Should a tube driver be paid more than a paramedic, nurse, teacher or a dentist?
Posted on June 9th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 21 Comments »
Bob Crow: Bringing London to a standstill, costing the London Economy £100 million for yet another spurious strike
Did you know that a living dinosaur was discovered in London today? It was identified as the lesser spotted Bob Crowosaurus, an aggressive bullying beast prone to frequent lazy spells.
So Travel chaos starts. Members of the Rail Maritime & Transport Union have stopped worked, pulled up the shutters, trudged off down ta pub, at the start of a 2 day strike which will cause travel anarchy across London and cost businesses, already struggling in the recession, £100 million pounds, (according to London First).
This is sickening. A disgusting abuse of the withdrawal of an essential service which is causing misery for millions of people. All because of the whim of a man hellbent on pursuing his Trotskyist agenda and using the most blunt and basic way to get his point across. Striking.
TBB has nothing but contempt for strikes like this, especially when the economy is on a knife-edge and this lost income for the London Economy can mean job losses for other industries down the line. Not the RMT of course as they seek to protect their members at all costs and will strike if there is any danger to their members. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) said the strike was damaging for business, would cause widespread inconvenience and hurt London’s reputation. Deputy director general John Cridland said: “It is regrettable that a small minority of people are prepared to inflict this kind of disruption on others at such a difficult time.”
The dispute is over pay, jobs, disciplinary issues and the sacking of two drivers. The RMT wants a 5% pay rise and a promise of no compulsory redundancies. Add in any other issue, including the weather and the performance of the English Cricket team and you have all the perfect conditions for Bob Crow, (General Secretary of the Transport Union), to whip up his troops into a frenzy.
Bob, 5% is double the current rate of inflation, how many employers in the private sector are giving salary increases in this environment, let alone double the rate of inflation? Do private sector workers strike? Of course not. How many firms in the private sector are laying of workers? A majority of them. Yet you seek no compulsory redundancies for the RMT. Get real. Grow up. London Underground is a business and has to be run as such. It exists as an essential service for London. It does not exist to provide guaranteed jobs and salaries for your members.
Bob Crow is a well known Communist. He is a throwback to the worst excesses of Union Militancy in the 1970’s. He delights in bringing the London Underground and Train system to a stop for the most spurious of reasons. Some would call him a hypocritical Communist. As general secretary of the RMT Bob Crow received in 2007, according to the official certification officer (www.certoffice.org), £79,564 gross salary, plus employer pension contributions of £26,115. That’s more than an MP. Not bad Bob. What is amusing about this is that true Communists believe that their leaders should share in the lifestyle of those they represent in order to main real contact with their conditions of life. Bob, doesn’t sound like you do that Comrade!
So Bob, as you lead your drivers and team out on strike, think of this. The average salary of a train driver is: £37,231. This is MORE than a paramedic (£21,720), a nurse (23,044), a secondary school teacher (£31,340), and even a dentist (£31,747). Figures from the National Office of Statistics.
As a society, do we genuinely believe that a train/tube driver is more skilled and should be rewarded more for their work than a paramedic, nurse, teacher or a dentist? I think even the most deluded in society would struggle to justify that. But not Bob Crow. Off he carts his merry bunch of workers off to cause chaos. Disgraceful and contemptible.
Bob this may help you and your members have a greater understanding of jobs and salaries.
WHO EARNS WHAT : COMPARISON
1. £0 to £10,000:Cleaners, hairdressers, some agricultural labourers, people on benefits, fast food restaurant staff, school cooks, fine artists, holiday representatives, swimming pool attendants, broadcasting/film runners.
2. £10,001 to £20,000:Manual workers, sewer cleaners, call centre staff, mortuary assistants, farmers, electronic assembly line workers, nursery and care workers, imams, Army privates, bus drivers, checkout staff, landscape designers, fishermen, charity fundraisers, junior civil servants, local government administrators, soil scientists, florists, counsellors, air cabin crew, miners.
3. £20,001 to £30,000:Junior MI5 officers, rabbis, vicars, social workers, NHS nurses, naval cooks, electricians, carpenters, binmen, international aid workers, health service managers, media buyers, plant breeders, textile designers, museum administrators, lorry drivers, map makers, journalists.
4. £30,001 to £40,000: Newly qualified RAF pilots, London Tube drivers, some television presenters, London police officers, pole dancers, sandwich shop managers, bishops, London cab drivers, vets, paramedics, architects, diplomats, timber merchants, trading standards officers, zookeepers, probation officers, opticians, literary agents, immigration officers.
5. £40,001 to £50,000:Air traffic controllers, solicitors, RAF Flight Lieutenants, theatre managers, office managers, foresters, engineers, TV producers.
6. £50,001 to £75,000:Marketing and senior managers, senior police officers, commercial airline pilots, Royal Navy captains, education administrators, top PAs, fashion designers, town planners, MPs, senior social workers, tax inspectors, medical sales representatives.
