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

Insurance Arbitrage

The BBC has a story about parents 'breaking the law' over insurance for their children because they don't believe a 400% risk premium is appropriate and proportional. The tone - and uncritical reporting - in the article seem to suggest that the BBC supports the insurers' position and that we'll hear more of this as they bitch and whine about how they can't screw more money out of the vast majority of the population.

The facts are that half of the population (41% admit to it, 61% would do so) are 'fronting' insurance because the punitive rates charged for an under-25 main driver are so completely ridiculous... and to preserve that cartel, the insurers are now resorting to the law. The law isn't there to protect your profits. If you construct a market with such piss-poor dynamics as to allow people to save 75%+ by a trivial arbitrage strategy, people are going to do that. And when it's half of the population, they are right and you are wrong. We call it democracy.

Some industry mouthpiece is quoted as saying:

"Yes, £4,000 is an awful lot of money but it accurately reflects the risk posed by young drivers"

which is utter bullshit. You do not have "accurate" risk statistics because at least half of your customers have been forced to lie to you because of your retarded pricing scheme.

You will note that insurers are still making a profit from car insurance, therefore the prices they are charging are sufficient to offset the risk and the costs of young drivers. Despite the fraud. Since half will admit to fronting, we can probably knock at least £2k off that price for the actual average risk premium received (and sufficient to be profitable). And, hey, doing that might just encourage people to do things by the book...

If not, then there's a good case for a state minimum insurance to guarantee access to the roads. This is the case in much of the US - e.g. the State of California will provide insurance to meet the minimum statutory requirements, since (like here) it's a legal requirement to have proof of insurance to be allowed on the roads. The current situation, which allows insurers to price young people off the roads and encourages fraud and driving without insurance, is ridiculous and needs to change.

If you can't make sensible profits from your oligopoly, then you shan't be allowed to have one.

- 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

KC-X and the Sky-high Cost of Sky-high Fuel

EADS' (Airbus' parent company's) annual report, about a week ago, contained an interesting note that slipped by many observers. It caught Lord Mandelson's attention and got a bit more ink, but still was largely ignored. That note was that EADS has pulled out of the KC-X bidding.

There's quite a story behind that, and I shall tell it as well I can remember.

The KC-X is the replacement for the old - ancient - KC-135 Stratotankers, the US military's air-to-air refuelling capability and key to global operations. They were adapted from Boeing's 707 airframe - the forerunner of the 747s, 767s and 777s that we see at airports today - and built in the 1950s and 1960s. The youngest ones are 45 years old, and some a decade more than that!

The story of the bidding process is rather unusual. The USAF issued the RFP (i.e. call for bids) in January 2007. The process began in an unusual way by stressing that this was an urgent requirement, and that delays in procurement would put lives in jeopardy. The two bids submitted were from EADS/Northrop-Grumman using a version of the Airbus A330 to be assembled in Alabama using US workers and imported parts, and from Boeing with a modified 767.

A mere 13 months after the bidding process began, in February 2008, the selection was made: EADS/NG had won. Again, in an unusual move, the USAF made a point at the press conference that, due to the age of the equipment being replaced, delays would cost lives - a not-too-subtle warning. This didn't seem to bother Boeing, though, who filed an appeal against the decision. That appeal was upheld in June 2008, bidding re-opened in July following the forced resignation of the head of the USAF - and then the project was put on hold in September. A year later, September 2009, bidding started again.

The project, particularly the un-selection and reopening of bids, has been dogged by allegations of jingoism amongst the US players: a feeling that letting a foreign company win would be unAmerican. This, despite the fact that Northrop-Grumman is at least as American as Boeing, that a significant proportion of the work would be undertaken by Americans in America, and that Boeing were - in 2003 - accused of corruption and stripped of $1bn of government contracts.

EADS has apparently realised that the deck was stacked against it, and pulled out in March this year, leaving this whole sorry mess as nothing but a historical note. KC-X is still on the drawing board. The US is still flying the creaking half-century-old tankers it was trying to replace. The UK MoD is trying to buy a couple of those rusty old KC-135s, refitted for electronic battlefield surveillance - the RC-135 'Rivet Joint'.

Hey, if you wanted a happy ending, you should have gone to a "massage parlour".

- KoW

Spring of Discontent

Yeah, it's been a while since I updated. So, we missed out on the Autumn of Wrath, but we're definitely now on for a Spring of Discontent.

