Bob Crow Dies | Breaking News

[LazyGun]

Bit of a shock, given his high profile.

[campbellking]

Will grant you his occupation of a council is not as obscene as that of Arthur Scargill still taking £34,000 a year rent from the miners union (despite them now being down to 1,000 members).
There are people on inflated salaries throughout professions (why does a tube driver earn £46,000 a year when nurses who have a degree qualification start on £25,000, and even my ward manager earns less than £46,000, and has a similar amount of unsocial hours to work)
Maybe us health professionals need more 'champagne socialist' representation!

[lady-janine]

hear, hear chilld. would be interesting to know what he claimed on expenses. didn't begrudge salary but council house/home. no way was he morally there.

[mrs_overall]

LazyGun - bit of a shock

It must have been....especially for him

I'm with the others on the council house issue. The man was a hypocrite.

[jno]

why was he a hypocrite?

Had he spoken out against people staying in council houses?

[ToraToraTora]

yes chill but pretty well by definition most socialists are "hypocrites"!

[mikey4444]

You have said before TTT, that you are opposed to unions.
Who else are working people to rely on to protect their job, wages, and working conditions ?

[LazyGun]

I do not get why believing in socialism makes you a hypocrite, nor why being paid more than 100K a year makes you a hypocrite if you espouse socialist values.

He would be a hypocrite if he talked about squeezing the rich and then looked to avoid paying tax himself, or if he claimed not to be rich himself, having previously claimed that anyone earning over 100K a year should be considered rich - but he did neither of these things that I am aware of.

The only real issue for me was his council house - and the fact that he remained there is not so much hypocrisy as much as a refusal to make way for someone more needy and then attempting to justify that on ideological grounds

[ToraToraTora]

I'm a working person Mikey, I'm not in a union.

[ELVIS68]

All RMT members have been allowed a days unpaid leave to attend his funeral

[campbellking]

Being a 'working person' should not exclude you from being in a union. I work for the NHS, and nationally we are being threatened with downbanding of posts, we've had our allowances cut for being on-call, our local recruitment and retention allowance removed, pension contributions increased etc.
I would feel even more vulnerable if I wasn't in a union

[mikey4444]

Smart answer TTT but not one that appears to have anything to do with the question I asked you. Still unsure how people would be protected without membership of a union.

[ToraToraTora]

What protection do they need? How am I protected? I don't understand the concept, if I don't like a job I get another one, if the conditions of employment are not to my liking I don't apply.

[237SJ]

I don`t have particularly strong views about him but he obviously cared about the T&Cs of the workers and that is needed these days judging by what some companies/organisations will get away with, given the chance. I thought Boris Johnson`s appraisal of him just now on BBC news was very fair, despite the presenter rather pettily trying to bring up a spat that they had on the radio (only for Bosis to tell her this isn`t the time to bring up such things).

[B00]

Protected against what Mikey?

Like 3T im a worker and not in a union, even though its been offered to me countless times.

[campbellking]

TTT, currently across the country, people are having their terms and conditions changed with minimal warning in the NHS. I signed up to my contract 20 years ago, which has been changed several times since. It's not a question of just 'going to get another job', there's only one hospital in the area, I work in an intensive care unit and I like my job. Privately funded intensive care units are like hen's teeth in this country as insurance companies won't pay for patient care in them

[youngmafbog]

TTT unions themselves are not bad things per se. The problem arrives with the left wing dinosaurs that run them.

Personally I have managed all my working life to get on without them, like you if I dont like something I move on. Everyone is dispensable and replaceable, shame a few union members dont understand this.

I guess my big problem stemmed from the 70's. My relatives were always on strike (worked for leyland in Brum)

[LazyGun]

@3T Changing your job if the terms and conditions of your job are unilaterally changed by your employer is not always easy for everyone, especially when unemployment is high.

If you are in a high value high skill job you may well have the luxury of not needing a union, but those jobs are rare.

For everyone else, collective pay bargaining and an organisation that will lobby and negotiate for safer and better working conditions have improved the lot of the workers immeasurably, and their is still a requirement for such organisations - to combat discrimination or unfair or exploitative terms and conditions.

[youngmafbog]

campbel. Welcome to the real world.

If your conditions are so bad move to something else.

My wife too is affected by NHS reorganization. It's about time it was done or it will collapse on itself. But then Unions rarely care about that.

[B00]

cambelking- with all due respect, by what you've described your particular union doesn't seem to be helping you there either do they?

[mikey4444]

Then it appears that you don't understand how union membership works TTT. Many employers would ride rough-shod over their employees working conditions and safety issues if it wasn't for the unions taking an overview. I was an engineer for many years for a major utility company, and served on a joint employer/union safety committee and I had to fight tooth and nail every inch of the way to ensure that safe working conditions prevailed.

About 90% of our staff were union members and we didn't operate a closed shop, something I have always been against. But the non-members always benefited for all the work done by the union in areas like health and safety, and wages, despite not paying a penny towards the costs involved.

Employers always say that safety is the first concern but it rarely is. It nearly always comes 2nd after profits. Perhaps you have always been lucky, working for employers that were paragons of virtue, but the rest of us live a more real world.