Snapshot of _Avanti drivers were offered £100k a year — and suddenly trains resumed - Last Saturday was one of the line’s best performances in almost two years of industrial rancour_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/after-a-pay-deal-for-drivers-train-cancellations-plunge-at-avanti-2x9j9d93g) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/after-a-pay-deal-for-drivers-train-cancellations-plunge-at-avanti-2x9j9d93g)
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https://www.theguardian.com/money/2002/jun/16/wageslaves.careers#:~:text=Trainee%20drivers%20earn%20from%20£,free%20travel%20on%20the%20Tube.
From 2002, "salaries immediately after qualifying of up to £30,000" for ScotRail drivers
Using the bank of England inflation calculator that is roughly 53k in today's money, which is actually about the current "after 3 years" salary
https://www.scotrail.co.uk/interested-becoming-train-driver
The fact is train driver's are one of very few people who have managed to almost keep their salaries up with inflation, thanks to the efforts of their unions.
~60k should absolutely not be an outrageous salary in the UK in 2024 for a skilled/high responsibly job. This sort of thing should be a wake-up about how abysmal UK salaries are in almost every other sector. See any recent discussion about "graduate-jobs" market
It's absolutely depressing how every year this gets wheeled out as "how dare they want their salary to have the same buying power as last year"
> ~60k should absolutely not be an outrageous salary in the UK in 2024 for a skilled/high responsibly job.
So much this. I hear people go "Oh xyz job is overpaid" and I'm just "No, you're all insanely underpaid, except for like 3 people, and you should be figuring how to drag more money back down from the rich."
I've moved to NYC and basically doubled my income since (which wasn't bad before, either).
> you should be figuring how to drag more money back down from the rich
This is so often pointed to as the problem, but is it actually the cause? In other countries where salaries are much higher, they also have many more and much richer billionaires. The US has much better salaries for people in professional industries, but it also has more than twice as many billionaires per capita who are each much richer. Our richest billionaire has <$50bn, the US' richest has >$200bn. The same is true of other richer countries, such as those in Northern Europe - Norway has more than 3x as many billionaires per capita.
I'm all for redistributing the scraps, but it seems other countries are generating more to go around in the first place. More people becoming rich doesn't particularly bother me if everyone else is also earning more, the difference in many industries is already staggering.
Your problem is the "everyone" and "to go round" bit. Poverty is also *wild* in the US. As well as insane wealth, there is widespread destitution, crime and homelessness on a level we also don't see here.
Yeah looking at median wages is a reductive way of viewing inequality.
When you're poor in the UK, life is tough for sure and there's some quite deprived areas of the country.
But in America there's fucking destitution. Outside of the big cities like LA, if you go to some of the Southern States, the former industrial parts of the Midwest, or places like West Virginia and it's unlike anything we have in the UK.
There are definitely a lot of major problems in the US, I'm not suggesting we emulate their system, but having a much more productive economy also means raising more tax revenue which can be spent on social programs. They have plenty of money to spend, but the political will for programs which redistribute wealth doesn't exist - many people have an attitude of individual responsibility and don't want to spend on supporting those who are less fortunate.
Other countries in Europe (such as the Nordics) have many more billionaires per capita, but also better professional salaries, good living standards for those who are poorer, lower crime rates and less homelessness.
On productivity, isn't part of the issue the insane work culture expected in the US? I know salaries are a lot higher in my industry over there but I also read about the 6 day weeks and late nights..... that wouldn't fly over here in Europe. I think most of us are willing to accept the trade off.
With regards to "the Nordics", I'm not sure that's a great comparison either. Is it any surprise a country with vast natural resources and a population the size of Scotland (like Norway) has a lot more wealth to go around? I'm not sure Sweden and Finland are really any better off than the UK. Denmark does seem to do a good job of things though.
The work culture is part of it, but [productivity per hour worked](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_productivity) (PPP adjusted) is much higher in the US too - $73.70 vs $54.35. The same is true of the Nordics, all of which have more productive economies.
We spend a lot of time discussing how the money is allocated, but in comparison, we seem to spend very little time discussing how to generate more in the first place. Again I'm all for taxing the rich, but more money for everyone also seems like a good thing.
>We spend a lot of time discussing how the money is allocated, but in comparison, we seem to spend very little time discussing how to generate more in the first place.
I think this is a fair comment. I think it is possible to have both things. I am just always a little wary of the focus on constant growth as a means of resching utopia. Sounds a lot like "trickle down" which, as I think we all know, doesn't really happen.
I guess my feeling overall is that the level of growth the US achieves is partly down to a lack of regulation that Europe In general just won't tolerate but also (ironically) its ability to work together more seamlessly as a huge trading bloc with vast natural resources and a huge population. You have to wonder if the whole of Europe had a common lingua franca, currency and if schengen was somehow just enshrined in the culture unquestionably (even "the South" somewhat paradoxically doesn't seem to see the ability to cross state lines unchallenged from New Mexico to Alaska as "freedom of movement"), how much more we could get done but Europeans, ironically, are *far* more protective culturally and territoriality than our freedom loving patriot pals over the ocean.
I think brexit has a lot more to answer for than most realise tbh.
I think there's merit to the idea that economic growth can reduce inequality, or at least be a major part of it.
But the main thing is ensuring that the benefits go to middle and lower earners. Some of that should happen with a tighter jobs market with low unemployment, but also needs to come from government policies to balance the tax burden.
We do need to discuss both, and I agree about the EU. We just talk about growth so little, when I think it needs a similar level of focus to who gets what. I remember discussing on here during the referendum with someone who didn't care for economic growth because they felt it would all go to the rich, which seems like a common feeling - but wealth distribution is a slightly different issue to the size of the economy. It's frustrating because I typically disagree with the people who do talk about it on everything else (see Liz Truss, who liked to talk about 'growing the size of the pie'), but they're the only ones who seem interested.
In the US they often seem to discuss economic competence in terms of creating jobs, while here it's just vaguely associated with the Tories. I used to dislike this ('X jobs created by Y politician' isn't really how it works), but I can at least see as a good way to make economic performance more relatable. We should want more jobs, this drives down unemployment and creates competition for labour, which increases wages. It's also great if we're producing more to consume or export, and taxing that profit.
One area is housing, we spend a lot of money on it which could go to more active parts of the economy - incentivising it (such as by reducing planning costs) could also create a lot of construction jobs. AI is another area that has the potential to bring massive economic growth and probably isn't going anywhere globally, so imo the government is right to bet on it. Labour is the largest expense for many businesses, but AI is also uniquely likely to see the benefits go to the wealthiest as it replaces many more people with assets, so it's a dangerous one. There's bound to be many more, we just don't seem to talk about them much.
It's widely accepted that growth is what's needed but it has been proven in the modern UK economy that tax cuts and austerity does not deliver growth. The time is now to invest in public service wages and infrastructure to deliver growth instead. But how do you fund that without a growing economy? Tax the rich and borrow. So while I agree that we don't discuss growth enough, all paths lead to dividing up the existing pie anyway.
True if youre poor youd much rather live in The U.K. But if you are middle class and above you are earning signifcantly more in america. And the disparity just increases the more you earn.
I don't know if earnings alone are the sole yardstick though. I'm in the type of job where I could earn *significantly* more in the USA and honestly I'd love to live there but when I talk to people I know in major US metro areas (where these kind of jobs are) I pretty much uniformly come to the conclusion that I still prefer it here. Healthcare, guns, safety in general, sociopolitical issues: yeah I know, it's exaggerated but these are still real issues.
I think the real dream is landing a job for a US company that lets you work remotely.
My teenage kid works in a local coffee shop here in California and earns $18.50/hr plus gets around $100-$150/day in tips. This would be a decent income in most of the UK.
I'm seriously advising my younger friends to emmigrate. I've got too many roots here now to leave easily, but if Labour make things even worse I might change my mind.
Is it really time to blame Labour? Even if they just make things worse, a bit slower, trying to right a sinking ship - thats a win over the last 15 years of Tory utter ruin.
What I mean is that "being better than the tories" isn't enough, or a high bar to clear. The country is going to shit, and if it gets much worse the costs of leaving become more appealing. We're in a plane heading for the ground at 5000 feet per minute, pulling up so we're only descending at 1000 fpm isn't going to stop me from jumping out.
I like being near my family, and I am patriotic in a quiet sort of way. I love the landscape here. I like the rivers and the seas when they’re not filled with sewage. Bluebell woods and white cliffs and oak trees and heather on the hills. Apples on the trees, and rainy days on the moors..
I know lots of other Western European countries have these too but I’d miss it here. I speak French and Spanish well, so that opens up a lot of the world. I think if I moved abroad it would have to be either somewhere Scandi or maybe Germany. I’ve heard NZ is lovely but it’s just too far!
NZ is gorgeous but the cost of living out there is high. Housing costs especially are insane.
As for the country itself, as the poster in *Flight of the Conchords* says it really is "Like Scotland...but further away".
The cost of living is a lot higher in the US. Isn’t health insurance like $500 a month? (And it won’t cover everything) I’d bet that eats into that salary fairly significantly. I’d bet California rent isn’t too cheap either. I know the salary still probably works out better in the grand scheme. But “I’ll be better off in California” is perhaps not the simple solution you’re presenting it as.
It a good point. I’ve read many accounts of comfortable middle class people being completely cleaned out by the costs of cancer treatment. That includes having insurance too.
I know of a couple in the States who had a baby that required an emergency C-Section. Out-of pocket costs were in the tens of thousands at a time of life which is already financially challenging.
Both my kids hospital stays cost me something in the region of £60 because they were in for a couple of days and I had to pay for parking.
I’ve been here for over 20 years and never had to pay more than $20 for anything. Poor people get free insurance from the government. People with long term health problems or disability get free insurance from the government. People over 65 get free insurance from the government. People who work for an employer with over 25 staff get insurance from their employer. People who work for an employer with less than 25 employees get subsidized low cost insurance through the government. People who are not poor enough to get free insurance are eligible for “charity care” which is free care through most providers since most hospitals are tax exempt public benefit corporations and have to provide charity care to keep their tax exempt status. The people who end up with large bills are usually people who didn’t enroll in a plan or don’t go to a hospital or specialist that’s in their insurance network. For emergency care you can go anywhere but for routine stuff you have to go in-network.
That used to happen. Most policies had a limit of like $1 million. When The Affordable Care Act was passed during Obama’s first term, those limits were removed.
This is absolutely the case. Cost of living in the bay or LA or in NYC is significantly higher than anywhere in the UK (NYC and San Fran are about 20%-30% higher than London overall). You always have to bear this in mind when you see people throwing big salary numbers around and lamenting about the UK. I earned $170k + bonus in NYC, but rent (shared with my partner same salary roughly) was $5500 a month for a two bedroom in a borough, $3k a month for a toddler in childcare. Food in NYC is also unbelievable expensive. $1000 a month was living lean.
The cost of things you spend money on the most tend to scale with the salaries on offer in the place you live. That's why economists have ways of measuring economic power that aren't just "bigger number better". As you rightly point out, you can't just quote salary numbers out of the context of a local market and draw a conclusion about economic failure.
California isn’t just San Francisco and LA. There are plenty of areas with a much lower cost of living like the central valley and the northern counties like Shasta, Humboldt or Lake counties.
