This is an interesting dispute and comrade Lynch is a breath of fresh air.

The unions make one good point - the share of profits is out of kilter - you cannot have huge profits and shareholder distribution and then say we can't pay the workers more money.

On the other hand you can't have no compulsary redundancies - effectively saying all workers have a job for life even if that role has been modernised out - that show the union in bad light and gives Boris and his mates ammunition against Labour and their close connection with the unions.

Boris needs a summer of union strikes - it will distract from all his other behavioural mistakes.

Hi Sal, I thought you'd emigrated !

The current dispute on the railways will be just the first of many strikes through the rest of this year and beyond.
With inflation now at around 10%, for any worker to be expected to survive with no increase in income or a paltry 1.5/ 2% is impossible.
People need to find some additional income from somewhere, either by achieving a reasonable pay rise or, by moving jobs.

The private sector will take care of itself but, the public sector will be the biggest test of "us and them".

Of course, increasing public sector pay could mean increasing taxes, which are already at record levels overall. However, there is no doubt they Johnson and Sunak have been building up a fair old "war chest" so, the increases in taxation could be mitigated.

I think your right about a wave of strikes suiting the Tories more than they suit Labour though, strikes will be used as a stick to beat The Labour party with and it's therefore little wonder that Johnson was suggesting that the "public" get ready for the long haul.
This could rumble on right up until the next General Election.

I'm in the private sector and I'll have to survive on a 2% increase.
Public sector workers on average are better paid than those in the private, especially in low skilled jobs.
They can also retire earlier and on better pensions. Oh and on average they work fewer hours and have longer holidays.
But apart from that they are really suffering

Same old tories. Always wasting billions then blaming somebody else and taking from the poor and pandemic key workers



£4Bn wasted on PPE
£11Bn wasted servicing debt because Sunak didn't act
£40Bn wasted on track & trace
£10Bn handed to criminals
£6Bn wasted on overheating armoured cars
£100M wasted on tagging criminals

And at the same time removing the cap on fat cats pay



Yep levelling up, were all in it together



Never, ever trust the tory.

I think this is no longer the case because private sector pay was frozen for the last few years . I think your problems are actually more to do with your employer and conditions rather than the sector.
I think you will find that regardless of what de Pfeffel and his colleagues keep stating the vast majority of people are struggling unless you are a pensioner apparently who are due a 10% increase which could be something to do with the fact they are more likely to vote and for de Pfeffel. I wonder if you have tried telling you employer that you are a de Pfeffel voter and must be due more.

Yeah, with the public purse supposedly closed, you could be surprised that the pensioners ar in line for an eye watering 10% increase, plus the various other bits of help.
However, when you realise that the vast majority of the blue rinse brigade vote Tory, it all becomes much easier to understand. Cynical move, you bet it is.

As for the private vs public sector, its worth remembering that the public sector have barely come out of their 10 year austerity "pay freeze" so, they are "due" something.
At least you would think so ?

What annoys me is that my wife who is in a union and the private sector has gone on strike along with the other union members. They have been able to obtain a better offer but when they do I have never come across any of the non union members not accepting the improvements.
On a slightly off topic but the two by-elections were set for today by the government, I wonder if this date had anything to do with de Pfeffel leaving the country after all it is not like him.

They are "due" no more than anyone else IMO. In my industry the purse strings are are just as tightly closed. However I enjoy my job and anyway at 62 I am too old(lazy) for retraining.

Do you mean public sector pay? If so you are wrong

Give over


White van Brexit man lol

By the time that 2% has been added to £40/hr earnings and paid by the agent into the offshore company account, and then 1/3rd of it transferred back into the U.K. company bank account as UK declared earnings , with expenses and tax fiddled it’s worth 20%, and with no corporation tax or income tax to pay..



Criminals

I'm not a union official so earn nowhere near £40 an hour. HTH

Of course you don’t, but the offshore Ltd company account does

Well, Lynch has certainly exposed the media for the establishment mouthpieces they are.

Don’t forget the Conservative sacrificial junior ministers. It’s something of a record being called out as being a liar 17 times on tv

I don’t agree about the comment about you can’t have no compulsory redundancies.
You can make jobs redundant- Many who have worked a long time will take non-compulsory for the package. If jobs no longer exist then you offer to retrain those workers elsewhere. It’s more than doable.
The modernisation that the government is talking about makes it sound as if they are putting in fancy new equipment- what it means in reality is people working more weekends for no more money.

The strikes on the railways are just the tip of the ice berg. There is a summer of discontent coming.

YEP. teachers, nurses and other nhs workers next.

I used to work in education. The pay isn't bad as a teacher on the face of it - but the workload is absolutely shocking.
I would easily be putting in 60 hours a week in a 'normal' week, and during the "holidays" that you all think we get I would work at least half of those. We would be expected to come in and do revision sessions during holidays, after school sessions etc, parents evenings, open evenings, so really when you work it out you are earning minimum wage. And don't even get me started on the bullying culture that exists on staff in many schools. and if you work in a 'tough' school its even harder.

all that is before COVID, I really don't know how my ex colleagues have dragged themselves through the last two and a half years. I look back know and think F*** what I put up with!

nurses are in a similar boat with shortages and all the extra they are having to do.

