Think drivers just push buttons? Think again!
The latest strike by train drivers has once again brought out the ‘automate’ and ‘sack ‘em’ brigade – many calling them “button pushers”, along with other less polite names.
All this does is illustrate the gap in understanding between what some believe the job involves and what it actually involves. ‘Drivers are paid more than (insert job here)’ is another indignant cry that the mob shout, but surely that’s an argument for those other jobs to be paid more – not for drivers to be paid less. Does society really want to see a race to the bottom when it comes to pay?
Drivers contact me on a regular basis (I’ve written a number of pro rail staff pieces in the tabloids and they have been a great help in providing information for my books) as they can’t go public in case “HR goes on the rampage” and what they tell me is far from the rose tinted view that some of the public have.
One driver describes how he hit a middle aged lady as she jumped in front of his train and “exploded in a pink ball of flesh and bones” and how a passenger slashed her wrists on a platform, near the driving cab. Much of the network is driver only and in an emergency, drivers not only have to deal with the incident, but look after passengers too. Many a driver has been on the receiving end of an irate passenger’s fists – one Tube driver had several teeth knocked out during one attack. Just because these things don’t make the newspapers, it doesn’t mean they don’t happen on a regular basis, it just means that PR people don’t want it in the press.
As a journalist, I’ve ridden on the footplate many times and to claim that all drivers do is push a start and stop button is the biggest work of fiction since Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. If the job is that easy, why do so many fail the initial selection? I’ve used many a driving simulator and having done so, have only respect for the job.
As for a social life, well that has to come second to work. Booking on at all hours of the day and night, seven days a week isn’t something for everyone and one has to have an understanding spouse. It wasn’t so long ago that there was a significant number of divorced drivers, compared to many other jobs. Many a driver has missed Christmas day with his young family – being sat on a loco during an engineering blockade.
I’ve sent Huw Merriman a copy of my book ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Train to London’ which lays out in graphic detail just some of the horrors that drivers, and other rail staff, face on a routine basis. Whether he reads it (or even received it) is another matter. One very senior rail manager (who is anti strike) has told me that he thinks the book should be banned, as it “reveals too much” about what rail staff face. Rail staff, who helped a lot with the book, feel very differently. I wish I could send a copy to everyone who believes that drivers are overpaid, lazy etc – their opinions would shift overnight, after only reading the first couple of chapters.
The right to withdraw labour is a fundamental right of any democratic society – it’s not a socialist of conservative thing, but a basic human right that should cross all party barriers.
https://www.chimewhistle.co.uk/shop/p/a-funny-thing-happened-on-the-train-to-london