On 10/09/15 10:37, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Wonderful! I love the plot line where a man holds a gun to your head and
tells you to rob a bank or else, and then claims it was all your own
doing, for selfish reasons of self preservation!

Fighting for better pay or conditions of service is holding a 'gun to your
head'. Or, of course the more usual 'holding the country to ransom'. But
then hyperbole does tend to be a tool of the extreme right wing.

It's another case of what happens when power is highly imbalanced. In
this case, it rested (unusually) with the state workforce across many
industries.

I don't blame them for taking what they could at the time - but in the
long term it gave enough impetus to the government to produce a lot of
union restricting legislature. About the only industry with any worker
power left is the trains now.

Did you actually live through that period?

Of course it's far better now. Loads of the poorest on zero hours
contracts at minimum wage. Just what big business ordered.


Which is a bloody disgrace.

There is a vast difference between Casual Labour and Zero Hours
contracts - principally where the latter seeks to "own" the employee
exclusively, but merely pay them for the hours it feels like.

I would love to see that tested in court, if an employee held 2 or more
zero hour contracts simultaneously and was subsequently fired because of it.

Part of the problem now is not that the unions are powerless, but that
most people are too apathetic to join one. What usually happens is the
good people bugger off to a better employer and the weaker (but not
necessarily useless) ones get left holding the ****ty end of the stick.