Strike a light

Not quite the lowest postings in 2022, but will try to find something each week as we move into the New Year. It has not started too well with SWMBO struggling to shake off her third bout of Covid which looks like it could be a long Covid type of hang-over. We shall see how she develops over the next few weeks.

The year end has been dominated by strikes and the national nurses, railworkers and border force strikes have been augmented in Wirral by a bin strike.

Now this is an interesting case study. Firstly the whole of the Wirral population is affected, unlike the National strikes which affect smaller percentages of the population. The bin men are employed by BIFFA and the waste disposal sites ( the tips) are run by VEOLA. They are both subcontractors of Wirral Council.

As mentioned in an earlier post Wirral Council are £46m in debt so they are unlikely to let their sub-contractors off the hook regarding their financial deals. That said, they did call all parties into a Zoom call on Christmas Day, and the press are indicating that the bin men accepted a 10% pay rise and went back to work.

Deep joy for the residents and probably a bit of double time for the refuse collection operatives, to give them their correct title. Think, however, of the good will they have lost. They were not working the week before Christmas so must have lost out hugely on the traditional Christmas box which I and other residents surely still give them. £100 a street must be worth several thousand pound per lorry. Losses they will never recoup. The postal workers were in the same boat. So they have bowed to their Union wishes without  thinking it through.

Let's look at the RMT, and their dinosaur of a leader, Mick Lynch. Liverpool is one of the last bastions of the Union movement. Unite and Unison are investing heavily in student accommodation in an effort to brain washing their residents into the benfits of joining a trade union. 

All the RMT union seem to be doing however is alienating their very customer base and they could see many being permanently driven down other transportation routes, particularly as working from home seems to be becoming a more accepted work pattern.

Any why are they striking? Clearly they want more money, don't we all, but working practises play a part as well. They are opposed to the closure of ticket offices, but very few people buy tickets at the station these days. what the train operators are saying is get off you backside and help out of the station concourse. Technology has been forcing people to retrain for decades now, the RMT really do need to remove their blinker's and embrace the closure of ticket offices and the introduction of driverless train. The DLR in London and the Metro in Paris do not have any more accidents than Metrolink or the London Underground. There needs to be a bit of give and take to allow the Country continue to operate without the Unions trying to hold us all to ransom.

Finally to the nurses. Yes they need a payrise, but not the 23% being bandied around. Undoubtedly the independent pay board will allocate a double figure rise for them in the 2023 assessment, and hoepfully the Government will accept and implement it. There are two areas, however, which I am struggling to understand.

The first is bedblocking. What has happened to the Nightingale hospitals developed very quickly for COVID patients, but rarely needed. why can't these facilities be used for people with either little or nothing wrong with them, who are waiting for aftercare, or for the new wave of flu and COVID patients, making them almost isolation hospitals?

Second is the cost of accommodation. In the day, every hospital had nurses home to allow the staff  subsidised living facilities. Maybe the Unite and unison investment in property could be better used to reintroduce these facilities and help their members in a more practical way.

Time will tell.