Autumn of Wrath 2: Autumn Harder!

So, nearly a year late - it is the tube after all - the strikes are kicking off and will paralyse London. For what? Because the RMT and some other bunch of TSSAs think it's a bit unfair that they shouldn't be paid to sit around reading novels and want 250 unfilled and demonstrably-redundant jobs to be filled rather than being part of a 5% headcount reduction which will not cost anyone their job and will simply be natural wastage.

Wonderful, eh? Doesn't it make your heart sing that Bob Crow is going to fuck up the week of several million people over a manufactured and practically non-existent "dispute". We all know what this is really about - it's not the ticket staff, it's not the union members, it's purely to test the will of the coalition government. "The issue is not the issue". For that reason, it'll keep rolling on with one petty grievance after another trotted out as a pretext for what must be the last hurrah of unions in the public sector. We have a precedent - Lord Scarman ruled against the unionisation of workers at GCHQ, for the fairly obvious and sensible reason that some services are too important to allow union activity to interfere with them. When millions of people can be held hostage for the benefit of a few hundred, half of whom don't exist and none who would lose their jobs in any case, the system is broken.

I'm not going to be affected by it, of course - as soon as talks broke down, I called in some hotel points and booked myself a room within walking distance of the office. There's a bit of an opportunity cost there, but no alternative.

The point is that unions have a stranglehold over the public sector (and the Labour party) and simply cannot be allowed to disrupt vital public services on a whim. As I've said before, strikes only make sense when there is a functioning market and a company can lose customers to its competitors; when the "company" is a state monopoly, they are simply extortion with menaces.

In any field other than industrial relations, blackmail will get you jail time.

Time to step into the 20th century, eh? Forget about all those abusive Victorian mine owners and deal with the fact that, for nearly four decades, we've had adequate protection for workers in potentially-dangerous environments and bans on discrimination on the grounds of race or sex and, for approaching five decades, protection against arbitrary dismissal.

The battle was won half a century ago, it's time to stop fighting it.

The government should ban something useful for once: unions in monopoly services.

- KoW

The Rudest Woman I Have Ever Met

Well, tonight's train journey (the First Capital Connect 19:45 from King's Cross to Cambridge) was eventful... some woman set her kids a fantastic example by throwing a tantrum when she couldn't get her way.

I'd got to the station too late to comfortably make the 19:15, so I ended up waiting. Naturally, this meant that I was able to get on the 19:45 as soon as boarding started. I found myself a nice seat, stowed my bags and got out a drink and a newspaper. Boring and predictable just like most evening journeys.

Just before the train was due to leave, a fat woman, two other mothers, and four kids got on and decided that, as part of their arrangements, I was going to have to move. I was... non-plussed. Now, if you ask nicely, or give me a few seconds to weigh up "being surrounded by annoying kids" against "the hassle of moving", I'm blatantly going to give up my seat and move somewhere quiet.

But, no, as I had the temerity to want to sit where I was sat, the fat woman immediately goes off on one. Shouting, swearing, trying to insist that I have no right to the seat I'm in, attempting to draw analogies with airlines, making whiny passive-aggressive comments to everyone in earshot. That technique has repeatedly been shown by studies to be the best way to get exactly what you want... if what you want is a punch in the face, anyway.

Obviously goodwill goes right out of the window at that point and you're getting the full-on feature-length Stubbornness Experience (with a cartoon before and ice-cream during the intermission). Needless to say I sat there, quietly reading the Standard, with the fat woman complaining about how unreasonable I was on one side, and one of the kids kicking me in the knee on the other (clearly she sets a good example to them), thinking "wouldn't it be nice if we could all just... get along?" and "if they were doing this to a train company employee, it'd be called 'assault', according to the station posters".

I'm at a loss to understand what distorted sense of entitlement makes someone expect to be able reconfigure the seating arrangements of complete strangers in a public train, and to throw a fit if people don't immediately bend over backwards to accomodate you. It's ridiculous and, frankly, embarassing. One of the kids even suggested calling the police - presumably to tell them that "the bad man won't give up his seat for us", which I suspect is a misdemeanour at best.

As I got up to leave the train, the fat woman gave me a round of applause, which was nice. She probably meant it sarcastically, but who gives a damn? I certainly don't need anyone's approval to occupy a seat on a train, and nor will I apologise for it.

