South West Trains to go on strike for a month

wtaf. How is this legal?

They aren’t walking out for a month though are they? I thought they were just dicking around on and off for a month. Over Christmas. Which is probably more annoying and disruptive. I’m glad I don’t use SW Trains.

They are on strike for 27 days, ie all of December except the 1st, 12th and then Christmas Day and Boxing Day (when there are no trains).

I can't believe that their employees will actually stick to a loss of 27 days pay immediately before Christmas, but I guess I am going to be working from home a lot. 

Same as Kimmy. I was trying to commute from home on the South Coast to Putney, it was taking me 4 trains to get to work and another 4 to get home. On a good day. There were times when I would look at the train app on the way to the station to see all trains for the next 4 hours had been delayed or cancelled. 

Still, I made a lot of money out of delay repay. 

I don't miss commuting on Southern. Empathetic commiserations to all SW Trains commuters. 

I seriously considered buying 'down south' but the thought of having to rely on South West trains to get to work every day was simply too much to fathom.

They are also one of the main reasons that I avoid flying from Gatwick.

It is cheaper to have what they call "on board supervisors" rather than guards.  The OBSs are not trained to the same levels of safety as guards.  The Southern franchise was the test case for this change in 2016-2018.  Worse than the strikes were the drivers/guards refusing to do overtime, causing daily cancellations.  It was totally horrific.  

Okay, but are passengers content with having a destroyed service for a month to defend the right of the train company to offload more expensive staff?

If I was an SW trains passenger I would not consider my daily commute to be an acceptable sacrifice to allow Stagecoach management to save face in a spat with their employees. 

I'm not sure why the the default is to blame the union and assume that capital's cause is legitimate, I do not give a fook about Stagecoach's dividend. 

Why don't they just say okay, you win, and keep the fooking guards? 

They have. They have offered to keep guards on all trains. This is apparently about safety - RMT wants the guard to be the one who authorises the train to move and SWR wants it to be the driver. Not sure this is a valid reason for a 27 day strike... 

Outrageous if true. I use SWR and at best they are adequate. Transport strikes should be made unlawful. North London extreme left 'tankies' will support them, of course, because they are unaffected by rail strikes.

Train drivers earn £53,000 per year. Many lawyers or paralegals don't touch anywhere near that. Those on publicly-funded work will arguably become Francoistas overnight if they are affected by more militant action.

Wellington, surely you should be supporting this glorious socialist direct action by your left-wing fellow-travellers. 

(Perhaps travellers is the wrong word in this case. Fellow walkers?)

Heh, wot he said.

1. Like all rail services in the U.K., it’s barely fit for purpose.

2. If you want to live in the sticks so you can proclaim loudly the benefits of your local butcher and gastropub, you can suffer what goes with it.

3. Guess what, there are proper butchers and gastropubs all over London. Is it just the brown people you don’t like?

4. Britain innit.

 

What cookie said.  Just now I was enjoying a 2E looking out over several hundred acres of old growth woodland, turning beautiful shades of burnt amber and glistering in the morning sun and thinking to myself oh how I long to be in a poky terraced house in north london, with a garden a grown man can almost lie down in and can hold up to 2 Tesco garden chairs, nary a tree in sight, surrounded by somali criminal gangs, Turkish drug dealers, dreadful champagne socialists and a miasma of Marlboro gold smoke, misery and resentful scorn...

You do realise they have people of different ethnic origins outside the m25, right?  There's a lady next door who is Welsh.

And for somebody who whines on all the time about defamation on rof, maybe you should hold off on baseless  character assassination.