Unite - Labour's life-support - have announced strike dates for BA cabin crew, and are apparently trying to arrange potentially-illegal secondary picketing from the Teamsters. The strikes have been (belatedly) condemned by Lord Adonis and even Gordon Brown, but are going ahead anyway.

A comment on the BBC's 'Prime Minister's questions' coverage says:

Tory support scabs nothing has changed. They need to support the workers nothing has changed since the 70s for the Torys
Mark McQuade, Hamilton

which is certainly an interesting view of the world. I'm happy to say that it's one which the vast majority of the population does not subscribe to - even in the 70s, "up the workers" was an anathema to the general public. The Carry On films parodied industrial relations at the time and it's very much clear that Sid James' ordinary working-class factory foreman was the hero, not the shopfloor firebrand with his NUCIE rulebook.

The public, including the vast majority of the working class, dislike unions.

Workers used to join them "just in case", to protect themselves from being victimised, but then found themselves being forced out on strike for causes they didn't really care about in order to further the political ambitions of, well, half of Labour's front bench. As a result, union membership has plummeted in the private sector: the law gives workers protections that once required a union. It's still over 60% in public sector and former-public-sector organisations, like BA, though.

Every Red Robbo wannabe in those unions should bear something in mind, though: we, the voting public, hate you. You abuse us on a whim to favour your own agenda, holding us to ransom to give your members a bigger share of our earnings. No more.

Collective bargaining has been effective for you for a few years, but there's a flip-side to that: there's a much bigger collective whose pockets you've been picking, and we're fed up with it. There are no more abusive employers, only abusive unions, and the time has come to rid ourselves of these dinosaurs once and for all.

- KoW

The Pants Bomber

Catching up on a few things after the holidays. Well, this was the big story on Boxing Day, wasn't it?

To recap the facts as currently understood:

• A Nigerian man flew from Yemen to Amsterdam and then on to Detroit
• He had 80g of chemicals sewn into his underpants, possibly including PETN
• During the flight he tried to inject a liquid into the chemicals which, instead of exploding, caused a fire
• The fire was extinguished, the man was subdued and turned over to the authorities

Sounds like everything worked out OK, right? In fact, it bears out what people were saying about the liquid explosives plot: that you can't synthesise TATP on a plane because of the amount of cooling (e.g. ice) required. As soon as the reaction starts, it heats up and blows the reagents out of the container, ending the reaction. Oh, and the fact that aircraft designers try to ensure that their jets don't fall out of the skies when damaged - see the Aloha Airways jet that lost half of its fuselage, or the Qantas one holed by its oxygen tanks.

So, naturally, the TSA knee-jerked into banning passengers from using the on-board toilets - and then tried to crack down on whichever one of the thousands of people involved in implementing this policy leaked its details. Clearly it's vital for security reasons that passengers must be sat down and restrained, and not using a book or laptop, whilst pissing in their seats because they're not allowed to use the toilets.

Spotting a bandwagon and never shy of removing civil liberties from the proles, Gordon Brown has authorised the use of Naked Scanners at all UK airports. Never mind that they're completely ineffective against this threat, require the production (legally-speaking) of indecent images when used on minors, and will take even longer to use than the current useless measures... we're going to have them anyway. Fan-fucking-tastic, there's nothing I like more than getting up at 4am, so I can get to the airport 3 hours before my 10am flight due to the time it will take for the rent-a-plod to make an image of my cock.

And, you know what? The next time this happens, and there will be a "next time" because the world is full of bad people, the attacker will just have shoved the explosives up his arse and pulled them out in the toilets after going through the security theatre. Oops. The Naked Scanners and pat-downs don't detect that, you need a body cavity search. And if you start doing that, they'll find some other way - by the time a plot gets to the airport, it's too late to stop it.

But let's go back to the TSA for a moment. The agency charged with protecting US transport security cannot even take care of its memos. They have a track record of incompetence, and trying to invoke "national security" concerns to cover up that incompetence, and have a police state mentality which will - if unchecked - put the every US airline into Chapter 11 within a year.

Why don't they take lessons from real security agencies and accept the fact that since background checks and the most in-depth vetting procedures can't detect spies, devoting one-minute-per-passenger is about as effective as asking "Are you a terrorist?" at check-in. Probably less effective, in fact, as a good poker player would have a field day asking that question.

- 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