Bus Eireann

Tosser from the union was on the radio last night He was talking about the 55 cuts/changes that 'de mangement' were introducing from the start of march.
Some of them were reasonable he said, and we would be happy to negotiate. But some were red line issues.
For example, the removal of a training allowance. This is an allowance drivers get for training new drivers. An extra add-on additional to their basic salary. Fecks sake, woulnt it be great to get extra cash for all the work you do that is above the basics of your role.

I would love to see them all hoofed out and their union agreement shoved up their hole. But the reported average 200k redundancy payments tempers that a bit.

Dirty Dingus McGee wrote: »

They want to stand around with placards and protest outside their place of work (i.e bus depot) they should do it on their time off.

You clearly dont understand the concept of strikes do you?

Hector Bellend wrote: »

You clearly dont understand the concept of strikes do you?

I do actually.It involves holding the country to ransom until the government caves.They shouldn't be allowed to do that.

Deleted User wrote: »

Thanks be to Jesus the state and private corporations have not been holding workers to ransom for years now, using the "recession" as the excuse to purge workers, increase and expand the range of taxation imposed upon us while reducing public services but managing to pay off rich private foreign gamblers. Oh wait.

Meanwhile, year after year we are told that the owners of the same huge corporations are richer than they've ever been and that inequality is now greater than at any time since 1945. And then we have the very same senior Irish civil servants and politicians who out Haughey Haughey with their "As a nation we are living beyond on means" speeches and articles while enjoying utterly obscene salaries and pensions from as young as 34 years of age (e.g. John Bruton, whose pension last year alone was €140,000, 35 years after first receiving his pension as a 34-year-old in 1982). Defend that, Neoliberals!

The leaders of this government and civil service and their "Do as we say not as we do" approach to the finances of this state deserve the abject contempt of all thinking Irish citizens. Likewise, the "Only the little people pay taxes" mentality of the tax-dodging uber rich of this brave new Neoliberal world.

It's long past time that workers made a stand against the incessant overthrow of workers rights and working conditions while the tax-dodging rich get richer on their work.

Lastly, if you're not worth at least a billion yourself it's beyond strange that anybody here would defend the above.

Please explain how Bus Eireann workers are being mistreated?

Bus Eireann workers are overpaid compared to private bus drivers.Why are they being paid more than the going rate for their job? Could that possibly be why the company is short of money.

We let go 25 people from our office last year and they had no choice but to accept it because there just wasn't any work for these people.That's the way it is for the vast majority of people.

Why should the general public suffer despite having done nothing wrong.


This strike is not about standing up for anyone apart from themselves it isn't a sign of some stand being made for the working classes who are being exploited because by and large most workers aren't being exploited by their employers. Nobody will benefit from this strike apart from those striking they are looking after themselves and only themselves.

I'm not denying the workers right to protest and stand up for themselves as anyone should but I don't think they should be allowed to disrupt hundreds of thousands of people who depend on the service.

I'm all for a better bus service and I don't have a problem with them making losses as that is what happens with public transport companies as they sometimes have to provide a service that is not profitable for the public good but why are the workers being paid well above the market rate for doing the exact same job.It doesn't make any sense.Everybody else in the world has to put up with being paid the market rate for the job they do, that's the way the world works.

The pensions our retired politicians receive are nothing short of a disgrace they but this has absolutely nothing to do with this issue.

mikeym wrote: »

The bus drivers and staff who work behind the scenes in BE seem to strike every couple of years.

They are a hard crowd to please.

It's constant "keeping up with the Jones" between bus, LUAS and rail workers.

suicide_circus wrote: »

Yeah I get the feeling there might be more support for BE drivers if they weren't so consistently crabby and ignorant towards customers

Customers? We are not their customers.

We are an inconvenience to them.

The cheek of us- making them have to stop the bus and take fares off us. And some of us have the cheek to not thank them profusely at the end of the wonderful transportation experience they have granted us.

seamus wrote: »

This is something I'm really torn over.

While LUAS proves that privately-run transport services wipe the floor with state-run ones, there is an overall social obligation to ensure that a reasonable level of public transport is available to as many people as possible.

Full privatisation obviously means a lot of people losing out as rural routes would not run or would be reduced to once every other day or something.

But at the same time a hybrid model where the state runs the unprofitable routes would just create a wider divide - people in urban areas would have high-quality, fast and comfortable private services while rural dwellers would have terrible services driven by civil servants.

I guess the way to go here is to privatise, and include a USO.
That the state defines the list of routes required, the frequencies required and the expected passenger numbers on each. Then for every, say, ten routes an operator serves that the state defines as "profitable", they are obliged to serve an "unprofitable" route a minimum of 4 times daily.

In effect the state would own the "infrastructure" - that is defining the routes and the numbers of busses - and the operators simply run that infrastructure.

Ack that's rubbish. What's particularly good about the Luas line for one? It's a slow slow tramline with significant social problems on at least one of its lines. The drivers have also gone on strike and the are "earning too much" according to the libertarians on boards.

Secondly the buses run by the state now are generally of better quality than the private operators.

And your plan at the end will make it less likely that private operators would compete for these lines. Many will fold sporadically.

It isn't much of a free market if the government forces companies to take on unprofitable routes and limits the number of operators on profitable lines?

In those circumstances you might as well have a state operator.