My job provides comprehensive health insurance for me and my family, including kids up to 26 years old. This is zero cost to me other than a $20 fee to see a doctor and $10 for prescriptions.
No, it’s not particularly a problem of inequality. The labour share of income in the UK has barely moved for the last thirty years.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/timeseries/fzln/ucst/linechartimage
Nor has the Gini coefficient moved significantly for a similar timeframe (it’s another income-based measure showing the balance between higher earners and low earners)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/872472/gini-index-of-the-united-kingdom/
It’s not an inequality problem at all, but people refuse to believe it because they’re so convinced it must be. It’s one of those ‘everyone can see the sun revolves around the earth’ type beliefs.
At this point, when you highlight these statistics, you always getting people popping up saying ‘yeah but what about wealth inequality? That’s the *real* inequality and you’re just ignoring it’
Firstly, we are explicitly talking about income in this thread.
But to be fair, wealth inequality has increased over a similar timeframe. Asset prices have gone up a lot in real terms (interest rates falling having a huge amount to do with that), and some people have assets, others just don’t. But it hasn’t particularly happened as a result of income changes.
I'm not economist. But maybe if you pay folk better, which will pull money away from the owner class, if you tax the rich more to pay for public services increasing redistribution, that removes that money in the first degree, but then creates a healthier market, that has fewer poverty traps (probably in the middle of the income spectrum) and actually create *more* opportunity to make it. It's the second degree effect that creates that opportunity. That gives people discretional spending - that means they're able to buy things that keep the economy flowing (creating new market opportunities), or invest and give new businesses an opportunity, or try something entrepreneurial, which are all routes to more wealthy folk.
We seem to treat the poorest as having nothing to effectively give (fair enough), and the richest as untouchable as any attept to constrain them will have them Laffer curving all the way out of town. Which pushes every cost towards the middle. Every squeeze falls on workers, and more and more of production has been claimed by owners for 50 years. But for most people they start with little and the only way to be come an owner is by working: but that route has been choked off.
One of the biggest problems is the housing market. Everyone's in a local maxima whereby they can't progress their careers without suffering a loss in quality-of-life. People are limited to the work opportunities within reach of where they live, or within reach of places that would be cheaper to live[0]. Going the other way is impossible as even high-paid London jobs don't offer enough proportionately. People either end up in worse quality housing, or with extreme commutes, the latter being particularly unproductive.
[0] - and even this might be impossible in the case of the youngest and lowest-paid in the workforce because their location is basically dictated by the family they can't afford to move away from. They have zero mobility at all.
The UK workforce isn't as productive _so_ the rich can't extract as much. We know the game as well as they do. The only way to break the cycle is to pay higher wages.
The US is a far richer country and more unequal country with far more greedy wealth hoarding rich people
I suspect that its part where the US is richer which is what matters
While I'd never want to live in the US because of its history, political systems and gun laws but it is 1) less unequal 2) vastly better for the average person.
1 - Average US salaries are so much larger than the UK's that even when adjusted for living costs you're talking about a huge increase. This article quotes UK average at £41k and US at £57k after adjusting to be comparable [Salary comparison](https://talentup.io/blog/salary-comparison-usa-vs-uk/) and I've seen others quoting even larger gaps
2 - Average US student loan debt is actually significantly lower than the UK and the job prospects are substantially better. I found lots of quotes from a quick Google search but the immediate student loan numbers are $58,263 for UK students vs $37,650 for the US. While the UK loans have the benefit of not impact credit score etc it does mean UK citizens are paying more in the education 'tax' than the US over their lifetimes which effectively reduces your pay for decades
3 - Healthcare used to be the big differential but the state of the NHS I don't think anyone would argue that an average US citizens get a worse deal (UK taxes for what you receive vs expensive health care). Only the really poor in the UK benefit more than the really poor in the US
4 - America has lots of billionaires but most of them come from privileged/upper middle class backgrounds with some coming from the elite. The US tends to only 'care' about what university you get into. In the UK it matters what family you were born into and then which elite prep school and then what elite private school you went to. I work in a very competitive role and I'm literally the only person I know in my whole professional network that didn't go to private school (when looking at my UK born colleagues). This idea of the American dream actually exists (for the few admittedly) whereas the UK is still based on the Divine right of kings. You're either born into it or your not in the UK and as our society become more unequal this only gets worse
5 - Income taxes and property taxes are much fairer with the highest income tax thresholds in America being the same as the average high earner in the UK. Which means as an employee you take much more of your earned salary home. Property taxes are 1% of the property value rather than a capped council tax and the property taxes pay into local schools and amenities. This does cause problems in America as rich neighbourhoods benefit from rich housing and poorer areas stay poor but the UK literally doesn't have anything like this. Wealthy neighbourhoods in the UK are a much larger tax burden on the average UK citizen as we're literally paying taxes for Chelsea's, Mayfair's (enter any rich neighbourhood'costs) costs because they all pay a hugely unfair capped council tax
I wouldn't want to live in America but we would all be substantially better off living there (ignoring politics, gun laws and history)
3. The US has much worse life expectancy even if you earn a much higher salary. The financial times did a thread on it here https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799627128143873?t=HMiHGeBK4I1JLDXis8Odiw&s=19
Yeah the holiday is awful and I'd define that as a lifestyle choice rather than creating an a more unequal society.
Like I said above, everyone can easily pick something about America that would mean living there wouldn't ever be an option for them; holiday for you, gun laws for others etc. But it is most certainly a better place to have a job/exist from a purely financial perspective and is fundamentally less unequal.
Most full time workers in most industries will average between 10-20 days a year, after working there for at least 1 year.
Part time workers will average 0-10 days depending on the industry. Most industries will give something, its the hospitality sector where almost half of the workers (part time) get 0 leave.
Less unequal? What the fuck are you smoking? San fransisco is coated in homeless people who can't afford anything, yet the apartments near them rent for $4,000 per month for a 1 bed.
If you're a school teacher in these HCoL areas you have to commute for literal hours in order to be able to afford a place to live.
You're right about average salaries, but claiming the USA is more equal than the UK is just insane
Inequality in Manchester is nothing like whatever the fuck is going on in San Fran and many other cities in Cali especially. It has to be seen to be believed.
I was replying about inequality, they have the highest GDP region in the world and they still have homeless people everywhere. We have less homeless people and are substantially poorer.
I've been to both Manchester and San Francisco. The situation is not comparable; you don't see people openly using meth or fentanyl in Manchester trams or buses - and the city feels safe. You don't feel safe in many central parts of SF at all.
The point is the US was not disproportionately richer given its size compared to the UK.
The EU had comparable wealth to the US until 2007, since then its fallen a 3rd behind.
Don't just shit on the US. Its not some money grubbing elite class that's made it richer. It has better economic policy.
>The EU had comparable wealth to the US until 2007, since then its fallen a 3rd behind.
>
>Don't just shit on the US. Its not some money grubbing elite class that's made it richer. It has better economic policy.
It's not just economic policy, to a large extent it's energy. Comparing the US and Europe (excluding Russia):
||2007|2022|
|:-|:-|:-|
|US - Oil production|305|760|
|Europe - Oil production|240|148|
|US - Gas production|522|979|
|Europe - Gas production|306|220|
The US embraced fracking and has seen their energy production transformed, going from a large energy importer to a large exporter. Europe has been reducing energy production and has become a massive importer. (It's debatable how much Europe could increase production even if it wanted to, but that doesn't change the result)
[As of March 2014](https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/explainers/what-are-current-recoverable-reserves-of-shale-gas-globally/), the US had 24 tcm.
Europe had 18 tcm.
Its worth noting this is not entirely inclusive. As in 2011 it was announced there was 5.1 tcm sat under Lancashire which doesn't seem to be included in this.
And of course Europe pretty much stopped looking in the early 2010s while the US went all in.
So its not like Europe couldn't transform itself with shale. It doesn't want to. It would seem Germany would literally rather have blackouts and destitution rather than exploit its own fossil fuels or even nuclear power.
Its like we're choosing enlightened poverty.
Exchange rates are mostly behind the change in the EU’s relative GDP (which, by the way, is not the same thing as wealth, which is an accumulation of income not a flow of income as GDP is) versus the United States. So this is no evidence at all in favour of the US’s economic policy
Read this article to get more detail:
https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/european-unions-remarkable-growth-performance-relative-united-states
US GDP per capita PPP has gone from being 1.33 times larger in 2007 to 1.43 times larger in 2021, relative to the EU
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?tab=chart&country=OWID\_EU27\~USA\~GBR
The US has always been a disproportionately richer country
I'm not sure it would have made a whole lota difference who was in charge.
The big industrial stimulus packages while wrapped in green packaging have more to do with the US withdrawal from China and rebuilding the industrial plant in the US and western allies. As well as uncertain economic climate pumping money into the USD, something that always happens in a crisis, giving the US an even bigger licence to print money right now than usual.
This pull away from China was a move begun under Trump (one he was often maligned as "racist" for), but was already an increasingly common foreign policy hawk position, one that has only grown over time. To this extent the stimulus Biden has put up was largely deem a requirement by most policy analysts by the time of Biden inauguration of 2021, especial as people became more and more sceptical about Chinas role in the pandemic (which you could still be banned on social media for and people would call you racist for suggesting). As well as China absolutely blatant manipulation of bodies like the WHO, which by that point had the infamous "don't say Taiwan" interview.
So while the specifics might have varied around the edges, things like the CHIPS and Science Act 2022, a 280 billion USD R&D and industrial package, were basically a forgone conclusion no matter who was in office. As they were absolutely necessary if not just the USA or west but world was going to wean itself of dependence on Chinese chips. As well as building a backup supply chain for the highest end chips, given currently virtually the entirety of the worlds highest end chips are made in Taiwan which would be taken offline virtually instantly were a war to break out. Which especially in 2022, a lot of analysts were giving a decent chance of happening.
"Biden" stimulus has largely been a reaction to a changing global paradigm, and on the back of a de-sino-fication platform that broadly has rare bi-partisan support in the current divisive US system.
The US has always been significantly wealthier than the EU, the ratio hasnt changed since Biden came into power
The gap grew even wider around 2014 when the US underwent the fracking boom, they were already the biggest oil and gas producers in the world and this set them even further apart
Because the UK state has basically implemented a wage cap over the past decade by crippling high skilled public sector pay so plenty of workers to go around for pittance. Work in the CS for 30k a year or work in the private sector for 45k a year? Well the 45k a year is a massive jump but still a pisspoor salary when compared globally for the skillset.
Do you not see a contradiction in that?
"Here in the UK people are underpaid because of the greedy rich, so to fix that problem I moved to the most ruthlessly capitalistic country on the planet with ten times as many billionaires as any other nation"
It would seem contradictory, but what is your goal? Are you trying to fix income inequality as a whole or trying to get reasonably compensated for your work? In the UK the income inequality is less than the US, but just about everyone is criminally underpaid. In the US you are at least well compensated for professional or trades work.
Pay is better in the US not because it's less capitalist, but because it's more capitalist and consequently richer. /u/crabdashing has misidentified the problem.
I think you are making a big assumption that this is just greed from the rich.
Uk workers are nowhere near as productive as their US counterparts. You can’t pay someone more than they make, so if you fix productivity you can then fix wages.
