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How hard is it to become a train driver? Do you need to start on the tickets or depending on who you know? Tbh though we go on about footballers earning ridiculous amounts of money which they do but that is a shocking amount for train drivers when you see nurses and what not working 12+ hours a day for a pittance
From my conversations with local train guards it's ultra difficult to become a driver as new positions are as rare as hen's teeth. The one who was accepted said if I remember he was one amongst a thousand candidates for two openings and to secure it he had to undergo endless tests, including psychological ones, spread over many months. He did say no formal education qualifications were necessary. Whether applicants were limited to Arriva staff I don't know as I didn't ask.
I agree, quiet month though this one as nobody wants to change till after ChristmasOriginally Posted by A Quiet Monkfish
You need to be a jammy sod to get it then
Good luck mate, I've just come out of self employment-25 years of it-In the building industry. It's a hard game, if i added up all of the hours i used to do, including pricing jobs, getting material,paperwork etc it wasn't much more than minimum wage some weeks, add that to the responsibility of the job etc. Plus working when you're ill or drained, having no time off etc, fecking tax bill in January, just after Christmas when you've had time off and forked out.....Nah...
Exactly, I’m one of those millionaire!!!!! self employed builders, been loading out blocks in someone’s garden this afternoon, f*ck me I should have had armbands on. Told myself that I’d never work in the rain again, unfortunately I’d have been on bread & water if I’d stuck to that promise this last month. Good luck to the train drivers, why do people compare them to nurses as if it’s their fault? Ridiculous!!!!!
I'm in work, however my age is not the business of a forum full of people I don't know.
In what way will they settle?
Inflation will go through the roof.
The country becomes bankrupt under a Labour government again ........ everyone's unhappy
Socialism
‘50 years next week, I would have got less for murder’ by Surge is the thread you need to go on, you can say what season your first City game was and how old you were 👍🤪
You didn't answer the question Bob. Not like you!
Can't you see that 28% pay increases as a bribe to buy an election, would be a disaster financially for this country?
Do you consider £100,000 to 'just' be a very good salary?
What sort of salary should a brain or cardiac surgeon be on?
What about front line ambulance and A&E personnel, who save lives every day, while low life scum are vandalizing and stealing from ambulances and abusing staff?
It would be great if everyone could get paid £100 grand, but who then gets paid lots more and how can a country afford that?
It's not a race to the bottom that people are advocating, it's just the country can't afford a perpetual race to the top.
Who takes financial responsibility in any household to best 'make ends meet'? Or do people just spend totally freely as they wish without the capacity to afford their spending. Do you have a yacht, a house in the south of France and a Ferrari?
Most likely the answer is no, because and I can't afford it.
We 'have' to live within our means, otherwise we go bankrupt. Someone has to be responsible
The country has to do the same.
Running the country is the most responsible of jobs and you have to run it responsibly and that includes financially.
After reading this I thought I’d have a look at what the prime ministers salary isI can’t believe anyone could accept train drivers earning 100 big ones a year it’s fecking ridiculous and yet these bastards want to cause havoc to thousands of people’s life’s by getting paid more
There is no doubt they are high earners but a tube driver's average salary puts them around 95th percentile, so 5 percent of the population are earning more than them. There are ~30 million tax payers in the UK so around 1.5 million people are earning more than the average tube driver. Somehow these ~3000 people appear to be the sole beneficiary of your anger towards high earners. If this is the case then I would suggest that you might wish to broaden your horizons beyond what the newspapers report.
I'm not angry, just concerned and also trying to address the imbalance on here.
Some of the 5% of higher earners are likely to be seniors in the medical and legal professions.
With the amount of knowledge, skills, training, on going professional development and responsibilities, then i think their salaries are justified.
I don't believe a train driver should be valued more than three times that of a Qualified Nurse, do you?
But they're not paid out of the same pot so there's no comparison of value. If train driver wages dropped then nurses would get nothing out of it.
It's as pointless as comparing pogbas wages with a soldier. And yes I'd be delighted if nurses were paid more.
Apologies if I'm wrong here, but I believe you voted leave in the EU referendum? I only mention this because the remain side had set out a scenario similar to the one you did for the consequences of a rise in the minimum wage, the Leave side would have, correctly in my view, be shouting "project fear, project fear!".
Anyway, following your logic through, shouldn't there have been all of the dire consequences you listed when the minimum wage was introduced in 1999? After all, this resulted in a pretty substantial wage rise for some low paid workers and yet, unless some sort of link that no one else has mentioned to the crisis which suddenly erupted, in financial terms anyway, nine years later, then the introduction of the scheme did not have any truly significant consequences for the UK economy.
