals saw off the massive wave of industrial unrest in 1911-12.

I would like the current strike wave to have the effect you outline. But I doubt it will. Tory credibility will take yet another blow though. And Tory nastiness is being paraded every day, which is also helpful.

[Andy @ Allerton!]

If IT staff went on strike, I think they'd call in the army, the navy and the airforce. I am sure they are all trained in how to turn things off and back on again.

Pretty much nothing works after that due to dependancies and background stuff.

They'd probably work it out in 5 or 10 years.

[Andy @ Allerton!]

Other than the coal-miners bringing down the Heath government in 1974 I'm struggling to recall any other industrial dispute that has had that effect. The 'Winter of Discontent' in 1978-79 had a big effect on the Callaghan government's credibility, but it survived until the following May (when the Scots Nationalists brought it down). Baldwin survived the General Strike in '26 and the Liberals saw off the massive wave of industrial unrest in 1911-12.

I would like the current strike wave to have the effect you outline. But I doubt it will. Tory credibility will take yet another blow though. And Tory nastiness is being paraded every day, which is also helpful.

Yep would agree with that. Most memes and most discussions are (not surprisingly) siding with the Key Workers

And quite right as well. These are people that not only kept us going through the pandemic, but are there for us 24/7 as individuals and as a country.

Years ago, you'd think that it wasn't possible to have a government as intentionaly nasty and downright evil as Thatcher and her Stormtroopers - but these bastards today are ten times worse.

Everything they do honestly looks arranged to fuck the UK and its people and not even a certain 'range of people' - unless you class 'The Super Rich' as one group and 'Everyone else' as the other.

[Red-Soldier]

If IT staff went on strike, I think they'd call in the army, the navy and the airforce. I am sure they are all trained in how to turn things off and back on again.

Why would IT staff strike?

Aren't they generally well-paid?  I saw some data the other day showing their wages have increased substantially.

[Elmo!]

Why would IT staff strike?

Aren't they generally well-paid?  I saw some data the other day showing their wages have increased substantially.

It really depends on what you do in IT. Software engineers get paid very well, whereas I think pay for IT Support staff has diminished, because there are just so many people qualified enough to do it to some level, along with things like outsourcing to places like India.

[Andy @ Allerton!]

Why would IT staff strike?

Aren't they generally well-paid?  I saw some data the other day showing their wages have increased substantially.

[thaddeus]

It really depends on what you do in IT. Software engineers get paid very well, whereas I think pay for IT Support staff has diminished, because there are just so many people qualified enough to do it to some level, along with things like outsourcing to places like India.

Very much that.  IT is a catch-all term used for a lot of different roles but the pay variation is massive.  There's been a skills gaps in the UK for a few decades but pay doesn't reflect that in many roles as, as you correctly pointed out, outsourcing is simpler than with many other jobs.

Where I currently work we have a few software development leads (well paid), a couple of hardware support technicians (low paid) with the bulk of the work carried out in Egypt.  I used to work at a council and they didn't outsource - other than an over-dependence of consultancies - but they paid their IT staff poorly.  The entire functioning of the council by the time I left was in the hands of a dozen people in their late 50s and early 60s that, in their own words, were sticking around for the pension.  Their plan is to move everything into "the cloud" because they don't actually know what that means or entails or that the costs will massively dwarf those of just paying their IT staff better such that they can retain younger staff.