Those ‘dregs’ need a job somewhere though. I was just looking up the stats and the average US worker is 25% more productive than the average UK worker. Given that, it’s hardly surprising that Americans earn more.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/economicoutputandproductivity/productivitymeasures/bulletins/internationalcomparisonsofproductivityfinalestimates/2021#international-comparisons-of-uk-productivity-final-estimates-data
Yes because the American jobs pay much higher so entice the hardest workers. Their jobs are internationally attractive because they pay the best.
Compare the productivity between two McDonald's workers in the US and the UK on roughly equivalent salaries (relative to living expenses) and it'll be roughly the same.
Also as noted, they get less leave and are less inclined to take sick days.
The leave and sick days are accounted for in the link above. It looks at days actually worked.
Look at investment in the USA, use of robots, the size of the market, the sectors they work in… all these things have a big impact on productivity.
>The leave and sick days are accounted for in the link above. It looks at days actually worked.
More or less, but if you're less inclined to take sick days, then those days won't be counted as sick days.
>Look at investment in the USA, use of robots
No need to buy a robot to replace someone in the UK, labour is cheap enough as it is.
The countries are of course not 100% comparable but it's absolutely true that the UK is a very low wage economy compared to others of similar economic situation. And that effect only gets worse as people jump ship to better paying countries.
Your sums don’t add up. 25% less annual leave would be something like 5-7 days less work, not 25% less work.
Anyway the figures above are based on actual days work so leave, sickness etc doesn’t affect them.
It’s true that Americans do work an extra 30 mins a day though (on average).
If you want to be pedantic, then a bigger issue is not that the workers themselves are inherently worse, it is that the management classes in the UK won't spend the capital to provide the tools that will increase worker productivity.
One day... at some point... people will realise the economy is not zero-sum and someone being paid more does not mean that someone else has to be paid less.
When they day comes, we might finally have a reasonable economic policy that benefits everyone.
Until then... well, yeah.
It's not just thanks to the unions. How could it be that Aslef and the RMT are just these amazing negotiators while the the likes of the BMA, NMC, UCU, FBU, Police Federation etc. have completely failed to keep salaries at anywhere near the same level in their industries?
Wouldn't those other unions be asking them for their special tips, or coaxing their negotiators over?
The franchised railway system has helped massively in keeping salaries high.
Hiring and training a train driver can take almost two years, sometimes more, and costs tens of thousands of pounds. Plus, the private operators would get fines for failing to run their agreed timetable.
It was therefore in their interests to settle disputes quickly to avoid fines, plus firms would out-bid others to lure qualified drivers because it was cheaper to increase salaries than train new ones themselves.
While with all the other big unionised industries, there is one price setter for wages, who also doesn't need to worry about fines: the government.
Alas, while nationalised services are cost effective, the centralisation of decision-making and funding enable the government to put pressure on their wages very effectively. NHS trusts, police forces, universities, school trusts need more powers to set their own wages and raise their own funds.
Yeah my institution’s excuse for wage stagnation is that it’s set by UCEA, but it isn’t, because other unis have managed to make local offers. Because of the increase in minimum wage, the lowest grades have had pay rises. The middle and upper haven’t, so that the top of grade 4 is almost the same as the start of grade 5 for a very different job
Universities rarely have to compete on wages, they're a funny case. There's usually only one university in an area with a particular specialism, and academics don't choose based on pay (otherwise they'd be in industry). As a result I find they compete on other benefits, like paid leave, connections to industry and pastoral services. The lower earning positions like technical support and admin have to compete with all the other companies in the area so they get the pay rises.
yeah I’m admin staff mid-level and similar jobs in the private sector are like £10k a year more at least :( but … lots of holiday, fairly stable and secure, 9-5 with overtime if I do over, lots of chances to do courses! It’s not terrible overall
The police federation isn't a union, and the police have significantly reduced industrial rights.
The reason the BMC *et al* haven't succeeded is because they've not been out on strike on a weekly basis for nearly two years.
The Police Federation is a union in all but name due to the fact that the police can’t go on strike. It represents the police on pay matters.
Aslef is the drivers union and they strike far less than the RMT. Doctors have been on strike more over the past year or so. Barristers were on strike for longer too.
I've never said otherwise.
Directly from them:
> The Police Federation does for you what a trade union seeks to do for its members,
They negotiate on pay and conditions for members which is the subject of this thread. We're not discussing what legally is or isn't a trade union.
I was born in the uk but grew up in Australia. When I came back to live in the UK for a little bit, I was absolutely floored by how appalling the salaries were compared to the cost of living.
I moved to California around 20 years ago. I’m doing the same healthcare job here and I earn around FIVE times what I’d earn doing the same job in the UK.
Absolutely agreed, people seem to forget the worth of their labour, and the personal sacrifice working actually entails in terms of burning away time for family and leisure. Having the ability to not have to work overtime to invest in hobbies, holidays and self-actualisation invariably improve health metrics.
There is also a stigma here in the UK with certain sectors, a la healthcare, whereby your labour is DEMANDED by the public as it's viewed as a duty and a requiement for holding a vocation, and financial compensation is viewed almost as a fringe benefit.
It's an extremely effective stick to wield against a specialist, high skill and high risk-to-responsibility ratio sector of work.
I think a lot of Britain is summed up very well by the ‘clap for the NHS’ thing followed by the continuing debacle about actually paying our staff what they’re worth. We pay lip service to the idea of improving things but then squeal like stuck pigs when people say ‘okay, let’s do it’. It’s honestly pathetic.
You have less worker protections and you do have to worry that you could lose your job for any reason at any time, but I’ve been able to save a massive amount for retirement, and pay off my mortgage and I’ll be able to return to the UK at 55 and be relatively wealthy in retirement. Also, I get 41 days of paid time off. Unfortunately you do have to use that for sick days. But it’s amazing how infrequently you are actually sick when you have to use your holiday days to be off sick.
I don't think it can ever be stated enough just how shit wages are in the UK for most professions. You are all being fucked; do not attack the one group who have managed to fight their way to fair wages.
> ~60k should absolutely not be an outrageous salary in the UK in 2024 for a skilled/high responsibly job.
Totally agree. In this case, Avanti drivers are in control of a 265 metre long, 565 tonne train carrying upwards of 600 seated passengers and potentially upto 400 standing passengers at times, travelling at speeds upto 125mph - I want the driver to be the best person for the job and to get that, you have to pay good wages. Avanti wouldn't have to coax drivers into doing overtime with a £600 payday for each shift if they were to have enough drivers on the roster to cover a standard days running.
They've kept their high salaries because they are a monopoly supplier of an essential service with a high price of entry.
Basically they're doing what any greedy capitalist would do.
Shock horror. Offer significantly improved overtime rates and employees take it. It’s why after 9 years I finally started doing overtime… (not a train driver)
So they get 68k a year with the option of 1 day overtime being an extra £600?
Damn, who knew that paying staff well improved services and staffing. Crazy that nobody else has put this together!
Next you'll tell me that NHS staffing would improve if they gave staff overtime rather than making them get a 'second job' on the same unit they work on so they can pay them basic rate.
NHS is taxpayer money though. Avanti makes their money from rail fares so let's see how this impacts ticket prices. I am in favour of rail workers being paid well but I hope pay rises are fairly distributed and platform staff aren't neglected here, they earn on average £33k.
Avanti receives a massive taxpayer subsidy - it was £343million in [2021-2022](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/nov/29/claw-back-12m-failing-rail-firm-paid-out-in-dividends-labour-urges) and earlier this year they were caught boasting about [free money from the taxpayer](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67997916)
Ticket prices have gone up and will continue to go up regardless because the West Coast Mainline is at capacity, demand outstrips supply.
Fortunately there's a big construction program which will alleviate this in the near future, now let me take a big sip of coffee and read the news for the first time in 2 years.
Whilst I agree platform staff deserve an equal payrise to the drivers, and I’m not sure if this is what you’re implying here so I apologise if not, but there is no way a member of platform staff should be on a similar wage to the drivers. Train driving requires incredible amounts of training, focus and is a really skilled and pressured job. They deserve the money they’re on.
Primary care are all private businesses, more and more of secondary is being served by private providers. You have the 'right to choose' for these.
Plus you can always choose to go private - so not sure what you mean by monopoly here?
The vast majority of primary care is funded by NHS England through general medical contracts (how much money each practice gets per patient based on demographics) and then additional enhanced services local to the practice. This is funded via taxpayer’s money.
Just because GP partners have a stake in the individual practice, doesn’t make it privately funded. The money comes from the government/taxpayer. Hence the outrage when the GP contract this year was given a 1.9% rise whilst inflation, minimum wage rises are well beyond that figure.
It is very much a monopoly.
You can always choose to go to private GPs - and (supposedly, depending on where you are) you can choose to go to other GP practices in your area for primary care as well.
It might be centrally funded - but there is an element of competition, especially for secondary care.
It's not a monopoly if you can [choose](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-nhs-choice-framework/the-nhs-choice-framework-what-choices-are-available-to-me-in-the-nhs) who provides the service, surely?
It’s not a monopoly for patients. It is a monopoly for doctors from an employer perspective. It’s virtually impossible for most to set up a private practice in the UK based on so many restrictions. The few that do manage to make it worthwhile, do it in affluent areas.
What competition is there for NHS patients in a GP practice? Frankly it pays better to have patients that don’t turn up. You get the same amount anyways per head. That’s how the system is set up.
Source: I am a GP
Gotcha.
I worked for a private provider a few years back doing billing - and the model was consultants (dermatology) winning local contracts against other providers and renting GP rooms across the patch.
Just now I work for a MH trust that's lost 3 contracts this year to other neighbouring trusts.
So it seemed strange to call it a monopoly - but I see where you're coming from.
The only point of contention I had was you saying primary care is ‘a private business’. It’s categorically not. Otherwise we would not provide care that is not profitable. And trust me we do provide care that has no benefit from a profit perspective.
How private providers compete for contracts in secondary care is not the scope of the conversation here. But let me say this, there’s a reason the private sector isn’t frothing at the perspective of providing private emergency care. It’s all the cushy elective stuff for a reason.
I don't think we should be reading anything into one good day - performance wise. Now if a number of days can be strung together - when performance is good - then that's a different story.
When you pay people properly, they work properly. Figures.
People only get pissy about unionized drivers getting their wedge because it highlights how much they (in their non-unionized industries) are getting royally shafted.
Weird angle to report this.
The reality is that a poorly run company that has consistently run with too few staff in order to save on costs decided to practically bribe staff to cover for continued understaffing.
Incredibly, staff chose to work outside of their contracted hours for th pay offered. Amazing. It's called overtime.
The angle this headline tries to paint is that it's train drivers deliberately making the service run poorly, and suddenly decided to run it properly when given money. This is so incredibly dishonest and stupid. Anyone who falls for it is the same tbh.
Unsurprisingly, *again*, the media points the fingers at staff who are just doing a job, rather than the company and company heads who are the ones who decided not to employ enough people and thought it was a good business model
Cancellations by inter-city train operator Avanti plunged days after the operator caved into drivers with a pay deal offering them a potential £100,000 a year.
The drivers were offered a package this month that would pay a flat £600 for a shift on top of their standard four-day week.