Awaits Sal Paradise on his return telling you that's Rubbish

After watching all the media clips I was a paid up member of the fan club and ready to get the Lynch t-shirt. But then I saw him asked if he regretted urging his membership to vote to leave the EU, and he said he did not.

Now personally left wing brexiters make my skin crawl. We already know right-wing littler England types have a warped world view but for the left to be quitlings is utterly disgusting. It is perfectly legitimate for socialists to be ideologically opposed to the EU as constructed. However, they have a duty to ask themselves a fundamental question, is the working man and woman better off in the EU or out of it. I'd argue that if he thinks the working classes are better off out of the EU he's either a liar or he's unhinged.

So the fact that Lynch was a committed brexiter back then, and he is unapologetic for it to this day, more than cancels out the goodwill I had based on his sparring. A little Friday rant as I'm way too hot.

[iFrom someone who works on the railways...
Three years ago we accepted a 0% pay rise, two years ago we accepted a 0% pay rise. But this year they came to us with a 0% pay rise plus over 2500 redundancies, changes to terms and conditions. An increase from 28 weeks of nights to 39 weeks of nights. An increase from 32 weekends worked to 39 weekends worked.
Currently for a night shift we get time and a quarter, for a weekend turn we get time and a half. They wish to cut both of these to time and a tenth. So that’s a 15% pay cut on every night shift and a 40% pay cut on every weekend turn. But they want us to work more of them. This is their modernisation they talk about. Not technology, we embrace technology and have seen more and more of it in recent years. They also wish to fire and re-hire the operative grades and bring them back under a new job title but on £9000 a year less. They also want them to use their own vehicles to get to work sites, this when fuel is at its highest. They will also be pooled when currently they are part of the team. The press are painting this to be about pay above all else. It is not. But now we’ve said sod them we are going to demand better. I wish everyone could see past the government controlled media smear[/i

So we have an effectively privatised rail system atm with the government giving railways £16 billion. Rather than running the railways for a non profit format they are reducing wages and terms of employment so they can increase shareholders bonuses.

Last year £800 million pound of shareholders profits was paid out effectively the tax payer putting £800 million into the pension pots of hedge fund managers

I guess it’s called being honest a rare commodity in de Pfeffel world.

I believe it's costing around £7m a day to look after the Dinghy Divers.

The difference with the private sector is wage inflation impacts costs - these costs have to be passed - this is resulting in much higher costs across all industries. We are not getting 2/3% increases we are getting 10%+ this is just for firms to standstill.

If you add the costs of raw material and transportation to wage inflation you have a toxic mix that will fuel further inflation or drive job losses as firms who can't pass on these increases go under.

The public sector is different HMRC/DVLC/NHS/DWP wage increases don't drive anything significantly other than taxation to pay for it i.e. it isn't passed on

The new Rwandan plan which other countries have stopped due to costs does not bode well. I would think if it was so economical compared to the existing arrangements they would be shouting it from the rooftops but no not a mention, I wonder why. We have already paid Rwanda 120 million before we even start and £500,000 on a plane just to make de Pfeffel and the Home Secretary appeal to certain voters prior to two by-elections.

Unfortunately for the Tories, who are encouraging this strike for all they're worth because they perceive huge electoral advantage from it, the world has moved on a long, long way since the 1970s.

Most people simply don't find trade unions to be terrifying bogeymen any more, they don't see working people fighting for decent wages and working conditions and conclude they are the enemy. Because they are fights so many would love to have, if only they had the power.

40 years of Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite policies have created a country with vast wealth inequality and insurmountable social mobility issues. A country in which the Conservative-supporting elites bribe their way to have the ear of government officials, are in happy receipt of lucrative government contracts (where they deliver worse results for more cost than when things were done in-house) and who pay low, little or no taxes. And where, perhaps most important of all, the free market has been so corrupted that companies like Amazon, the big supermarkets and giant conglomerates and oligopolies are able to drive small businesses out of existence and drive wages down across the board with their anti-competitive behaviour.

The country's economic model has clearly fundamentally failed. The generation for whom the mention of "unions" drove them to voting for Thatcher is sadly largely dead now and younger people simply don't have the same perspectives. The upcoming fight will inevitably be similar to France: between a band of hard core extremists of the far right (who have taken over the Tory party), the young who are jaw droppingly left wing and the centre for whom the fight to preserve and restore free market values will generate a very large, quite unsatisfactory big tent. The Tory party's grievence-based politics, their culture wars and their attempts to find wedge issues will only take them so far, but they will milk it for all they're worth in the hope of getting enough voters to vote for them or not vote for the opposition to enable their minority rule to continue. Labour's task is to try and knit together a coalition of the centrists, increasingly appalled by the extremism of the Tory party, and the left - and that will be difficult indeed.