Exactly, Governments of all persuasions have taken advantage of the fact that many who work in the NHS do so out a sense of a sense of vocation and so lower wages than they deserve can be "gotten away with" by their employers.
Anyway, aren't privatised bodies supposed to be run by market forces? In that case, rail drivers are only getting what the market deems they should have surely? My father was a train driver with BR and, comparatively speaking in terms of where the profession stood in the wages league, he earned a lot less than his modern equivalent
Do you think you could jump into a train after brief instructions on how to drive it, then be able to do the job?
Here's a thought - the disparity between the most wealthy in the country and the poorest is considerably larger than anywhere in Europe. What if the money for those wage increases came from the huge profits that the billionaire owners and corporations, who like paying peanuts, like squirrelling away overseas so they can avoid tax at the same time?
I think this answer taken from a rail forum sounds reasonable:
The driver wage is due to many factors, including the following:
- enormous levels of responsibility - risk of a manslaughter charge and a prison sentence if you don’t do your job properly. Note that as other grades disappear (guards and platform staff), drivers take on their responsibilities;
- tremendous pressure to perform well in the role. These days, if you SPAD, you can’t just call the box and “true up” with the signaller as some of my former BR colleagues remember doing!;
- barriers to entry - not that many people who apply pass the tests and make the cut through training. TOCs want to retain those that do. Training is highly expensive and takes 12-18 month. Platform staff, by contrast, can be trained in a few days;
- privatisation - this has created a competitive market where TOCs compete for staff. Inevitably this drives wages up;
- necessity of the role - the reality is that trains will not move without drivers. There is also a small pool of drivers competent to drive the routes and traction of any particular TOC. Even if qualified drivers are recruited from elsewhere they will take months to train. Inevitably this again means TOCs need to retain their staff;
- strong union representation (although note this also suppresses salaries, as agreed pay deals prevent drivers from being poached by TOCs who are short staffed and negotiating higher salaries on an individual basis).
https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads...cation.157086/
No but I think I’d be ok to learn how to drive a train before I could learn open heart surgery
You could technically learn how to become a footballer before being a train driver.
Too many people think that wages reflect difficulty or ability/qualifications required to perform a job. In reality, lots of market forces control these things.
Take a Premier league footballer. The huge increases in TV money have seen a hike in transfer fees and wages. Is a player worth, say, an extra £20k a week because there's more money available?
I sometimes hear of bus drivers complaining that their wages aren't comparable, but then their jobs aren't comparable, either. A bus driver can be trained quickly and inexpensively, and can move from one company to another with little training required. A train driver's training takes as much as 2 years and is very expensive. A driver moving to another operator needs months of training. It's easier to keep drivers happy and keep them at your company than have them move to another, while other operators want pre-trained drivers to train as it costs them less. The result is a merry-go-round that means higher wages. Market forces above difficulty or ability required. Same with footballers.
It's not pointless, if people rightly so, compare job for job and salary for salary. When there is a huge disparity, then there's potential for unrest in the workplace, which then affects productivity and quality of service.
Everyone 'should' get a fair wage for the work they do, based on skills, experience, qualifications, expertise, etc.
I just don't believe that train drivers warrant a salary in excess of three times that of an experenced and Qualified Nurse, who has three years training before they have examinations to qualify. They have to regularly prove their continued Professional development.
Not sure exactly what training and CPD is required of train drivers, but doubt its to that extent.
Lowering a tube drivers salary doesn't help a nurse feed her family.
How can you think a salary is justified without knowing what their salary is or what the requirements of their job are?
Not sure why your pre-amble about Brexit was necessary, other than to show that not everything is black and white in politics.
We may occasionally share exactly the same viewpoint on certain matters, even with polar opposite views on the majority of political matters.
I know exactly how the 1999 minimum wage impacted a number of businesses.
It didn't financially impact many businesses paying low wages, because they were paying close, if not above the introduced NMW of £3.60 in April 1999.
Therefore, the financial crisis you jokingly alluded to didn't materialise.
What did happen, was the number of job applicants rapidly reduced after NMW was introduced, as often people felt 'their' value was worth more than the 'minimum'. It was also not helped when Naomi Campbell ludicrously stated she wouldn't get out of bed for less than £10,000 a day.
Pre-NMW, the number of applicants were plentiful.
The 28% minimum wage increase that Labour wants is far too much to responsibly introduce, without it adversely impacting on SME's, costs of living, council taxes, inflation, mortgages and the country's balance defecit.
There will be many businesses severely damaged, social and nursing care will be decimated, significant job losses as a result and many councils will declare bankruptcy.
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