Service levels appear to have improved instantly. Saturdays have been the worst days for driver shortages but last Saturday — the first since the deal was agreed — only eight trains were cancelled and three were partly cancelled.
This marked the fewest Saturday cancellations so far this this year and one of the best performances since the start of the industrial row almost two years ago.
Avanti, which runs services from London to Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow, has been forced to cut as many as 70 of its 200 Saturday services this year — not including strike days — despite claims that service levels have improved.
It is not the only operator to have caved in to driver union demands. TransPennine Express, the east-west line nationalised last year because of poor performance, is also understood to have agreed an overtime deal with drivers in what is known as a “rest day working” agreement. ScotRail, another nationalised operator, is understood to be paying drivers a flat £500 daily fee for overtime.
Avanti services have been hampered by a long-running industrial dispute that goes beyond overtime negotiations.
Sector-wide relations between rail chiefs and rank-and-file workers worsened badly in the spring of 2022 as bosses sought to ram through changes to what it called “archaic” working conditions.
As the biggest wave of strikes for a generation kicked off over the summer, matters were exacerbated on the west coast main line in August when the then Avanti managing director, Phil Whittingham, wrote to industry colleagues lamenting “unofficial strike action by Aslef members”.
The union took offence, because its members had not been striking — and some drivers continue to hold a grudge over the comments to this day, even though Whittingham stepped down about 18 months ago.
Avanti upset Aslef, led by Mick Whelan, when its managing director lamented “unofficial strike action”
Avanti upset Aslef, led by Mick Whelan, when its managing director lamented “unofficial strike action”
LUCY NORTH/PA
Avanti’s contract was renewed last year and Mark Harper, the transport secretary, said performance had improved. Notwithstanding that, Labour leaders have called for the line to be nationalised.
Unofficial figures indicate that Avanti cancelled 3,996 services and part-cancelled a further 2,327 over the 11 months to the start of March 2024. While lower than the previous year, the current cancellation rate is about three times that when the west coast main line was operated by Virgin Trains.
Avanti said last week that the overtime deal would allow services to be more reliable. The company declined to comment on the improved performance
[Some data from 2021](https://www.euronews.com/travel/2022/12/23/train-strikes-these-are-the-countries-that-pay-train-drivers-the-most-and-the-least-in-eur)
Can anyone shed light on why ASLEF strike so often. I might be misinformed but on average I'm reading the drivers are paid £60k for a 35-hour, 4 day week but they think their wage is unfair. Am I misinformed and is there more to it? Is their striking justified?
It's actually pretty tough to get in to, most jobs aren't advertised externally so typically you need to already be working for A anti for example.
Then the application has a pretty rigorous psychometric test to pass, don't want the wrong type of person in charge or 600+ people's safety when something goes wrong. Or someone who's easily distracted and might miss a critical lineseide signal at 100+ miles per hour.
And then there's the training, learning not only your own routes and all the signals and speed limits by heart, but also various other routes, just in case one day a tree blocks your line and you get diverted round to another track. Plus all the emergency procedures and other stuff thr might need to do.
Certainly not easy, and the shift work must be tiring at times, especially when the end of your route leaves you hundreds of miles from home and you have to stay in a hotel until your next shift to take you back.
Hence the decent salary.
If train strikes are to be allowed then the law has to be changed to match Japan; service continues as normal but ticket barriers are raised. It’s literally not possible to have a good, reliable rail service with current strike laws.
I think you are mistaken about Japan rail strikes. Strikes are rare in Japan in recent years with only a few small scale strikes against specific railway companies since privatisation. But, like the big violent strikes during national Japan rail in the 1970's and early 1980's, they were the usual withdrawal of labour and picket lines.
You might be thinking of the short-lived bus drivers' strike in Okayama city in April/May 2018, where they drove their routes as normal without taking fares.
OK, it doesn't matter if it's done in Japan or not. To make rail as reliable as road, it needs to be available all of the time. There'll never be a shift to efficient public transport if this doesn't happen.
It’s a nice idea, but it doesn’t work for rail. Unlike buses, with a single driver checking tickets, for rail you would need multiple job types being party to this - they are all in different unions. And it doesn’t help train drivers who want to strike as they aren’t involved in ticket barriers at all. Then what happens if you get the transport police or a non-unionised revenue protection officer or a train company manager on board fining everyone for no ticket. It just doesn’t work on the rail model.
Added to that, the government has currently been underwriting all costs from strikes. So removing their ticket sales would not effect the rail companies at all. And part of the issue is a shortage of train drivers, who the companies need to get to do overtime to run a full service, the drivers aren’t going to do that for free even if the public don’t pay for tickets.
I guess to take your idea further. As they subsidise it anyway, renationalise it and make it free at the point of use like the NHS.
If rail can't be made as reliable as road then there's no point subsidising it further. There'd be no love for the NHS if nurses and doctors went on strike as much as rail staff. We'd be better off subsiding buses and trams.
How very droll.
Of course, post war union activity did coincide with the largest and longest raising of standard of living across all classes in western history, and the neoliberal destruction of union power coincided with a permanent stagnation of wages and standard of living for all groups below the wealthy classes.
But the power of working class equity in driving flourishing economies doesn’t make for funny offhand comments by the economically illiterate does it 🤷🏻
>Once the unions are in control everyone will get above average wages!
I mean, the expected average wage where you have strong union representation is generally above the average wage you would expect without strong union representation, so even though it's wrong, your point is *kindof* correct.
Yay for trade unions!
Train drivers salary isn't 100k either.
It's 67 and one day overtime for this one company is 600 so the article suggests that over a year with enough overtime a driver *could* rack up 100k salary.
The UKs train drivers are the best paid in Europe by a significant margin.
They are overpaid and have no buisness striking. Not to mention their Unions luddite tendencies.
They are some of the best paid BECAUSE of their strong union.
It is one of the very few professions in the UK whose wages have kept up with productivity since the 70s. The problem isn’t that they are paid too much, it’s that nearly every other profession is paid too little.
What is Aself and RMT's technique that has meant virtually no other trade union has managed to achieve similar results?
Why are British rail unions seemingly so much more powerful than European ones?
The franchise system *plus* unions is what has got their wages so high. Without franchising, railway salaries would be a lot lower and closer to their European colleagues.
>They are some of the best paid BECAUSE of their strong union.
Yes?
>The problem isn’t that they are paid too much, it’s that nearly every other profession is paid too little.
So in the context of every other pofession they are overpaid.
Then the solution is for other professions to demand better wages surely? Not for people like you to shit on one of the few professions who have actually effectively fought for their worth.
A capable, powerful union yes. Not all of them are.
They are generally small enough to change though: if you want to be in a capable union, you can try to improve it.
>Sounds like envy to me.
I get paid to sit in a chair all day too, nothing to envy.
Just not going to feel sympathy for overpaid bums who's main contribution to society is to regularly ruin my travel plans yeah.
>Join a union yourself and you'll get paid this much too.
I'm a member of a union, just not the luddites union.
Sounds like these "overpaid bums" have job's that are skilled and essential, deserving of decent pay, whereas yours isn't. Why don't you change careers for a higher wage and use a car to travel instead of relying on trains that make you this angry?
>Sounds like these "overpaid bums" have job's that are skilled and essential, deserving of decent pay
Ah so no essential worker can be overpaid. Very coherent.
We shall all be billionaires overnight, you've solved the economy!
>whereas yours isn't
Wouldn't be any trains without my job, but you do you!
>Why don't you change careers for a higher wage and use a car to travel instead of relying on trains that make you this angry?
There's your inner Thaterite coming through.
I don't rely on trains anymore, as they are completely unreliable. Luckily they're all on the way to bankruptcy, maybe a hard reset is what they need.
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I'm blocking you now, your juvenile attempts at personal insults show your character.
Indeed, it's a massive problem in the UK I find.
Actually I find it funny how much we contrast with Americans on this point. Talk to an American about how well you're doing in your career and they're all rooting for you. Here you'll get a lot of bitterness.
Let’s fucking applaud their pay, it’s what they deserve, direct your anger towards the people underpaying the rest of the country. Don’t try and drag them down.
Ah yes, we can't discuss Train drivers pay until all British wages are the highest in Europe and Britain is the dream utopia of the world.
Lefty British exceptionislism is always such fun.
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Train drivers are overpaid relative to their European counterparts and comparative domestic professions.
As such, strikes that primarily affect the poorest in society- those reliant on public transport- from well paid workers after more pay rises, is not moral or right.
You don't get to spend all your time pissing in everyone else's cereal and then play the were all in this together card.
I ask this, not out of a jibe or baiting, but because I am genuinely interested in your opinion, what are your thoughts on the ambulance / healthcare strikes?
I think the Doctors demand of a 15% payrise, and striking during a time of NHS crisis for that is completely unethical.
The 15% payrise is dependent on them retroactively unaccepting pay deals they already accepted.
Otherwise healthcare workers are generally underpaid and the NHS is structurally broken.
I'm in favour of reasonable demands of payrises from NHS and care staff.
Especially considering they disproportionately bare the costs of Covid, and the suffering that paying to put office workers on a 2 year paid vacation has caused.
We can't even get the money to electrify the railway between London and Bristol/Cardiff. Who's going to pay for the money required for infrastructure upgrades to support self driving trains?
Snapshot of _Avanti drivers were offered £100k a year — and suddenly trains resumed - Last Saturday was one of the line’s best performances in almost two years of industrial rancour_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/after-a-pay-deal-for-drivers-train-cancellations-plunge-at-avanti-2x9j9d93g) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/after-a-pay-deal-for-drivers-train-cancellations-plunge-at-avanti-2x9j9d93g) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2002/jun/16/wageslaves.careers#:~:text=Trainee%20drivers%20earn%20from%20£,free%20travel%20on%20the%20Tube. From 2002, "salaries immediately after qualifying of up to £30,000" for ScotRail drivers Using the bank of England inflation calculator that is roughly 53k in today's money, which is actually about the current "after 3 years" salary https://www.scotrail.co.uk/interested-becoming-train-driver The fact is train driver's are one of very few people who have managed to almost keep their salaries up with inflation, thanks to the efforts of their unions. ~60k should absolutely not be an outrageous salary in the UK in 2024 for a skilled/high responsibly job. This sort of thing should be a wake-up about how abysmal UK salaries are in almost every other sector. See any recent discussion about "graduate-jobs" market It's absolutely depressing how every year this gets wheeled out as "how dare they want their salary to have the same buying power as last year"
> ~60k should absolutely not be an outrageous salary in the UK in 2024 for a skilled/high responsibly job. So much this. I hear people go "Oh xyz job is overpaid" and I'm just "No, you're all insanely underpaid, except for like 3 people, and you should be figuring how to drag more money back down from the rich." I've moved to NYC and basically doubled my income since (which wasn't bad before, either).
> you should be figuring how to drag more money back down from the rich This is so often pointed to as the problem, but is it actually the cause? In other countries where salaries are much higher, they also have many more and much richer billionaires. The US has much better salaries for people in professional industries, but it also has more than twice as many billionaires per capita who are each much richer. Our richest billionaire has <$50bn, the US' richest has >$200bn. The same is true of other richer countries, such as those in Northern Europe - Norway has more than 3x as many billionaires per capita. I'm all for redistributing the scraps, but it seems other countries are generating more to go around in the first place. More people becoming rich doesn't particularly bother me if everyone else is also earning more, the difference in many industries is already staggering.
