Drivers get 43 days holiday a year and station staff get 52

[Nortube]

Usual bxxxxxxs trotted out by LU when trying to make out how well staff get paid and how much time they have off.

This was from a full page advert letter from mike brown in today's standard:

"Drivers Annual leave will remain at 43 days for a train driver and 52 days for station staff"

Of course, that is done deliberately to make it look that staff have lots of holidays and put staff in a bad light. He conveniently forgets to mention that those total days include time off for time already worked unpaid over the last year (Banked Rest Days) and includes every bank holiday, even though many of those bank holidays will be worked.

Edit 060515-0004
I forgot about the censoring, so for those of you that wondered what flowers meant after Usual at the beginning, I've rewritten the original word to something non-censurable

[railtechnician]

AFAIK b%x is non-censurable but if not beepercentex means the same thing! I have been using both for many years.

Annual leave is exactly that! Thus if 43 days and 52 days are not actually annual leave what they are exactly should be spelt out. I have no doubt that both unions and management are complicit in referring to banked rest days as annual leave.

At devolution of engineering to lines back in 1991/2 all engineering staff were forced to sign new contracts. At the time the 26 days annual leave enjoyed by most engineering staff plus the 8 Bank holidays were rolled up in the contract as 6.8 weeks annual leave. Thus Bank Holidays ceased to exist which made Christmas day interesting if one was rostered to work it, traditionally the only day that LU services didn't run. Under the old contract one was normally expected to take Bank holidays off, under the new contract one had to write a memo to request leave on a Bank holiday. I seldom wanted to take a Bank holiday off so the new rosters which included Bank holidays as normal days suited me, I often took my entire leave allowance in one or two blocks, and I refused to take Christmas day off when I was rostered to work it, my attitude being that the company could not have it both ways!

As I have said before both management and unions write agreements that although apparently binding have plenty of wriggle room, if you have any complaint about the way that management express an agreement, or portion thereof, you should berate the appropriate union secretary.

As for the usual b%x we all know, or should know by now, that both unions and management can be tarred with the same brush, they are equally guilty. IMHO the current dispute is more about greed than work/life balance, safety or the night tube.

[Nortube]

It's now splashed in big letters on about half the front page of today's metro:

Commuter fury as strikers with 52 days' holiday

No explanation as to how the 52 days are made up, but then that's only to be expected in the sister paper of the standard

[railtechnician]

Aug 6, 2015 15:19:42 GMT Nortube said:

It's now splashed in big letters on about half the front page of today's metro:

Commuter fury as strikers with 52 days' holiday

No explanation as to how the 52 days are made up, but then that's only to be expected in the sister paper of the standard

Perhaps someone should tell the media but I expect the backlash would be much the same as many many hundreds of office workers do many hours unpaid overtime without a sniff of one day off in lieu let alone several.

Obviously good headlines and stories sell newspapers rather than truths so the bias will always be anything but the whole truth no matter what the article. I have to say that TV media is little different especially as so much TV news these days simply isn't anything more than a regurgitation of the output of the previous half hour or so.

I do believe that striking inevitably leads to media sensationalism whereas other less disruptive (to the travelling public) action would probably achieve the same results in the end without stories filling the headlines as they would be less important. PR is one thing that none of the unions seem to be very good at these days, they might be said to be 'hoist by their own petard' to the detriment of those that they represent!