7. £75,001 to £100,000: Senior managers, senior civil servants, Army brigadiers, secondary school heads, celebrity stylists, some plumbers, advertising executives, senior PRs, distribution managers, accountants.
8. £100,001 to £500,000:GPs, High Court judges, Prime Minister, business whizzkids, Cabinet ministers, Chief of Defence Staff, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, chief executives, senior company secretaries, NHS chief executives, private psychotherapists, financial advisers, quarry managers.
9. £500,001 to £1,000,000 
irector General of the BBC, heads of larger companies, including the managing director of Arsenal and the chief executive of Sainsbury’s.
10. Over £1,000,000: Chief executives of the UK’s biggest firms, celebrities, footballers, bestselling authors, football managers, senior solicitors, investment bankers.
Tubes sitting in the sidings. Not running for 48 Hours
Stats from the Southern Daily Echo.
21 Responses
I wish I had not read this article.
This makes me absolutely bloody furious. I never realised that Tube drivers earned more than the likes of teachers and nurses.
I work in London but will try to struggle to work tomorrow. This will be a bloody nightmare.
I am disgusted. Great article TBB but distressing
Thank you, TrueBlueBlood for that post. And thank you for overview of the salaries, too. It gives a great peek at what the salaries are.
What I wanted to add is, I think striking should be illegal and people who strike, should be immediately fired like people who don’t appear to work because they drank too much and can’t get their arses up.
Because, when one starts a job, one agrees with the employer how much one is going to earn. It’s basically a contract between the employer and employee, and employer hires the employee on certain conditions, as the employee starts working on certain conditions. And if one starts a job on an agreed salary, how on earth can one *demand* more during the work relationship? One can either sit down with the employer if one thinks the salary isn’t enough any more, or one can quit and find oneself a job that pays better. Simple as that.
I think that unions are created because there are some idiots among people who can’t deal with their own things themselves and behave inadequately. If people were reasonable and understood things, including the meaning of the agreement between the employer and employee, there would be no need for those bloodsuckers.
Bang on TBB. Bob Crow is a dinosaur and should be extinct.
To dismiss unionism entirely is both ahistorical and ignorant of the reality of non-middle class lifestyles. Quite often unionism arose as a final enclave for the dispossessed poor (we haven’t always had a beggar-class; enclosure created that), and might be said to have created as many problems as it solved, but to dismiss it entirely on the basis of a very 21st century and middle-class understanding of the employer-employee relationship (I refer here mainly to the comments of Sten Hankewitz) kind of misses the point.
At the same time, however, the problems with unions is that, for all their demands, they have never had the means nor the desire to regulate the standards of their members. That is, they churp up at the perceived injustices commited by their employers, but do little to counter malpractice amongst their members, whatever form it may take. This is where they, too, could learn a little from history: medieval guilds used to stick up for their guild members, but they also rigorously defended the standards of their profession, and could be pretty ruthless to those that fell short. In this, much more symbiotic, perhaps there could be a new template for contemporary unionism – should ever we get rid of the feral leftists that so often seem to be at the head of them.
Ah. I see I am in the wrong band. Apparently I should be in band 3 -as a journalist- but I am in band 2, instead.
I agree with the general thrust of your article. Bob Crow is a dinosaur…
I once e-mailed RMT to say that i thought Bob Crow was a tw@.
The person at the other end e-mailed back to say that they thought that the spelling “tw@” was really clever.
I was a psychiatric nurse for about 10 years and an active member of COHSE (became UNISON. This is the main affiliated union for members of the nursing profession (including auxiliary nurses) At the time (late 90s) the nursing profession, and the NHS generally was being hit hard by tory cut backs following the ’second step initiative’ in which the Health Boards were turned into quasi independent ‘NHS trusts’. Much money was spent on recruitment of middle managers whilst nursing pay was effectively frozen for several years running and many nurses were facing redundancy as hospitals and wards were closed by over-zealous managers seeking to save money. The union had a member vote on whether the membership should relax its self-imposed rule forbidding industrial action. It needs to be said that ‘industrial action’ can consist of less drastic measures than strikes (eg overtime bans, or working to rule). Most members voted against this rule change. This meant that nurses had voluntarily cut off their most effective means of bargaining for better pay and conditions. to my knowledge things have not improved since that time, although i no longer work for the NHS myself. My points are these:
1. Nurses are their own worst enemies
2. No political party least of all the conservatives are likely to improve their pay and conditions, but all parties like to use them as pawns to score political points against other parties.
3. If they want matters to improve they must give their unions the bargaining tools that they need.
I say good on Bob Crow. He is clearly doing a good job for his members and if any teachers and nurses are reading the above paragraph they should take note.
ERRATUM
Sorry Im getting old and it all seems so long ago, but the member vote I refer to was 1994 or 1995. I mistakenly said ‘the late 90’s I should have said the early to mid 90’s.
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Be interesting to see what would happen if people, en masse, picketed the RMT headquarters near King’s Cross station, preventing Bob Crow and his cronies getting out of the building. Wonder how they would like a taste of their own medicine?
