All London underground ticket offices to close by 2015
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Soldato
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Yes i could kinda agree with that, i just don't like when people think because you support a union you are classed as a trouble maker or militant which i am not
I don't support Unions, but I'm not a mad, unfeeling, winer-takes-all capitalist either.
I have a few problems with Unions which are...
a) Their duty is get as much for their members as possible regardless of fairness or how it will affect new members or customers.
b) To justify their fees and existence there has to be a 'cause' for them to fight, meaning if you are a caring and moral employer who pays well and only lets people go as an absolute last resort then there is a need for the Unions to undermine you and even make stuff up.
c) It creates and enforces the 'us and them' mentality, which can in turn lead management to fall into the same mentality creating a circular problem.
If I could restart the country from scratch, I'd ban Unions. But I would have much stronger employment laws and laws that force businesses to be fair. For example, get rid of this probation period and qualifying periods for unfair dismissal, make a law that prevents CEOs from giving themselves 20% pay rises whilst giving the rest of the workforce 1% etc.
Then I would have arbiters (instead of Unions) who would be half funded from income tax and half funded from corporation tax (thus not biased towards either the worker or the company) who would rule on any disputes that weren't covered by my new employment laws.
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Soldato
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Soldato
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Fair point. I'll clarify then and say as well as Unions I would also ban striking to stop silly things like people withdrawing their labour because the canteen has changed its sandwich supplier.
Man of Honour
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They do
Really? All my American family and friends have never seen or heard of it!
Ah well, still, it's not as widespread then - would that be fair to say?
Soldato
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Judging from the stats we get I think its fair to say it hasn't taken off that well at all overall.
Granted it will change I think personally its because people don't realise or aren't made ware of it. For example at Nero its hidden under the glass display.
Granted it will change I think personally its because people don't realise or aren't made ware of it. For example at Nero its hidden under the glass display.
![[TW]Fox](/data/man-of-honor/2009.png){kind=avatar}
I have never encountered a single chip and pin machine in the USA and I visit a different part each year.
By contrast, they are everywhere in Canada.
Soldato
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Reading the last few posts I had to check I'd clicked on the right thread.
Aren't those contactless cards easy to hack?
That would explain why so many staff were working today. I'm guessing most that didn't vote or voted no to a strike carried on like normal... Interesting to see that no protests were being held outside stations though.
Yup - Apple need to catch up and get NFC though
However, I don't see why not.
TFL tried NFC on the tube but found it too slow to be of use on the underground
You can use contactless cards on all London buses already, I assume it'll be pretty soon we can use them on the tube as well. It may be a speed issue again though.
Out of interest why remove the probation period? Yes it protects the employee from losing their job after a month or two but it would forces the employer to keep employing the person even if they were very poor at their job. You could argue that the employer should have weedled them out at interview but being on the job is very different to an interview. The employer should still have rights to remove the employee from the company just as much as the employee should be able to quit.
[TW]Fox;25797326 said:
Yet my GF canadian chequing (current) account card doesn't have one! N. America do seem to be very behind on all that.
An employer can always get rid of people that aren't performing, but they have to follow a procedure and give an opportunity for improvement. Having a long probation period says to an employee that they are good enough to have been selected after several rounds of interviews, good enough to be given the same workload as everyone else, but not good enough to give a decent notice period to.
Personally as a probationary period means nothing unless it's spelt out in a contract what that involves I'd rather see the two year minimum for unfair dismissal scrapped.
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It won't happen. Driverless train systems are built from scratch to allow passengers to easily and safely escape when the system breaks down (the DLR, for example, has walkways along its entire length). Tube tunnels would need to be rebored to make the system in any way safe for passengers, which will never happen, and the parts of the network that are overground (which is most of it) aren't isolated from sources of obstructions (like things dropped off bridges).
There will always have to be someone on board TfL's trains who is fully qualified to operate it manually and that person will normally have to be at the front of the train to keep an eye out. That is a driver, even if the computer is doing all of the work.
Plus, and I don't know about anyone else, I'd rather keep a qualified driver on my train than get rid of them just to spite the union boogeyman.
What's a long period of probation? 3 Months is standard. Long enough to really see if the person will improve.
Problem is, as far as I understand, it is now very difficult to sack someone for being bad at their job. I don't mean dangerous, late etc., just poor at doing the job they were hired to do. If you hire someone and within a few weeks realise they just aren't up to scratch you can then let them go, rather than spend months trying to build up a case and going through multiple hoops hoping they won't take you to a tribunal at the end.
I say this with a reasonable amount of experience having spent the last year working with someone who is bad at their job. The employers know it, we know it and they know it. Unfortunately the employers are too worried about a tribunal to sack them.
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Perspective London. Get some!...
http://www.buzzfeed.com/tomphillips/while-londoners-complain-about-a-tube-strike-the-south-west
http://www.buzzfeed.com/tomphillips/while-londoners-complain-about-a-tube-strike-the-south-west
I edited my post because I was wrong about the probationary period - it doesn't give employers the right to drop people if they feel like it. All it can do is reduce the notice period, but they still have to go through putting the complaint in writing, holding a meeting, confirming the actions of that meeting with a right to appeal.
It's hard to get rid of someone who is bad at their job if you have no structures in place for measuring performance. Unfortunately a lot of employers don't want to do this because then it gives the staff who excel a very obvious sign that they are outperforming the expectations made of them, and/or the rest of their team. In your example if the person who was bad at their job was given metrics to hit and consistently missed them then there's no reason why dismissing them should cause any issues.
Words cannot express how much I dislike Buzzfeed. It's probably the laziest form of content creation after straight up stealing it from someone else.
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Man of Honour
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It's an aspiration. We'll never innovate and improve if we're always reticent of change. Sometimes you have to take positive risks. Sometimes you have to look past our current restrictions. Moving forwards we will get there, as long as people support it. We haven't got where we are in this world without trial and error, innovation/invention and looking at new ways of working and behaving.
Driverless trains can be just as safe if not safer (they remove human error).
Anyway, this is about ticket offices, which are still unnecessary really if we have a good simple ticketing system (which it currently isn't).