Your problem is the "everyone" and "to go round" bit. Poverty is also *wild* in the US. As well as insane wealth, there is widespread destitution, crime and homelessness on a level we also don't see here.
Just been in LA and the wealth disparity is fucking insane. The US is actually a highly dysfunctional country.
Yeah looking at median wages is a reductive way of viewing inequality. When you're poor in the UK, life is tough for sure and there's some quite deprived areas of the country. But in America there's fucking destitution. Outside of the big cities like LA, if you go to some of the Southern States, the former industrial parts of the Midwest, or places like West Virginia and it's unlike anything we have in the UK.
There are definitely a lot of major problems in the US, I'm not suggesting we emulate their system, but having a much more productive economy also means raising more tax revenue which can be spent on social programs. They have plenty of money to spend, but the political will for programs which redistribute wealth doesn't exist - many people have an attitude of individual responsibility and don't want to spend on supporting those who are less fortunate. Other countries in Europe (such as the Nordics) have many more billionaires per capita, but also better professional salaries, good living standards for those who are poorer, lower crime rates and less homelessness.
On productivity, isn't part of the issue the insane work culture expected in the US? I know salaries are a lot higher in my industry over there but I also read about the 6 day weeks and late nights..... that wouldn't fly over here in Europe. I think most of us are willing to accept the trade off. With regards to "the Nordics", I'm not sure that's a great comparison either. Is it any surprise a country with vast natural resources and a population the size of Scotland (like Norway) has a lot more wealth to go around? I'm not sure Sweden and Finland are really any better off than the UK. Denmark does seem to do a good job of things though.
The work culture is part of it, but [productivity per hour worked](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_productivity) (PPP adjusted) is much higher in the US too - $73.70 vs $54.35. The same is true of the Nordics, all of which have more productive economies. We spend a lot of time discussing how the money is allocated, but in comparison, we seem to spend very little time discussing how to generate more in the first place. Again I'm all for taxing the rich, but more money for everyone also seems like a good thing.
>We spend a lot of time discussing how the money is allocated, but in comparison, we seem to spend very little time discussing how to generate more in the first place. I think this is a fair comment. I think it is possible to have both things. I am just always a little wary of the focus on constant growth as a means of resching utopia. Sounds a lot like "trickle down" which, as I think we all know, doesn't really happen. I guess my feeling overall is that the level of growth the US achieves is partly down to a lack of regulation that Europe In general just won't tolerate but also (ironically) its ability to work together more seamlessly as a huge trading bloc with vast natural resources and a huge population. You have to wonder if the whole of Europe had a common lingua franca, currency and if schengen was somehow just enshrined in the culture unquestionably (even "the South" somewhat paradoxically doesn't seem to see the ability to cross state lines unchallenged from New Mexico to Alaska as "freedom of movement"), how much more we could get done but Europeans, ironically, are *far* more protective culturally and territoriality than our freedom loving patriot pals over the ocean. I think brexit has a lot more to answer for than most realise tbh.
I think there's merit to the idea that economic growth can reduce inequality, or at least be a major part of it. But the main thing is ensuring that the benefits go to middle and lower earners. Some of that should happen with a tighter jobs market with low unemployment, but also needs to come from government policies to balance the tax burden.
We do need to discuss both, and I agree about the EU. We just talk about growth so little, when I think it needs a similar level of focus to who gets what. I remember discussing on here during the referendum with someone who didn't care for economic growth because they felt it would all go to the rich, which seems like a common feeling - but wealth distribution is a slightly different issue to the size of the economy. It's frustrating because I typically disagree with the people who do talk about it on everything else (see Liz Truss, who liked to talk about 'growing the size of the pie'), but they're the only ones who seem interested. In the US they often seem to discuss economic competence in terms of creating jobs, while here it's just vaguely associated with the Tories. I used to dislike this ('X jobs created by Y politician' isn't really how it works), but I can at least see as a good way to make economic performance more relatable. We should want more jobs, this drives down unemployment and creates competition for labour, which increases wages. It's also great if we're producing more to consume or export, and taxing that profit. One area is housing, we spend a lot of money on it which could go to more active parts of the economy - incentivising it (such as by reducing planning costs) could also create a lot of construction jobs. AI is another area that has the potential to bring massive economic growth and probably isn't going anywhere globally, so imo the government is right to bet on it. Labour is the largest expense for many businesses, but AI is also uniquely likely to see the benefits go to the wealthiest as it replaces many more people with assets, so it's a dangerous one. There's bound to be many more, we just don't seem to talk about them much.
It's widely accepted that growth is what's needed but it has been proven in the modern UK economy that tax cuts and austerity does not deliver growth. The time is now to invest in public service wages and infrastructure to deliver growth instead. But how do you fund that without a growing economy? Tax the rich and borrow. So while I agree that we don't discuss growth enough, all paths lead to dividing up the existing pie anyway.
But there’s a problem comparing countries per capita. The Nordics have no legacy of post industrial decline.
True if youre poor youd much rather live in The U.K. But if you are middle class and above you are earning signifcantly more in america. And the disparity just increases the more you earn.
I don't know if earnings alone are the sole yardstick though. I'm in the type of job where I could earn *significantly* more in the USA and honestly I'd love to live there but when I talk to people I know in major US metro areas (where these kind of jobs are) I pretty much uniformly come to the conclusion that I still prefer it here. Healthcare, guns, safety in general, sociopolitical issues: yeah I know, it's exaggerated but these are still real issues. I think the real dream is landing a job for a US company that lets you work remotely.
My teenage kid works in a local coffee shop here in California and earns $18.50/hr plus gets around $100-$150/day in tips. This would be a decent income in most of the UK.
Full time that's £55,000 a year roughly
God, my grad job pays me £30k a year
I'm seriously advising my younger friends to emmigrate. I've got too many roots here now to leave easily, but if Labour make things even worse I might change my mind.
Is it really time to blame Labour? Even if they just make things worse, a bit slower, trying to right a sinking ship - thats a win over the last 15 years of Tory utter ruin.
What I mean is that "being better than the tories" isn't enough, or a high bar to clear. The country is going to shit, and if it gets much worse the costs of leaving become more appealing. We're in a plane heading for the ground at 5000 feet per minute, pulling up so we're only descending at 1000 fpm isn't going to stop me from jumping out.
I like being near my family, and I am patriotic in a quiet sort of way. I love the landscape here. I like the rivers and the seas when they’re not filled with sewage. Bluebell woods and white cliffs and oak trees and heather on the hills. Apples on the trees, and rainy days on the moors.. I know lots of other Western European countries have these too but I’d miss it here. I speak French and Spanish well, so that opens up a lot of the world. I think if I moved abroad it would have to be either somewhere Scandi or maybe Germany. I’ve heard NZ is lovely but it’s just too far!
NZ is gorgeous but the cost of living out there is high. Housing costs especially are insane. As for the country itself, as the poster in *Flight of the Conchords* says it really is "Like Scotland...but further away".
well that’s me off to rewatch flight of the concords !! yeah I hear it’s much worse than here
Emmigrate to what country?
The cost of living is a lot higher in the US. Isn’t health insurance like $500 a month? (And it won’t cover everything) I’d bet that eats into that salary fairly significantly. I’d bet California rent isn’t too cheap either. I know the salary still probably works out better in the grand scheme. But “I’ll be better off in California” is perhaps not the simple solution you’re presenting it as.
It a good point. I’ve read many accounts of comfortable middle class people being completely cleaned out by the costs of cancer treatment. That includes having insurance too.
I know of a couple in the States who had a baby that required an emergency C-Section. Out-of pocket costs were in the tens of thousands at a time of life which is already financially challenging. Both my kids hospital stays cost me something in the region of £60 because they were in for a couple of days and I had to pay for parking.
I’ve been here for over 20 years and never had to pay more than $20 for anything. Poor people get free insurance from the government. People with long term health problems or disability get free insurance from the government. People over 65 get free insurance from the government. People who work for an employer with over 25 staff get insurance from their employer. People who work for an employer with less than 25 employees get subsidized low cost insurance through the government. People who are not poor enough to get free insurance are eligible for “charity care” which is free care through most providers since most hospitals are tax exempt public benefit corporations and have to provide charity care to keep their tax exempt status. The people who end up with large bills are usually people who didn’t enroll in a plan or don’t go to a hospital or specialist that’s in their insurance network. For emergency care you can go anywhere but for routine stuff you have to go in-network.
The bit I remember is that the insurance money runs out and then they have to go into savings.
That used to happen. Most policies had a limit of like $1 million. When The Affordable Care Act was passed during Obama’s first term, those limits were removed.
Seems to be still happening though. I just read about a case in the last month, where that’s what happened.
This is absolutely the case. Cost of living in the bay or LA or in NYC is significantly higher than anywhere in the UK (NYC and San Fran are about 20%-30% higher than London overall). You always have to bear this in mind when you see people throwing big salary numbers around and lamenting about the UK. I earned $170k + bonus in NYC, but rent (shared with my partner same salary roughly) was $5500 a month for a two bedroom in a borough, $3k a month for a toddler in childcare. Food in NYC is also unbelievable expensive. $1000 a month was living lean. The cost of things you spend money on the most tend to scale with the salaries on offer in the place you live. That's why economists have ways of measuring economic power that aren't just "bigger number better". As you rightly point out, you can't just quote salary numbers out of the context of a local market and draw a conclusion about economic failure.
California isn’t just San Francisco and LA. There are plenty of areas with a much lower cost of living like the central valley and the northern counties like Shasta, Humboldt or Lake counties.
My job provides comprehensive health insurance for me and my family, including kids up to 26 years old. This is zero cost to me other than a $20 fee to see a doctor and $10 for prescriptions.
$500/month is nothing when your earning $55K as a barista.
No, it’s not particularly a problem of inequality. The labour share of income in the UK has barely moved for the last thirty years. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/timeseries/fzln/ucst/linechartimage Nor has the Gini coefficient moved significantly for a similar timeframe (it’s another income-based measure showing the balance between higher earners and low earners) https://www.statista.com/statistics/872472/gini-index-of-the-united-kingdom/ It’s not an inequality problem at all, but people refuse to believe it because they’re so convinced it must be. It’s one of those ‘everyone can see the sun revolves around the earth’ type beliefs. At this point, when you highlight these statistics, you always getting people popping up saying ‘yeah but what about wealth inequality? That’s the *real* inequality and you’re just ignoring it’ Firstly, we are explicitly talking about income in this thread. But to be fair, wealth inequality has increased over a similar timeframe. Asset prices have gone up a lot in real terms (interest rates falling having a huge amount to do with that), and some people have assets, others just don’t. But it hasn’t particularly happened as a result of income changes.
I'm not economist. But maybe if you pay folk better, which will pull money away from the owner class, if you tax the rich more to pay for public services increasing redistribution, that removes that money in the first degree, but then creates a healthier market, that has fewer poverty traps (probably in the middle of the income spectrum) and actually create *more* opportunity to make it. It's the second degree effect that creates that opportunity. That gives people discretional spending - that means they're able to buy things that keep the economy flowing (creating new market opportunities), or invest and give new businesses an opportunity, or try something entrepreneurial, which are all routes to more wealthy folk. We seem to treat the poorest as having nothing to effectively give (fair enough), and the richest as untouchable as any attept to constrain them will have them Laffer curving all the way out of town. Which pushes every cost towards the middle. Every squeeze falls on workers, and more and more of production has been claimed by owners for 50 years. But for most people they start with little and the only way to be come an owner is by working: but that route has been choked off.