He’s also a eurosceptic who thinks that the EU does too much to help business, and does not do enough for workers’s rights.
[...] has a brilliant post about the strike. I quote: This is sickening. A disgusting abuse of the withdrawal of an [...]
I’m no fan of the RMT and totally disagree with what they’re doing, but I don’t agree with your argument about salaries.
Why shouldn’t a Tube driver earn a salary in that range? A commercial airline pilot earns significantly more – but what’s the real difference between their roles and responsibilities? A Tube driver bears the responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of over 1000 people on board their train every time they set off – and they’re loading and unloading hundreds of people every three or four minutes whereas a commercial airline pilot is only responsible for 500 and they only load and unload their passengers once, plus the majority of their journey is automated with little decision making required.
So why is one profession looked down upon with disdain and scorn, and the other lauded?
I agree essential services like paramedics and nurses are underfunded but that is an entirely different issue and not the fault of Tube drivers.
Bob Crow is a crook. He is little more than an outlaw, putting a gun to the head.
He is a disgrace
@ Peter Gash –
The argument salary put forth here is robust, but what annoys most people is their greed at a time of financial hardship for those of us not fortunate enough to be on the public sector gravy train.
1. Driving a train is a lot simpler than flying a plane. What kind of decision making does a train driver have? When to brake is about all that comes to mind.
2. Most pilots learn to fly in the military or at their own expense. Tube drivers are trained by their employer. As such, the pool of people to fill these respective jobs is hugely different.
3. A tube driver’s salary is significantly more than a bus driver. Why? It is hardly like they have to deal with traffic, or steering, is it?
The Underground is a liability for terrorism, spread of swine flu, stress in general, and lack of sunshine and exercise.
It will be better to shut down the Tube altogether, ban most cars from London, and have millions of bicycles emulating the great success in communist China.
Indeed, it will be best to have everyone on equal pay; anyone who does not do equal work will be deported to labour camps.
I believe Bob Crow and his good men will solidly endorse this, and willingly die in defence of our communist system. That’s the only way to counterbalance the threat from communist powers like north Korea.
Train drivers are more responsible as they’ve more lives on their responsiblity than any other employee on earth.
I have just stumbled across this article and as a signaller with Network Rail, read it with interest. I am in the RMT but have no love for Mr Crow. What interests me most of all is the perception that a train driver is not worth as much as they are paid. I say perception as it seems that no-one outside of the industry has the faintest idea how signallers and drivers get the passenger from A to B. So a driver gets on board a train and drives it all day and then goes home?
There are dangers in most jobs but how many jobs hold the responsibility for the safety of possibly thousands of people (over a whole shift). Does yours?
Captains of industry trot out the same old line when asked about their salary, usually that you have to pay a lot to attract the best people. Why should this not be so for train drivers. Do you think that you could do it?
If this is the salary offered for driving trains, then this is the salary.
I see that air traffic controllers get about 40K, they prevent planes from crashing in the air, as a signaller, I do not get anywhere near that but perhaps that is because I only prevent trains crashing on the ground.
Nobody is forced to strike even if Mr Crow tries to bully them, the workforce can use action short of strike but have chosen not to, I beleive that this is their right. That Bob Crow earns as much as he does is neither here nor there, a lot of our sainted top bankers earn a lot more and your children will be paying for their folly for years to come. A little perspective please.
I tend to agree with Chris on this issue. How much do you earn, how much money does Nick Ferrari of LBC Radio earn and we must not forget to ask Matthew Jeffrey Tory Blue Conservative to the Core, Well Jeffrey How much do you earn. don’t forget any side lines and give us all a true account of your wages please. Is it true that people like Jeffrey would have the service industry ie Train Drivers on 20k per year or less. Why knock the unions when they are simply doing what their members tell them to do thats why people join Trade Unions, some of the comments made on this post are of people that have never needed to worry about wages and conditions and many of the public that use the tube and railways would only be too grateful if they could belong to a union that was able to stop wages from dropping and keep conditions of work at a good level. Anyone that is working full time for less than 30k per year is really having a bloody hard time of it. So instead of feeling jelours and attacking other workers it may be time to start taking on your employer and asking for a decent wage.
LBC Nick Farrari shoots his mouth of against our fight for a decent wage and better conditions but never reveals his earnings. I am a tube driver earn around 40k. so lets set a new example and say anyone adding to this blog dont forget to tell us what you do and how much you get paid. Its only fair to know. Thank you.
You kind of agure against yourself. On one hand Bob Crowe is using his members for some kind of polictical reason and on the other tube drivers earn to much, I guess because Bob Crowe is doing a good job for his members. Which is it? You can’t have it both ways.
Bruce. What do you do for a living, are you retired and struggling or are you working and struggling. How much do you earn and can you live and have at least one holiday per year. Do you have children to put through college? well i say if I or anyone else had the sort of money that M P s earn or the sort of money Cameron is worth I and you would be very happy and not have the same worry as most working class and middle classes have today.