Great Western Coffee Shop

ASLEF settles for 29% rise phased over 4 years. DOO changed to DCO with guarantee of guard on every train.

https://twitter.com/paulcliftonbbc/status/1240253293626109952?s=21

Unbelievable pay for a driving job. That's more than a lot of hospital doctors earn and vastly more than coach/HGV drivers whose work is far more stressful & difficult.

Automation should be prioritized.

We can see why UK rail fares are so high.

So means trains will have driver and guard/conductor/ticket person? ??

It seems that the agreement moves from DOO (which was already in the drivers' terms and conditions), to DCO.  As I understand it the former meant a train could run without a second person, whereas the latter doesn't, thus leaving RMT with the industrial muscle that is undoubtedly behind the strike.

If so, that is an odd thing for the management/government to give up, particularly given the pay rise being offered. And leaves the network open to ongoing strikes for years to come.  The Southern strikes only petered out because with DOO in operation, they weren't having much of effect.

Impeccable timing, what with it being a good day to bury good news. You could be forgiven for thinking that someone from the government asked for it to be finished off quickly, back to the proxy war in a few years' time.

The dispute was with RMT,  not ASLEF.  Have RMT settled?

SWR have needed drivers on side to run their strike service - which, on the lines where it runs, is much more than a skeleton service. So this could be seen as preparing for RMT strikes for several years to come. After all, not paying guards is one way to cover the costs of the drivers' deal.

Mind you, the timing is a bit ... unfortunate.

Looking back and tidying up after the last few months, I was noting the chronology of the South Western Railways long industrial dispute with guards - https://www.railway-technology.com/features/timeline-south-western-rail-guard-dispute/ and https://www.westsussextoday.co.uk/read-this/the-largest-rail-strike-in-uk-history-is-planned-for-december-this-is-what-it-means-for-christmas-travellers-851175 . I have mirrored those in our document archive too at http://www.passenger.chat/mirror/railstrikeplanwestsussex.pdf and http://www.passenger.chat/mirror/Timeline_SWR_Guard_Strike.pdf

Taking no view on the strikes themselves, I can't help wondering if passenger numbers - such as those quoted to us by SWR over recent months to justify service withdrawal ("even before covid ... ") would have been distinctly different had they gone back to passenger numbers for the time before those strikes too.

This may not be the right thread to best record the concern - but for future analysis, it needs to be recorded that SWR passenger numbers on many services were damaged pre-covid and those earlier figures are of doubtful merit when looking at the long term.

Anything that affects customer confidence that a good or service will be available is likely to have a detrimental affect on a business - alternatives will be sought and utilised -  it's one of the nuances that the RMT/ASLEF overlook in their endless quest to live in 1975.

Most of the rest of the World has moved on so far when it comes to industrial relations and looks on the railways with a mixture of disbelief and bemusement in this respect. It really is a time capsule.

I couldn't agree more that people will seek, or sought, alternatives.   I'm not going to assign responsibly between rocks and hard places - you have an unholy mix of government (represented by the DfT), commercial operators (represented by First and MTR) and unions (RMT and ASLEF) - the only people powerless in there are the customers who chose to travel in other ways (or, rather, we forced to travel other ways because the otherwise-best option) wasn't running or couldn't be relied on.

I have to look back and ask "what was the final resolution" and "why wasn't it possible to reach it in days not years".  Low passenger numbers during the strikes may not have been the straw that broke the camel's back of the Bristol service, but they were certainly used in arguments to justify its demise.