For the second day the complete bastards in Bob Crow’s RMT Union have paralysed the London Underground with industrial action. The time has come when someone needs to deal with these greedy and selfish complete and utter bastards.
This strike is over plans to phase out manned ticket kiosks and replace them with machines. Most folks already use machines out of choice since they are quicker and more efficient that the folks who man kiosks who are almost without exception grotesquely overweight, utterly surly and spectacularly unintelligent. Those who currently use kiosks will not struggle with the machines. We live in 2014 not 1914.
This mechanisation will cost 950 jobs. But other roles are to be expanded so creating 250 jobs on the tube while 1,000 staff have actually applied for redundancy. So there will be no forced redundancies. Yet the tube drivers are on strike.
To be a tube driver requires six weeks training. It is not like learning to be a heart surgeon. Yet tube drivers earn an average of £45,000 for a 35 hour week and get perks like free travel for the family which are worth a couple of thousand more. They are set to get a wage hike to £50,000 in 2015. They have managed to secure such great packages by bullying successive Governments with strike action. And every Government has caved in, just as they all used to cave into the miners until our greatest ever Prime Minister had the guts to stand up to them.
But there is no Margaret Thatcher to stand up to the militants on the tube. If you give into blackmail once you will be blackmailed for life.
Tube strikes paralyse London. Yesterday was a nightmare. It took two of my staff £40 and 90 minutes to travel 5 miles to work by cab and they had to run the last half mile as there was just gridlock everywhere. This two day strike will cost London businesses c£50 million. We all suffer as greedy and overpaid men and women take action over a complete non-issue. It is hard to find anyone in the capital who does not view the tube drivers with utter contempt.
There are various suggestions as to how these bastards could be brought to heel. The simplest one would simply to regard them as a key worker like the Police and put it into their contracts – by law – that they cannot take industrial action. But no-one is brave enough to stand up to them. Where is the new Maggie?