The mask slips from the Tory press as it attacks the 'tyranny' of train unions
The Tory press really, really doesn’t like tube strikes. Or so it would seem. Because if you read their arguments, what they actually dislike is train staff who won’t be pushed around.
Let’s start with the Times. The paper’s story today, ‘Unions threaten summer of chaos’, does an excellent job of not saying why train staff are striking.
(Why are they striking? In short, it’s not really about pay. They don’t want over-worked staff having to work even more nights and weekends when tubes go 24 hours, and oppose cutting staff at stations, which they say will damage the service to commuters.)
The Times instead saves all the information for a little data box, where it helpfully lists the salaries of all the union heads, (as if that is remotely relevant to a dispute over train staff’s working conditions).
After a thoroughly slanted Q&A, which presents Transport for London’s version of events, it has two short sentences about shifts and night work, (presented as unreasonable demands).
That’s the more balanced coverage.
The Telegraph calls RMT members ‘bullies and those commuting to work their victims’.
It then encourages train staff to get used to being treated as poorly as private sector workers!
“People want to use the network at night and it must represent value for money. In other words, the service has to embrace modernisation. So, too, must its employees – just as millions in the private sector have done while receiving much lower pay and far fewer benefits.”
What a tantalising offer! If I worked for TfL, passages like this would have me joining a union by nightfall.
The Daily Mail welcomes the government’s coming laws that will impose a 50 percent turnout limit for any strike action, saying this will ‘end the tyranny of union leaders’ and ‘prevent a cabal of militant, knuckle-headed rail unions from inflicting travel misery on London’.
Presumably the Mail is unaware this strike received 90 percent support from more than a 50 percent turnout of union members.
Some of the pieces have a menacing tone.
A Daily Express editorial, which reads as if its author was falling asleep while writing it, calls the unions ‘babies’ and the dispute a ‘tantrum’, before adding: ‘This blackmail cannot be allowed to continue’.
The Telegraph threatens the mass sacking (or ‘voluntary redundancy’) of tube staff and their replacement with robots:
“There are alternatives to the RMT’s bullying. Last year, Transport for London unveiled the design of automated trains. Robots would present one obvious advantage. They do not go on strike.”
It sounds as if the Telegraph would prefer workers behave like robots.
This kind of ‘bullying’ and holding workers to ransom is why we have unions in the first place.
***
For more on what’s wrong with the press coverage of the strike, see this excellent piece from Workers’ Liberty.
Adam Barnett is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow MediaWatch on Twitter
Read more:
The Sun won’t tell you why train staff are striking. So we will
Tory press takes the side of the bosses with its anti-union bias
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13 Responses to “Anti-union press wants train staff to act like robots. But who is the real bully here?”
Rick
Starting salary for a tube driver is just under £50,000
Seems to me that these people are in the banker class when it comes to greed !!!
stevep
The Tory press is trying to ape their right-wing good, left-wing bad, anti- union stance of the 1980`s.
Then, they were determined to wean the working classes off collectivisation and install an “I`m all right Jack!” mentality in it`s place.
It worked then because newspapers were more widely-read than they are now and working people generally less well educated.
In 2015 people are better able to access alternate points of view via the internet and are more selective in what they believe.
Sites like Left Foot Forward do a grand job in counteracting Tory press distortions.
Cole
Of course there’s no way theTories and their press will tell us the facts. It’s not what they do.
stevep
If you were flying, would you want the pilot to be well trained, happy, decently paid, have proper time off etc. Of course you would, so would anyone. Your life is their hands.
Ditto train and tube drivers.
To be a train driver you have to undergo one of the most rigorous and demanding recruitment training processes in any industry, with mental and psychological assessments, batteries of tests to see how well you concentrate, react and deal with given situations. If you are accepted into training you are really special, for only 1-in-400 succeed.
You then have to learn to be self-disciplined, handle responsibility and apply safety-critical procedures without supervision. If then, after a few months you have demonstrated competence in signalling procedures, electronics, maintenance, route learning and driving 100 ton plus locomotives with rolling stock at speed and stopping them ok, then you might become a train driver. Many fail. those that succeed work varied shifts including nights.
In short, being a train driver is a highly skilled job that only a relative few are qualified to do.
Of course they deserve commensurate wages or salaries. They earn it.
We should be grateful for their skill and experience every time we take the train.
Keith M
Democracy is ill served by the shambles calling itself the press in this country. Most controlled by non doms and let’s not forget the mail’s nazi appeasement policies in the 30’s.