8.5% pay rise in May. It is a great advert for the RMT Union to have negotiated that for them.
Except as far as I can see, it’s not true. The 8.5% rise is the one on offer - and it’s over two years, 4.5% in the 1st year and 4% in the 2nd.
Also involved are considerable changes which would see a reduction of numbers of non-driving workers, like guards, ticketing staff, catering arrangements, and the issue of passenger safety on driver-only staffed trains. The more the train companies reduce running costs by reducing staff, the greater their profits, and subsequent dividends to shareholders. Of course the term they use for the strings attached to the pay offer is ‘modernisation’. As 70% of our rail companies are now owned by German, Dutch, French and other European companies, that’s also a bone of contention for RMT.
As you’d expect, the government - supporting newspapers are using very strong language in their reporting of this dispute. This is from the Express’s Leo McKinstry last June, and I think it’s worth quoting in full:
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The Labour Party has just provided a terrifying glimpse of the future if it regains power at the next election.
Under a cowardly Left-wing government led by Sir Keir Starmer, the trade union bullies would be back in charge.
Industrial relations would return to the dark days of the 1970s when Britain was known as "the sick man of Europe" because of the widespread militancy.
That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from Lisa Nandy, the senior Labour frontbencher, when she used a TV interview yesterday to express her full support for the rail strike later this month over pay and pensions.
Called by the hardline RMT union and the white-collar TSSA, the stoppage by at least 50,000 workers will effectively last a week and will be the biggest on the network for decades.
Despite the misery, Labour is acting as a cheerleader for the strike. The party, said Ms Nandy, is "on the rail workers' side" because "they are really struggling to make ends meet".
That is the voice, not of a credible alternative government, but of a political puppet controlled by wreckers who want to hold the country to ransom for their own selfish ends.
Nandy's stance has been adopted by the other Labour MPs, like Ian Byrne, who proclaimed that "the British working-class should not have to beg".
That sort of language demolishes the pretence that Labour has shifted to the centre since Jeremy Corbyn was ditched as leader in 2020. In truth, the party remains in thrall to the outdated ideology, methods and rhetoric of the socialist struggle against oppression.
With railways, such an outlook is ridiculous. Rail staff are far better off than most British workers.
In addition to job security, good pensions, limited hours and generous holidays, their median salary last year was £44,000, around 60 per cent higher than average pay.
No fewer than a third are higher-rate taxpayers, earning over £50,000. That compares with an average pay rate of £17,000 for care assistants, £31,000 for nurses and £37,000 for teachers.
On every level, Labour's support for the strike is outrageous and economically illiterate. The railways, which this year will receive a massive subsidy of £16billion in the face of heavily declining passenger numbers, cannot afford an exorbitant pay demand.
Moreover, a large settlement for rail staff will feed a cycle of other unaffordable deals in the public sector, pushing up debt and inflation. Soon the nation could be in the grip of a summer of discontent, fomented in part by the reckless Opposition.
Labour has shown once again that they are unfit for office. The party was founded in 1900 as the political wing of the trade union movement and remains in that supine position to this day, with the militants proving much of Labour's funding and dictating its policy.
Yet the unions, whose membership has halved in the last 40 years, are no longer the authentic representatives of the working-class. Instead, they have largely become - as in the railways - the defenders of narrow, public-sector privileges and outdated practices.
It says everything Labour should still be marching in lockstep with this "I'm All Right Jack" bunch of trouble-makers.
'Labour has shown once again they are unfit for office'”