- KoW

March Snippets

Striking Distance

Today's Metro (p23) has the story British Airways 'rushing through' strike breakers, with Unite claiming that the replacement cabin crew have had insufficient training. I don't buy that, they'll have had more than most budget airlines, though perhaps not as much as the usual BA crew - who are extremely competent but frankly overqualified for a glorified waitressing job. Yes, there are things that can go wrong on a flight, and the earliest stewardesses had to be registered nurses, but their safety impact is minimal on a modern airliner - so long as the pilot knows his stuff and the maintenance is correct, there's not much difference from a train: a bunch of bored people sitting around in cramped seats.


Striking resemblance

Meanwhile, this looks set to be the first international strike, with support from the US, Germany, France and (I believe) Australia for their Unite brothers and sisters. The BBC story contains:

US union leader James Hoffa said: "Whatever we have to do, we will do."

That's either a remarkable coincidence, or he's some relation to Jimmy Hoffa. Indeed, Wikipedia suggests that he's the only son of Jimmy Hoffa. It seems that even the most hardcore left-wingers are as prone to nepotism and keeping it in the family as the aristocratic capitalists they claim to provide an alternative to. Then again, we don't need to look much further than our own cabinet to see two brothers, a husband and wife and the son of Tony Benn as clear and present evidence of political dynasties - and let's not forget Jack Dromey (Mr Harriet Harman) being parachuted into a safe seat for the 2010 election.


Going off the rails

Next to the BA story in today's Metro, p22 is a full-page ad from Network Rail's Chief Executive - Iain Croucher - imploring the RMT to negotiate over signal strikes at Easter. I'm vaguely suspicious that the turnout multiplied by the voting ratio means that 50.05% of eligible RMT staff support the strike, but it could be a coincidence.

This is another rather daft strike. The RMT are claiming, as usual, that the Spanish Practices they've managed to accumulate since the age of steam is somehow conducive to running a 21st century railway. It beggars belief that rail maintenance workers are employed Monday-Friday when the work is done at night, on weekends and over bank holidays.


Plus ça change

It seems that the French TV 'torture gameshow' has ruffled some feathers. I don't know why. It's just a jazzed-up version of the Milgram Experiment - one of the key results from experimental psychology. Derren Brown re-ran the as part of his show The Heist and replicated the results. Starting in 1961, Stanley Milgram's work essentially proved that ordinary, good people could be made to kill by even extremely weak instruction from authority figures. Before the experiment, psychologists had predicted that <0.1% of people would go all the way; in reality around half did.

With memories of WW2 still recent, this all but demolished the notion that the Germans were "bad people" - they were, as Eichmann's defence claimed, just following orders, and everyone else would have complied in much the same way.

Of course, that's an uncomfortable notion for most people, and a typical response to cognitive dissonance is to shoot the messenger. Bad luck, France2.

- KoW

ASLEF is an Anagram for "Total and Complete Bastard"

It's obviously not a strike, drivers just haven't turned up for work - in a coordinated action - today. That makes me feel warm and fuzzy to be living on the Hitchin-Cambridge spur of the Great Northern line, so I'm completely unable to travel today - the nearest replacement bus services are about 10 miles away, if I wanted to take a bus to Cambridge and then the Liverpool Street train.

That makes me glad I bought a season ticket.

I don't know if First Capital Connect will call a Void Day, presumably they will as they have no way of running a service today, which means I might get a couple of quid compensation. Woo.

It wouldn't be so bad if the "grievance" wasn't utterly contrived: drivers are objecting to being paid overtime to come in on a Sunday as it's only "voluntary" work. So they've all decided en-masse not to volunteer so, even though there are enough who would want double-time or whatever the pay is on any given Sunday, there is no service to protest this lack of compulsion. We know full well that the union would reject any calls to make Sunday working mandatory, and that would make the system less flexible and worker-friendly than it is currently.

So, what this actually is, is a strike about the lack of grounds for calling a strike.

Thanks, ASLEF. Strikes are only viable if the employer is a non-monopoly: it will lose customers to its competitors, so has an incentive to end the strike. With a monopoly, or a state-run pseudocompany, all it does is victimise customers. This union, like so many others, is playing a zero-sum game against the general public.

This is, it has to be said, a failure of privatisation: awarding of monopoly franchises does not create a market. The airline model is much better - arrival/departure slots bought from the stations, central (state-run) traffic control, and multiple service providers on the same route. This is so tantalisingly close on the King's Cross lines - GNER/NXEC, WAGN/FCC, Hull Trains and now Grand Central all run on the same tracks, and there are multiple providers as far north as Stevenage and Hitchin. Why isn't it a viable model more generally? Why isn't there a choice between easyTrain where I'd be standing for the entire journey, but it'd be cheap, or a First Class-only OpCo with complementary champagne?

- KoW