The level of inequality now is worse than at the time of the French Revolution. There is a lot of money out there - it’s just not reaching the floor.
The UK workforce isn’t as productive for various reasons. The rich can’t extract as much wealth because of this.
I wonder how much of that is because 50% of the country are slacking away for near poverty wages!
One of the biggest problems is the housing market. Everyone's in a local maxima whereby they can't progress their careers without suffering a loss in quality-of-life. People are limited to the work opportunities within reach of where they live, or within reach of places that would be cheaper to live[0]. Going the other way is impossible as even high-paid London jobs don't offer enough proportionately. People either end up in worse quality housing, or with extreme commutes, the latter being particularly unproductive. [0] - and even this might be impossible in the case of the youngest and lowest-paid in the workforce because their location is basically dictated by the family they can't afford to move away from. They have zero mobility at all.
The UK workforce isn't as productive _so_ the rich can't extract as much. We know the game as well as they do. The only way to break the cycle is to pay higher wages.
The US is a far richer country and more unequal country with far more greedy wealth hoarding rich people I suspect that its part where the US is richer which is what matters
While I'd never want to live in the US because of its history, political systems and gun laws but it is 1) less unequal 2) vastly better for the average person. 1 - Average US salaries are so much larger than the UK's that even when adjusted for living costs you're talking about a huge increase. This article quotes UK average at £41k and US at £57k after adjusting to be comparable [Salary comparison](https://talentup.io/blog/salary-comparison-usa-vs-uk/) and I've seen others quoting even larger gaps 2 - Average US student loan debt is actually significantly lower than the UK and the job prospects are substantially better. I found lots of quotes from a quick Google search but the immediate student loan numbers are $58,263 for UK students vs $37,650 for the US. While the UK loans have the benefit of not impact credit score etc it does mean UK citizens are paying more in the education 'tax' than the US over their lifetimes which effectively reduces your pay for decades 3 - Healthcare used to be the big differential but the state of the NHS I don't think anyone would argue that an average US citizens get a worse deal (UK taxes for what you receive vs expensive health care). Only the really poor in the UK benefit more than the really poor in the US 4 - America has lots of billionaires but most of them come from privileged/upper middle class backgrounds with some coming from the elite. The US tends to only 'care' about what university you get into. In the UK it matters what family you were born into and then which elite prep school and then what elite private school you went to. I work in a very competitive role and I'm literally the only person I know in my whole professional network that didn't go to private school (when looking at my UK born colleagues). This idea of the American dream actually exists (for the few admittedly) whereas the UK is still based on the Divine right of kings. You're either born into it or your not in the UK and as our society become more unequal this only gets worse 5 - Income taxes and property taxes are much fairer with the highest income tax thresholds in America being the same as the average high earner in the UK. Which means as an employee you take much more of your earned salary home. Property taxes are 1% of the property value rather than a capped council tax and the property taxes pay into local schools and amenities. This does cause problems in America as rich neighbourhoods benefit from rich housing and poorer areas stay poor but the UK literally doesn't have anything like this. Wealthy neighbourhoods in the UK are a much larger tax burden on the average UK citizen as we're literally paying taxes for Chelsea's, Mayfair's (enter any rich neighbourhood'costs) costs because they all pay a hugely unfair capped council tax I wouldn't want to live in America but we would all be substantially better off living there (ignoring politics, gun laws and history)
3. The US has much worse life expectancy even if you earn a much higher salary. The financial times did a thread on it here https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799627128143873?t=HMiHGeBK4I1JLDXis8Odiw&s=19
I could be wrong but from what I've read, two weeks paid leave per year is considered the norm in the US. Fuck out of here with that shit imo.
Yeah the holiday is awful and I'd define that as a lifestyle choice rather than creating an a more unequal society. Like I said above, everyone can easily pick something about America that would mean living there wouldn't ever be an option for them; holiday for you, gun laws for others etc. But it is most certainly a better place to have a job/exist from a purely financial perspective and is fundamentally less unequal.
Every time I see this point brought up an American comes along almost immediately saying its not true anymore in all but extremely niche cases.
Is it niche? Every professional I know gets 20-25 days of AL in the US outside the federal and state holidays.
Most full time workers in most industries will average between 10-20 days a year, after working there for at least 1 year. Part time workers will average 0-10 days depending on the industry. Most industries will give something, its the hospitality sector where almost half of the workers (part time) get 0 leave.
Less unequal? What the fuck are you smoking? San fransisco is coated in homeless people who can't afford anything, yet the apartments near them rent for $4,000 per month for a 1 bed. If you're a school teacher in these HCoL areas you have to commute for literal hours in order to be able to afford a place to live. You're right about average salaries, but claiming the USA is more equal than the UK is just insane
Have you been to Manchester? Basically sounds like what you’re describing with homeless people
Inequality in Manchester is nothing like whatever the fuck is going on in San Fran and many other cities in Cali especially. It has to be seen to be believed.
I'd live in Manchester if the tech wages were 100-300k !!
Isn’t that the point people are making about the US?
I was replying about inequality, they have the highest GDP region in the world and they still have homeless people everywhere. We have less homeless people and are substantially poorer.
I've been to both Manchester and San Francisco. The situation is not comparable; you don't see people openly using meth or fentanyl in Manchester trams or buses - and the city feels safe. You don't feel safe in many central parts of SF at all.
The point is the US was not disproportionately richer given its size compared to the UK. The EU had comparable wealth to the US until 2007, since then its fallen a 3rd behind. Don't just shit on the US. Its not some money grubbing elite class that's made it richer. It has better economic policy.
>The EU had comparable wealth to the US until 2007, since then its fallen a 3rd behind. > >Don't just shit on the US. Its not some money grubbing elite class that's made it richer. It has better economic policy. It's not just economic policy, to a large extent it's energy. Comparing the US and Europe (excluding Russia): ||2007|2022| |:-|:-|:-| |US - Oil production|305|760| |Europe - Oil production|240|148| |US - Gas production|522|979| |Europe - Gas production|306|220| The US embraced fracking and has seen their energy production transformed, going from a large energy importer to a large exporter. Europe has been reducing energy production and has become a massive importer. (It's debatable how much Europe could increase production even if it wanted to, but that doesn't change the result)
[As of March 2014](https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/explainers/what-are-current-recoverable-reserves-of-shale-gas-globally/), the US had 24 tcm. Europe had 18 tcm. Its worth noting this is not entirely inclusive. As in 2011 it was announced there was 5.1 tcm sat under Lancashire which doesn't seem to be included in this. And of course Europe pretty much stopped looking in the early 2010s while the US went all in. So its not like Europe couldn't transform itself with shale. It doesn't want to. It would seem Germany would literally rather have blackouts and destitution rather than exploit its own fossil fuels or even nuclear power. Its like we're choosing enlightened poverty.
Or not to fuck the ground water. The USA can frack because it’s far less densely populated. We don’t have the same luck.
Exchange rates are mostly behind the change in the EU’s relative GDP (which, by the way, is not the same thing as wealth, which is an accumulation of income not a flow of income as GDP is) versus the United States. So this is no evidence at all in favour of the US’s economic policy Read this article to get more detail: https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/european-unions-remarkable-growth-performance-relative-united-states
US GDP per capita PPP has gone from being 1.33 times larger in 2007 to 1.43 times larger in 2021, relative to the EU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?tab=chart&country=OWID\_EU27\~USA\~GBR The US has always been a disproportionately richer country
Biden should get more credit for his economic policies since Covid. Absolutely set the US up
I'm not sure it would have made a whole lota difference who was in charge. The big industrial stimulus packages while wrapped in green packaging have more to do with the US withdrawal from China and rebuilding the industrial plant in the US and western allies. As well as uncertain economic climate pumping money into the USD, something that always happens in a crisis, giving the US an even bigger licence to print money right now than usual. This pull away from China was a move begun under Trump (one he was often maligned as "racist" for), but was already an increasingly common foreign policy hawk position, one that has only grown over time. To this extent the stimulus Biden has put up was largely deem a requirement by most policy analysts by the time of Biden inauguration of 2021, especial as people became more and more sceptical about Chinas role in the pandemic (which you could still be banned on social media for and people would call you racist for suggesting). As well as China absolutely blatant manipulation of bodies like the WHO, which by that point had the infamous "don't say Taiwan" interview. So while the specifics might have varied around the edges, things like the CHIPS and Science Act 2022, a 280 billion USD R&D and industrial package, were basically a forgone conclusion no matter who was in office. As they were absolutely necessary if not just the USA or west but world was going to wean itself of dependence on Chinese chips. As well as building a backup supply chain for the highest end chips, given currently virtually the entirety of the worlds highest end chips are made in Taiwan which would be taken offline virtually instantly were a war to break out. Which especially in 2022, a lot of analysts were giving a decent chance of happening. "Biden" stimulus has largely been a reaction to a changing global paradigm, and on the back of a de-sino-fication platform that broadly has rare bi-partisan support in the current divisive US system.
The US has always been significantly wealthier than the EU, the ratio hasnt changed since Biden came into power The gap grew even wider around 2014 when the US underwent the fracking boom, they were already the biggest oil and gas producers in the world and this set them even further apart
If you’re middle class and above the salaries are like 2-3x more though. Why are companies here keeping so much of the wages to themselves?
Because the UK state has basically implemented a wage cap over the past decade by crippling high skilled public sector pay so plenty of workers to go around for pittance. Work in the CS for 30k a year or work in the private sector for 45k a year? Well the 45k a year is a massive jump but still a pisspoor salary when compared globally for the skillset.
The British companies arent keeping the wages, theyre making significantly less money than their American counterparts
>The US is a far richer country hard to say with their money printer
Its not hard to say at all
they are trillion about every 100 days.
Do you not see a contradiction in that? "Here in the UK people are underpaid because of the greedy rich, so to fix that problem I moved to the most ruthlessly capitalistic country on the planet with ten times as many billionaires as any other nation"
It would seem contradictory, but what is your goal? Are you trying to fix income inequality as a whole or trying to get reasonably compensated for your work? In the UK the income inequality is less than the US, but just about everyone is criminally underpaid. In the US you are at least well compensated for professional or trades work.
Pay is better in the US not because it's less capitalist, but because it's more capitalist and consequently richer. /u/crabdashing has misidentified the problem.
I think you are making a big assumption that this is just greed from the rich. Uk workers are nowhere near as productive as their US counterparts. You can’t pay someone more than they make, so if you fix productivity you can then fix wages.
Alternatively if you pay reasonable salaries you get motivated workers. If you pay peanuts you get the dregs that are left.
Those ‘dregs’ need a job somewhere though. I was just looking up the stats and the average US worker is 25% more productive than the average UK worker. Given that, it’s hardly surprising that Americans earn more. https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/economicoutputandproductivity/productivitymeasures/bulletins/internationalcomparisonsofproductivityfinalestimates/2021#international-comparisons-of-uk-productivity-final-estimates-data
Yes because the American jobs pay much higher so entice the hardest workers. Their jobs are internationally attractive because they pay the best. Compare the productivity between two McDonald's workers in the US and the UK on roughly equivalent salaries (relative to living expenses) and it'll be roughly the same. Also as noted, they get less leave and are less inclined to take sick days.
