(14 Oct 2022, 8:03 pm)Starscream wrote Either I miswrote or you misread, but I certainly never said nurses aren't key workers.
There are actually whole regions in this world where being a bus driver in the UK sense, or indèeed any sense, isn't really a thing et all. And yet it is quite false to suggest these places are dysfunctional backwaters where everyone is locked into an existence of travelling only as far as their feet can carry them.
Perhaps that is a good definition of key worker. If it's a role that you can find anywhere a critical mass of human civilisation exists to the point strangers routinely interact with strangers to conduct the essentials of survival (eating, sleeping, caring), it is probably a key role.
Buses can always be replaced, the key skill being driving, not bus driving. People perhaps don't take too well to demand responsive or personal ride sharing solutions precisely because it feels too much like you are behaving like your journey is necessary and important. That it is key.
Working so very hard to keep the UK hooked on this idea that transporting fresh air is an essential service, while simultaneously showing very little concern at how often services run early or don't run at all, and often don't serve certain places solely because of the cost of a driver, all far more serious issues for an essential service than simple late running, is perhaps precisely what ubdemines any union claim to be the representatices of key workers.
They are what they are, certainly in the current disputes. Trying to get inflation busting wage rises for their members, with nothing in return for their employers or the people who ultimately pay these wages.
The one thing your missing here is if they don't get an increase in wages then they're effectively getting a real terms pay cut.
Inflation is 10%, so effectively everyone should be getting a 10% pay rise. 4% is a 6% pay cut, not to mention most bus drivers didn't get a rise last year either.
Just because call centres want to pay below the national living wage and the workers have to do OnlyFans or use food banks to make a living doesn't mean others should have to do the same. Call centres are also an extra service so can be ditched without any real issue whereas drivers are actually needed (key difference between the two) which makes striking very different. If you shut an O2 call centre down it wouldn't impact anyone so wouldn't get them anywhere.
£12.40 is £1.50 above the minimum wage (to live) to do a job which is much harder than a basic supermarket job etc. Yet again driver's don't give a toss about their boss on £150k a year, bus routes not running, whether Betty has soup for her tea or whatever. They care about money for thereself and they've been treat like shit for years. If you run a business which can't pay a proper wage for their staff then that's a business problem and needs fixing and is a failure of the market.
Being a key worker or not is irrelevant here.