Rail strikes

[LMcD]

As far as I can recollect, Radio 4 news bulletins referred specifically to Eurotunnel services. This was confirmed by news and images on the TV news of cars stacked on the M20.

[zola]

People who have more experience of other strikes in the last year or so may be more familiar with what information gets put up on web sites.

South Western Railways always has a banner headline on their web site showing whether there is currently a good service on all lines or, as is more likely, what current disruption there is. Here is the current page regarding the industrial dispute.

https://www.southwesternrailway.com/plan-my-journey/rmt-industrial-action

[vinteuil]

Nostalgia moment: the Dover/Oostende jetfoil. Now there was a comfortable service.

.

Another nostalgia moment: Hovercraft. Sometimes a very uncomfortable service, and not reliable in rough weather. Quite exciting though.

... more nostalgia -

"I have been dictating these reflections on board a ferry during an averagely rough crossing between Portsmouth and St-Malo, a journey I must admit to having often found frustratingly intermediate in length - neither the hour-long hop to Calais, allowing time merely for a cup of bad coffee, the crossword, and a couple of turns of the deck, nor the day-long full-dress crossing of Newcastle to Gothenburg or Harwich to Bremerhaven, which at least offers a gesture in the direction of a proper sea voyage. Portsmouth-St-Malo does, however, have the benefit of depositing oneself in one of the most satisfactory, or least unsatisfactory, of the French port towns (an admittedly uncompetitive title, given that Calais is unspeakable, that Boulogne has seen the planners finish what the Allied bombardment began, that Dieppe involves an unthinkable departure from Newhaven, that Roscoff is a fishing village and that Ostend is in Belgium)."

Tarquin Winot in 'The Debt to Pleasure', John Lanchester [1996].

[Beef Oven!]

Over-paid and work-shy. Give the public the service they pay for, need and deserve!

[Dave2002]

South Western Railways always has a banner headline on their web site showing whether there is currently a good service on all lines or, as is more likely, what current disruption there is. Here is the current page regarding the industrial dispute.

https://www.southwesternrailway.com/...ustrial-action

After the event - in our case - but this may be helpful to others. Note also that it gives details of "intention to strike", but no explanation of why! What's the point of that?

I usually go straight to the National web site - http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/ - which doesn't seemingly always have the information about strikes.

[Dave2002]

Over-paid and work-shy. Give the public the service they pay for, need and deserve!

That might not get us very far.

Who says we actually deserve anything? We not actually be paying enough for a service we might expect. Who's to decide? Who is "the public" anyway?

[zola]

Note also that it gives details of "intention to strike", but no explanation of why! What's the point of that?

It's the old argument about changing the role of guards. SWR management commit to retaining two members of staff on each train but not to the role of that second member ( the driver remains at the front of the train under current plans !! ) All a bit arcane to those not in the industry.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

But the whole point of the lightning strike was to avoid a vote of all members, otherwise it's just a strike and can be countered by employers.

A strike by its very nature intends to cause inconvenience. Otherwise there would be no point in striking.

[Serial_Apologist]

Over-paid and work-shy.

That's just the passengers!

[Alain Maréchal]

.
given that Calais is unspeakable

Clearly spoken by somebody who has not lunched at La Buissonnière, refreshed himself Au Calice, or dined at the Cafe de Paris. Other (many other) establishments are available. I have never understood why the British speed through Calais without exploring it (although I know very well why I sped through Newhaven, Dover, Folkestone or Harwich.)

[Dave2002]

Clearly spoken by somebody who has not lunched at La Buissonnière, refreshed himself Au Calice, or dined at the Cafe de Paris. Other (many other) establishments are available. I have never understood why the British speed through Calais without exploring it (although I know very well why I sped through Newhaven, Dover, Folkestone or Harwich.)

I don't have the "down" on Calais that others seem to have - though often we go to Boulogne and then to Wimereux instead. Re Folkestone there are some good things there - trying to remember what ... there is a sign "Heaven is a place where Nothing Ever Happens" http://www.folkestoneartworks.co.uk/.../nathan-coley/ - there's also one of those in Australia - and there is an annual music festival organised by the Sacconis - http://sacconi.com/festival/

[vinteuil]

I don't have the "down" on Calais that others seem to have - though often we go to Boulogne and then to Wimereux instead.

... ah, happy memories of the Épicure in Wimereux - sadly no more, replaced by a Thai curry house...

Tarquin Winot in The Debt to Pleasure is of course an unreliable narrator and far from the voice of sanity, altho' I agree with him in many things.

Few of the English ports have much to recommend them, tho' Folkestone has some nice things and Portsmouth its moments. On the French side I have come to love in their different ways Dieppe, Cherbourg, le Havre, and Boulogne. Have yet to be persuaded of the virtues of Calais, tho' I note the advocacy of M le Maréchal ...



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[Sir Velo]

A slight annoyance as we'd already paid to park our car, and had to drive to another station where the car park charges were higher, but where the Southern trains were unaffected. In the grand scheme of things it's not such a big deal - we did get to the concert - and at £24 each the loss would have been greater if we hadn't, and we'd have missed out on a good experience - even if not outstanding.

Actually the loss would have been less if you hadn't gone, as the tickets were a sunk cost (ie already incurred) and the additional car parking charges were incremental and therefore would have been avoided!

[gradus]

A strike by its very nature intends to cause inconvenience. Otherwise there would be no point in striking.

Depends on who is striking and in which organisation. Strikes continue to be used tactically as threats - the union movt had the ultimate weapon of the Miners strike until that idiot Scargill destroyed what he espoused - and the sub-set of lightning strikes ie with no prior warning were used very effectively to put the knife to the throat of recalcitrant employers before the Tebbitt/Thatcher reforms stopped all that.

[Serial_Apologist]

Depends on who is striking and in which organisation. Strikes continue to be used tactically as threats - the union movt had the ultimate weapon of the Miners strike until that idiot Scargill destroyed what he espoused - and the sub-set of lightning strikes ie with no prior warning were used very effectively to put the knife to the throat of recalcitrant employers before the Tebbitt/Thatcher reforms stopped all that.

I've always thought the left placed too much faith in the progressive potential of strike actions. In the era during which manufacturing industry was still expanding and taking on labour there was point to trans-sectoral union organisation to pre-empt forestalling action by employers shifting operations to non-unionised areas/countries, especially when, after initial reluctance, the bosses' political class bought into the post-baby boom reality of mass consumer culture. The problem was when the "left romanticism" to which the likes of myself were prey failed to see at what point such action decisively became an end in itself rather than the empowering since qua non of progressive change towards dismantling capitalist power relations, and this, rather than working-to-rule and alternative workers' plans, assumed the immediate defensive forms of such as the last defining miners' strikes without the kind of forethought applied by the empoyers to ensure maximum impact when coal stocks were not exhausted. By this stage, with the once existing communities that had guaranted mutual resistence and support decimated by the demoraliation of mass unemployment brought about by the export of manual intensive industry, and automation, deskilling and casualisation usurping the final pretenses of working class power at the point of production at home, strikes were now as much at the inconvenience of those who had once been able to identify themselves as working class as the companies affected. The left still has to re-think its position on these fundamentals.