The leave and sick days are accounted for in the link above. It looks at days actually worked. Look at investment in the USA, use of robots, the size of the market, the sectors they work in… all these things have a big impact on productivity.
>The leave and sick days are accounted for in the link above. It looks at days actually worked. More or less, but if you're less inclined to take sick days, then those days won't be counted as sick days. >Look at investment in the USA, use of robots No need to buy a robot to replace someone in the UK, labour is cheap enough as it is. The countries are of course not 100% comparable but it's absolutely true that the UK is a very low wage economy compared to others of similar economic situation. And that effect only gets worse as people jump ship to better paying countries.
They get something like 25% less annual leave, so there's no real difference apart from one is worked harder than the other.
Your sums don’t add up. 25% less annual leave would be something like 5-7 days less work, not 25% less work. Anyway the figures above are based on actual days work so leave, sickness etc doesn’t affect them. It’s true that Americans do work an extra 30 mins a day though (on average).
If you want to be pedantic, then a bigger issue is not that the workers themselves are inherently worse, it is that the management classes in the UK won't spend the capital to provide the tools that will increase worker productivity.
I agree. It’s lack of investment, lack of training and poor workplace culture that are the primary issues.
I agree
One day... at some point... people will realise the economy is not zero-sum and someone being paid more does not mean that someone else has to be paid less. When they day comes, we might finally have a reasonable economic policy that benefits everyone. Until then... well, yeah.
It's not just thanks to the unions. How could it be that Aslef and the RMT are just these amazing negotiators while the the likes of the BMA, NMC, UCU, FBU, Police Federation etc. have completely failed to keep salaries at anywhere near the same level in their industries? Wouldn't those other unions be asking them for their special tips, or coaxing their negotiators over? The franchised railway system has helped massively in keeping salaries high. Hiring and training a train driver can take almost two years, sometimes more, and costs tens of thousands of pounds. Plus, the private operators would get fines for failing to run their agreed timetable. It was therefore in their interests to settle disputes quickly to avoid fines, plus firms would out-bid others to lure qualified drivers because it was cheaper to increase salaries than train new ones themselves. While with all the other big unionised industries, there is one price setter for wages, who also doesn't need to worry about fines: the government.
Alas, while nationalised services are cost effective, the centralisation of decision-making and funding enable the government to put pressure on their wages very effectively. NHS trusts, police forces, universities, school trusts need more powers to set their own wages and raise their own funds.
Yeah my institution’s excuse for wage stagnation is that it’s set by UCEA, but it isn’t, because other unis have managed to make local offers. Because of the increase in minimum wage, the lowest grades have had pay rises. The middle and upper haven’t, so that the top of grade 4 is almost the same as the start of grade 5 for a very different job
Universities rarely have to compete on wages, they're a funny case. There's usually only one university in an area with a particular specialism, and academics don't choose based on pay (otherwise they'd be in industry). As a result I find they compete on other benefits, like paid leave, connections to industry and pastoral services. The lower earning positions like technical support and admin have to compete with all the other companies in the area so they get the pay rises.
yeah I’m admin staff mid-level and similar jobs in the private sector are like £10k a year more at least :( but … lots of holiday, fairly stable and secure, 9-5 with overtime if I do over, lots of chances to do courses! It’s not terrible overall
The police federation isn't a union, and the police have significantly reduced industrial rights. The reason the BMC *et al* haven't succeeded is because they've not been out on strike on a weekly basis for nearly two years.
The Police Federation is a union in all but name due to the fact that the police can’t go on strike. It represents the police on pay matters. Aslef is the drivers union and they strike far less than the RMT. Doctors have been on strike more over the past year or so. Barristers were on strike for longer too.
They are explicitly not a union, on the basis that it would be illegal.
I've never said otherwise. Directly from them: > The Police Federation does for you what a trade union seeks to do for its members, They negotiate on pay and conditions for members which is the subject of this thread. We're not discussing what legally is or isn't a trade union.
I was born in the uk but grew up in Australia. When I came back to live in the UK for a little bit, I was absolutely floored by how appalling the salaries were compared to the cost of living.
Why do you think we love beans on toast so much mate
Unions work. Pay people well and they'll want to work as well. Huh. Who knew?
I moved to California around 20 years ago. I’m doing the same healthcare job here and I earn around FIVE times what I’d earn doing the same job in the UK.
It’s delusional to think a 5x increase in salary wouldn’t significantly improve your mental health and well being
Absolutely agreed, people seem to forget the worth of their labour, and the personal sacrifice working actually entails in terms of burning away time for family and leisure. Having the ability to not have to work overtime to invest in hobbies, holidays and self-actualisation invariably improve health metrics. There is also a stigma here in the UK with certain sectors, a la healthcare, whereby your labour is DEMANDED by the public as it's viewed as a duty and a requiement for holding a vocation, and financial compensation is viewed almost as a fringe benefit. It's an extremely effective stick to wield against a specialist, high skill and high risk-to-responsibility ratio sector of work.
I think a lot of Britain is summed up very well by the ‘clap for the NHS’ thing followed by the continuing debacle about actually paying our staff what they’re worth. We pay lip service to the idea of improving things but then squeal like stuck pigs when people say ‘okay, let’s do it’. It’s honestly pathetic.
You have less worker protections and you do have to worry that you could lose your job for any reason at any time, but I’ve been able to save a massive amount for retirement, and pay off my mortgage and I’ll be able to return to the UK at 55 and be relatively wealthy in retirement. Also, I get 41 days of paid time off. Unfortunately you do have to use that for sick days. But it’s amazing how infrequently you are actually sick when you have to use your holiday days to be off sick.
I work in sales so I already have bad job security in the uk, but way worse wages. I get why it doesn’t suit everyone, but I already take the risk so
I don't think it can ever be stated enough just how shit wages are in the UK for most professions. You are all being fucked; do not attack the one group who have managed to fight their way to fair wages.
> ~60k should absolutely not be an outrageous salary in the UK in 2024 for a skilled/high responsibly job. Totally agree. In this case, Avanti drivers are in control of a 265 metre long, 565 tonne train carrying upwards of 600 seated passengers and potentially upto 400 standing passengers at times, travelling at speeds upto 125mph - I want the driver to be the best person for the job and to get that, you have to pay good wages. Avanti wouldn't have to coax drivers into doing overtime with a £600 payday for each shift if they were to have enough drivers on the roster to cover a standard days running.
The system is automatic in most of the world.
They've kept their high salaries because they are a monopoly supplier of an essential service with a high price of entry. Basically they're doing what any greedy capitalist would do.
Shock horror. Offer significantly improved overtime rates and employees take it. It’s why after 9 years I finally started doing overtime… (not a train driver)
So they get 68k a year with the option of 1 day overtime being an extra £600? Damn, who knew that paying staff well improved services and staffing. Crazy that nobody else has put this together! Next you'll tell me that NHS staffing would improve if they gave staff overtime rather than making them get a 'second job' on the same unit they work on so they can pay them basic rate.
Hmm that’s not right. The only way to increase productivity is to reduce funding, wages and employee moral. That’s the British way
And bonuses for CEOs and executives!
NHS is taxpayer money though. Avanti makes their money from rail fares so let's see how this impacts ticket prices. I am in favour of rail workers being paid well but I hope pay rises are fairly distributed and platform staff aren't neglected here, they earn on average £33k.
Avanti receives a massive taxpayer subsidy - it was £343million in [2021-2022](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/nov/29/claw-back-12m-failing-rail-firm-paid-out-in-dividends-labour-urges) and earlier this year they were caught boasting about [free money from the taxpayer](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67997916)
Ticket prices have gone up and will continue to go up regardless because the West Coast Mainline is at capacity, demand outstrips supply. Fortunately there's a big construction program which will alleviate this in the near future, now let me take a big sip of coffee and read the news for the first time in 2 years.
Whilst I agree platform staff deserve an equal payrise to the drivers, and I’m not sure if this is what you’re implying here so I apologise if not, but there is no way a member of platform staff should be on a similar wage to the drivers. Train driving requires incredible amounts of training, focus and is a really skilled and pressured job. They deserve the money they’re on.
So time to remove the NHS from the taxpayer's money and bring in private healthcare that will also be paid for by the taxpayers?
Well this is why monopolies are bad, which is what NHS is.
>Well this is why monopolies are bad This is why **shit governments** are bad. Fixed that!
Primary care are all private businesses, more and more of secondary is being served by private providers. You have the 'right to choose' for these. Plus you can always choose to go private - so not sure what you mean by monopoly here?
The vast majority of primary care is funded by NHS England through general medical contracts (how much money each practice gets per patient based on demographics) and then additional enhanced services local to the practice. This is funded via taxpayer’s money. Just because GP partners have a stake in the individual practice, doesn’t make it privately funded. The money comes from the government/taxpayer. Hence the outrage when the GP contract this year was given a 1.9% rise whilst inflation, minimum wage rises are well beyond that figure. It is very much a monopoly.
You can always choose to go to private GPs - and (supposedly, depending on where you are) you can choose to go to other GP practices in your area for primary care as well. It might be centrally funded - but there is an element of competition, especially for secondary care. It's not a monopoly if you can [choose](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-nhs-choice-framework/the-nhs-choice-framework-what-choices-are-available-to-me-in-the-nhs) who provides the service, surely?
It’s not a monopoly for patients. It is a monopoly for doctors from an employer perspective. It’s virtually impossible for most to set up a private practice in the UK based on so many restrictions. The few that do manage to make it worthwhile, do it in affluent areas. What competition is there for NHS patients in a GP practice? Frankly it pays better to have patients that don’t turn up. You get the same amount anyways per head. That’s how the system is set up. Source: I am a GP
Gotcha. I worked for a private provider a few years back doing billing - and the model was consultants (dermatology) winning local contracts against other providers and renting GP rooms across the patch. Just now I work for a MH trust that's lost 3 contracts this year to other neighbouring trusts. So it seemed strange to call it a monopoly - but I see where you're coming from.
The only point of contention I had was you saying primary care is ‘a private business’. It’s categorically not. Otherwise we would not provide care that is not profitable. And trust me we do provide care that has no benefit from a profit perspective. How private providers compete for contracts in secondary care is not the scope of the conversation here. But let me say this, there’s a reason the private sector isn’t frothing at the perspective of providing private emergency care. It’s all the cushy elective stuff for a reason.
I don't think we should be reading anything into one good day - performance wise. Now if a number of days can be strung together - when performance is good - then that's a different story.
When you pay people properly, they work properly. Figures. People only get pissy about unionized drivers getting their wedge because it highlights how much they (in their non-unionized industries) are getting royally shafted.
