(27 Oct 2023, 1:47 pm)busmanT wrote All those stats are publicly available.
GNE made a loss of £4.5m last year.
GNE drivers received at least a 10% pay rise last year - between 2018 and 2022 there was of course the COVID-19 pandemic which depressed everybody’s pay.
Go North West drivers do a lot more work in a shift than GNE drivers do in the same shift length - that’s why they get paid more per hour.
Will his next statement be “loss making GNE closes depots and cuts services”?
And by extension job losses.
Remember that GNE provide a service that cannot be outsourced to cheaper countries, they need the employees here.
Job losses would mean, by and large, redundancies, I can guarantee that there will be drivers and engineers happy to take their payments and leave the industry, whether because they are nearing retirement or just happy to go and try something else.
Because of the high staff turn over, there will be a number of staff who were planning on leaving anyway regardless of redundancies.
There will be drivers and engineers who will find work at other operators quite quickly just to fill current vacancies due to the shortages currently being experienced.
If GNE shuts depot(s) and cuts routes, there will be other operators step in to take on routes they could see as profitable, and routes that Nexus and councils will have to keep running. Again creating more jobs for displaced drivers and engineers.
So if I was currently a GNE driver I could see the current dispute as a bit of a gamble, with either a vastly improved renumeration package or at worse a move to another operator ( in the case of ANE and Stagecoach) with a slightly better package that I now have.
With the current driver shortage, it is likely the only ones left unemployed are those who possibly shouldn’t be employed in the first place.
And of course managers and ancillary staff.
I know this is a simplistic view. But quite an accurate one I think.