Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
Terry Casey wrote:
In article , lid
says...
"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
I'll assume you mean *don't*.
They must have rail lines and ignored them
Gosh you mean we ship stuff around in containers, even by rail?
[1] I though the luddite unions so beloved of the likes of drivel
saw such ideas off in the 70s.
Most is shipped by rail. More should be. The only Luddites was
the outdated Tory party. Thatcher who for spite outsourced
manufacturing to the Far East decimating UK manufacturing industry.
There wasn't much left by the time Thatcher arrived on the scene!
The Luddites had already exported the London Docks to Rotterdam and
our car manufacturing industry to Europe and the Far East. Ditto ship
building.
In the late 50s I watched as BR built a massive new marshalling yard
to handle the container traffic from Tilbury. Thanks to the dockers'
efforts, the trade didn't materialise and the yard laid idle. In the
meantime, ASLEF made the railways so unreliable that most rail users
had switched to road haulage by the time the container traffic finally
arrived.
At around the same time I recall a couple of extremely lengthy
disputes which brought the shipyards to a standstill. Both were
demarcation disputes.
One was about whose job it was to hold the bucket that caught the hot
rivet, ready for the rivetter to fit. The other was about whose job it
was to twang the string that made the chalk line on the steel plate to
show where it was to be cut.
A couple of years later, as the orders dried up and yards were being
closed, I recall the unions demanding that the government should do
something about it ...
... which is precisely what Maggie did. Although like many cancers, it's
rearing its ugly head again.
It will.
The Union/labour movement has been in retreat for 50 years, and its last
stranglehold is on education and healthcare.
But frankly, with education likely to be semi privatised (state funded,
not state owned) and the majority of medical staff being too smart to
fall for it, its actually dead on its feet.
Well not quite, it juts smells that way.