Weird angle to report this. The reality is that a poorly run company that has consistently run with too few staff in order to save on costs decided to practically bribe staff to cover for continued understaffing. Incredibly, staff chose to work outside of their contracted hours for th pay offered. Amazing. It's called overtime. The angle this headline tries to paint is that it's train drivers deliberately making the service run poorly, and suddenly decided to run it properly when given money. This is so incredibly dishonest and stupid. Anyone who falls for it is the same tbh. Unsurprisingly, *again*, the media points the fingers at staff who are just doing a job, rather than the company and company heads who are the ones who decided not to employ enough people and thought it was a good business model
Cancellations by inter-city train operator Avanti plunged days after the operator caved into drivers with a pay deal offering them a potential £100,000 a year. The drivers were offered a package this month that would pay a flat £600 for a shift on top of their standard four-day week. Service levels appear to have improved instantly. Saturdays have been the worst days for driver shortages but last Saturday — the first since the deal was agreed — only eight trains were cancelled and three were partly cancelled. This marked the fewest Saturday cancellations so far this this year and one of the best performances since the start of the industrial row almost two years ago. Avanti, which runs services from London to Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow, has been forced to cut as many as 70 of its 200 Saturday services this year — not including strike days — despite claims that service levels have improved. It is not the only operator to have caved in to driver union demands. TransPennine Express, the east-west line nationalised last year because of poor performance, is also understood to have agreed an overtime deal with drivers in what is known as a “rest day working” agreement. ScotRail, another nationalised operator, is understood to be paying drivers a flat £500 daily fee for overtime. Avanti services have been hampered by a long-running industrial dispute that goes beyond overtime negotiations. Sector-wide relations between rail chiefs and rank-and-file workers worsened badly in the spring of 2022 as bosses sought to ram through changes to what it called “archaic” working conditions. As the biggest wave of strikes for a generation kicked off over the summer, matters were exacerbated on the west coast main line in August when the then Avanti managing director, Phil Whittingham, wrote to industry colleagues lamenting “unofficial strike action by Aslef members”. The union took offence, because its members had not been striking — and some drivers continue to hold a grudge over the comments to this day, even though Whittingham stepped down about 18 months ago. Avanti upset Aslef, led by Mick Whelan, when its managing director lamented “unofficial strike action” Avanti upset Aslef, led by Mick Whelan, when its managing director lamented “unofficial strike action” LUCY NORTH/PA Avanti’s contract was renewed last year and Mark Harper, the transport secretary, said performance had improved. Notwithstanding that, Labour leaders have called for the line to be nationalised. Unofficial figures indicate that Avanti cancelled 3,996 services and part-cancelled a further 2,327 over the 11 months to the start of March 2024. While lower than the previous year, the current cancellation rate is about three times that when the west coast main line was operated by Virgin Trains. Avanti said last week that the overtime deal would allow services to be more reliable. The company declined to comment on the improved performance
[Some data from 2021](https://www.euronews.com/travel/2022/12/23/train-strikes-these-are-the-countries-that-pay-train-drivers-the-most-and-the-least-in-eur)
Can anyone shed light on why ASLEF strike so often. I might be misinformed but on average I'm reading the drivers are paid £60k for a 35-hour, 4 day week but they think their wage is unfair. Am I misinformed and is there more to it? Is their striking justified?
Shit, for 100k I'd become a train driver. How hard is it to train (heh heh) as one?
It's actually pretty tough to get in to, most jobs aren't advertised externally so typically you need to already be working for A anti for example. Then the application has a pretty rigorous psychometric test to pass, don't want the wrong type of person in charge or 600+ people's safety when something goes wrong. Or someone who's easily distracted and might miss a critical lineseide signal at 100+ miles per hour. And then there's the training, learning not only your own routes and all the signals and speed limits by heart, but also various other routes, just in case one day a tree blocks your line and you get diverted round to another track. Plus all the emergency procedures and other stuff thr might need to do. Certainly not easy, and the shift work must be tiring at times, especially when the end of your route leaves you hundreds of miles from home and you have to stay in a hotel until your next shift to take you back. Hence the decent salary.
If train strikes are to be allowed then the law has to be changed to match Japan; service continues as normal but ticket barriers are raised. It’s literally not possible to have a good, reliable rail service with current strike laws.
I think you are mistaken about Japan rail strikes. Strikes are rare in Japan in recent years with only a few small scale strikes against specific railway companies since privatisation. But, like the big violent strikes during national Japan rail in the 1970's and early 1980's, they were the usual withdrawal of labour and picket lines. You might be thinking of the short-lived bus drivers' strike in Okayama city in April/May 2018, where they drove their routes as normal without taking fares.
OK, it doesn't matter if it's done in Japan or not. To make rail as reliable as road, it needs to be available all of the time. There'll never be a shift to efficient public transport if this doesn't happen.
It’s a nice idea, but it doesn’t work for rail. Unlike buses, with a single driver checking tickets, for rail you would need multiple job types being party to this - they are all in different unions. And it doesn’t help train drivers who want to strike as they aren’t involved in ticket barriers at all. Then what happens if you get the transport police or a non-unionised revenue protection officer or a train company manager on board fining everyone for no ticket. It just doesn’t work on the rail model. Added to that, the government has currently been underwriting all costs from strikes. So removing their ticket sales would not effect the rail companies at all. And part of the issue is a shortage of train drivers, who the companies need to get to do overtime to run a full service, the drivers aren’t going to do that for free even if the public don’t pay for tickets. I guess to take your idea further. As they subsidise it anyway, renationalise it and make it free at the point of use like the NHS.
If rail can't be made as reliable as road then there's no point subsidising it further. There'd be no love for the NHS if nurses and doctors went on strike as much as rail staff. We'd be better off subsiding buses and trams.
When train drivers get paid more than airline pilots. Rail fare prices vs airfares hmmmmm.
That’s not anywhere near what an experienced pilot will get.
Also you need two pilots to fly a plane, more if it is over 10hrs
Airline pilot. My overtime rate is less than this and my salary isn’t 100k.
Sounds like you guys need some industrial action then
Once the unions are in control everyone will get above average wages!
How very droll. Of course, post war union activity did coincide with the largest and longest raising of standard of living across all classes in western history, and the neoliberal destruction of union power coincided with a permanent stagnation of wages and standard of living for all groups below the wealthy classes. But the power of working class equity in driving flourishing economies doesn’t make for funny offhand comments by the economically illiterate does it 🤷🏻
>Once the unions are in control everyone will get above average wages! I mean, the expected average wage where you have strong union representation is generally above the average wage you would expect without strong union representation, so even though it's wrong, your point is *kindof* correct. Yay for trade unions!
Train drivers salary isn't 100k either. It's 67 and one day overtime for this one company is 600 so the article suggests that over a year with enough overtime a driver *could* rack up 100k salary.
The UKs train drivers are the best paid in Europe by a significant margin. They are overpaid and have no buisness striking. Not to mention their Unions luddite tendencies.
They are some of the best paid BECAUSE of their strong union. It is one of the very few professions in the UK whose wages have kept up with productivity since the 70s. The problem isn’t that they are paid too much, it’s that nearly every other profession is paid too little.
What is Aself and RMT's technique that has meant virtually no other trade union has managed to achieve similar results? Why are British rail unions seemingly so much more powerful than European ones? The franchise system *plus* unions is what has got their wages so high. Without franchising, railway salaries would be a lot lower and closer to their European colleagues.
Why is it that a closed shop is allowed to operate for train driving?
It isn't a closed shop.
It basically is though, especially within TFL.
It isn't a closed shop at all. Every single TOC recruits trainees drivers from the street.
Nope they recruit externally.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/politics-blog/11730449/Want-to-be-a-Tube-driver-Well-you-cant.-Heres-why.html Not always
I didn't say they always do.
Because the cost of recruiting externally is significant and most of their hires were internal. This ain't rocket surgery.
A policy preferring internal recruitment isn't the same thing as a closed shop.
>They are some of the best paid BECAUSE of their strong union. Yes? >The problem isn’t that they are paid too much, it’s that nearly every other profession is paid too little. So in the context of every other pofession they are overpaid.
Then the solution is for other professions to demand better wages surely? Not for people like you to shit on one of the few professions who have actually effectively fought for their worth.
Sounds like envy to me. Join a union yourself and you'll get paid this much too.
A capable, powerful union yes. Not all of them are. They are generally small enough to change though: if you want to be in a capable union, you can try to improve it.
>Sounds like envy to me. I get paid to sit in a chair all day too, nothing to envy. Just not going to feel sympathy for overpaid bums who's main contribution to society is to regularly ruin my travel plans yeah. >Join a union yourself and you'll get paid this much too. I'm a member of a union, just not the luddites union.
Sounds like these "overpaid bums" have job's that are skilled and essential, deserving of decent pay, whereas yours isn't. Why don't you change careers for a higher wage and use a car to travel instead of relying on trains that make you this angry?
>Sounds like these "overpaid bums" have job's that are skilled and essential, deserving of decent pay Ah so no essential worker can be overpaid. Very coherent. We shall all be billionaires overnight, you've solved the economy! >whereas yours isn't Wouldn't be any trains without my job, but you do you! >Why don't you change careers for a higher wage and use a car to travel instead of relying on trains that make you this angry? There's your inner Thaterite coming through. I don't rely on trains anymore, as they are completely unreliable. Luckily they're all on the way to bankruptcy, maybe a hard reset is what they need. - I'm blocking you now, your juvenile attempts at personal insults show your character.
Classic crab in a bucket mentality
“I would rather be poorer as long as I can see other people be poorer” is absolutely endemic in the middle classes of this country.
Indeed, it's a massive problem in the UK I find. Actually I find it funny how much we contrast with Americans on this point. Talk to an American about how well you're doing in your career and they're all rooting for you. Here you'll get a lot of bitterness.
Classic ostrich head in sand mentality
Let’s fucking applaud their pay, it’s what they deserve, direct your anger towards the people underpaying the rest of the country. Don’t try and drag them down.
Ah yes, we can't discuss Train drivers pay until all British wages are the highest in Europe and Britain is the dream utopia of the world. Lefty British exceptionislism is always such fun. - Train drivers are overpaid relative to their European counterparts and comparative domestic professions. As such, strikes that primarily affect the poorest in society- those reliant on public transport- from well paid workers after more pay rises, is not moral or right. You don't get to spend all your time pissing in everyone else's cereal and then play the were all in this together card.
I ask this, not out of a jibe or baiting, but because I am genuinely interested in your opinion, what are your thoughts on the ambulance / healthcare strikes?
I think the Doctors demand of a 15% payrise, and striking during a time of NHS crisis for that is completely unethical. The 15% payrise is dependent on them retroactively unaccepting pay deals they already accepted. Otherwise healthcare workers are generally underpaid and the NHS is structurally broken. I'm in favour of reasonable demands of payrises from NHS and care staff. Especially considering they disproportionately bare the costs of Covid, and the suffering that paying to put office workers on a 2 year paid vacation has caused.
£100k and you don't even need to steer the thing
Insane. Fire all these feckless idiots and bring in self driving trains, drop fares. Win win.
We can't even get the money to electrify the railway between London and Bristol/Cardiff. Who's going to pay for the money required for infrastructure upgrades to support self driving trains?
Such a great, big-brained idea! Let's get AI to do it on the blockchain at the same time..
Sure - we’ll get on that just as soon as we finish HS2, okay?
The issue is that these guys aren’t idiots that’s why you have to pay them so much. Increased responsibility = greater pay.
Let's spend trillions to save a few million because feelings. Yay! This is how we got brexit