The final showdown came in the summer of 1970. Another national dock strike had brought the nation to a standstill, and the effects were so serious that the government proclaimed a national State of Emergency, using legislation from 1920. The army were ready to move into the docks. Reggie Maudling was the Home Secretary, at war with the TGWU's Jack Jones. As meat prices soared in the shops, a generation in whose minds wartime rationing was still fresh had no sympathy with the cushioned stevedores. Few mourned the closure of the docks at the time.
Train and tube drivers are following the same path of industrial self-destruction as did the dockers. Londoners have noticed that driverless DLR formations are not reduced due to drivers seeking ever greater rents from the travelling public. HM Treasury is keen to make lasting large-scale capital investments in the national infrastructure, AI is advanced to a high degree and advances in autonomous vehicle technology are already putting driverless road vehicles on the streets. You'd think that if ever there was a time for train and tube drivers to keep quiet and buckle down, this would be it. But it seems this sector of the workforce has all the instincts of a family of lemmings.
AI is far better at driving trains and controlling track possession than humans. Driverless trains can run faster and much closer together, meaning cheaper and better quality transport services for the public. And this post-Covid truculence and blackmail is just the thing to precipitate change.
No, the dockworkers didn't really think that greenfield ports such as Felixstowe and Tilbury could ever eclipse the ports of London and Liverpool either. But they were wrong.
 |
Dockers voting in 1970 for their own destruction
|
Update - Excess deaths
=================
Looks like excess deaths all causes this week figs are E&W 11,539, Scotland 743 and NI 186 - 12,468 total. The pattern so far looks like 6 - 17 - 13 - 12.
18 comments:
London's Victoria Line was designed to be automatic so that's 50 years of front-seat paid passengers.
But automating the underground, which would be a very laudable aim, would mean more investment being made in London. Boris is pledged (rightly) to spread infrastructure upgrades and investment around the country. That's his very weak justification for the HS2 vanity train line which had no genuine business case when he signed it off and has even less of one now when the country has just demonstrated that our way of working has been permanently changed by Wuhan Flu.
I can't see him having the guts to "take on" the RMT having just driven the economy into the ground over Wuhan Flu,or any other potential Prime Minister, come to that.
Taken to its logical conclusion I see no need for 'real' politicians as a simple AI (like a raw potato for example) could make a better job of decision making in Parliament than the current crop of turnips.
The British working class has been sadly betrayed by their union leaders since the seventies.
"The British working class has been sadly betrayed by their union leaders since the seventies."
Whereas, before the seventies...
At the height of Southern Rail's industrial action a couple of years back, after thousands of people had lost their jobs because they couldn't travel to work from the south coast, I sat on a hot overcrowded train for 20 minutes only to get the announcement "this train's going nowhere, driver's on his break". Why not save on the redundancy packages and just lynch the tossers.
Another example of a “workforce with all the instincts of a family of lemmings” were the print workers who set the typeface in the late 1980s.
The unions became so powerful that wages soared and managers of newspapers were having to resort each night to throwing large quantities of £50 notes in the air to get the printing underway.
This drove the development of the technology for computerised printing.
My late father in law once told me that his father had expressed the opinion that the working man can contort himself into whatever position is required to stab himself in the back. Your article proclaims much the same thing. Jimmy Tarbuck called some dockers in Liverpool 'Wonder Boys' as in 'I wonder what's in there to steal?' My own experience of this was to hear a docker complain that the toolkit he'd stolen from an imported Mercedes was metric and wouldn't fit anything on his car.
I suspect that coal miners did the same collective action to destroy their jobs.
The Blessed Margaret Thatcher for all her faults discovered that along with an ambition to own their own homes and a dislike of pushy foreigners, many workers were much more badly bullied by the shop steward than the boss. This may be another of those turning points in history.
Reckon more self employed truckers will be replaced by AI than unionised train drivers will.
Trouble with the DLR analogy is that you routinely see guards/train captains upon it, who are capable of driving the train manually when issues occur. They have to learn/maintain competence in how to do that and so what is the point? Also, the Victoria line is entirely underground, so you have no need to contend with trackside vandalism, trespassing and even problems upon the platforms, in the form of the fact that erm, staff are present who can stop the trains in the event of danger. (E.g. A drunk in the suicide pit.)
"Driverless trains can run faster and much closer together, meaning cheaper and better quality transport services for the public."
sir, i generally agreee on the above. i work in software industry since 1980 and i am 100% in favour of automation.
however, since software production has been more or less all outsourced to outfits based the cheapest crapholes of the planet, i am very wary of automation where something going wrong can end up with loss of life
you might have heard for example than Boeing outsourced the production of critical systems software to external entities...
regards
I agree with Liberista, the AI is only as good as the human that writes the algorithm.
I used to freelance, writing human-interfacing programs and the critical thing was to make sure the human element was taken into account. Far too many programmers are too clever by half and introduce systems with no consideration of the vagaries of human behaviour, or fail to program for when systems fail.
So we see a lot of systems (like the 737 Max) where things are ok as long as the system works fine, but cannot deal with system anomalies in a way that doesn't cause further systemic issues and/or informs the human clearly in a way they understand to deal with the problem and if necessary disable the software.
I worked on dealing with anomalous behaviour much, much more than I did the actual core program. Such that my programs are still in place over a decade after I left the profession. Because they work and work well without any further interaction, dealing with issues properly and safely.
I can't say I have any confidence with programmers forced to cut corners or timescales under corporate management pressure.
Automation will come to the rails in due course. As the techies say of system reliability 'the last 5% takes 95% of the time'. Right now de-manning the rails does seem a bit of a British obsession. The French and Germans and Japanese get along OK with guards and drivers etc.
On another note, today's WHO report tells us that yesterday the USA suffered -1696 deaths. Does this mean resurrections are back in fashion?
Don't need drivers or rails.
The basic (BASIC) tube driver wage starts at £55k. Overtime? Bonuses? Unsocial (holiday) rates? Fuck me.
That's the cost of unionisation for you.
If that isn't an incentive for using AI I don't know what is. It's called 'pricing yourself out of a job' - and they know it. Getting what they can, while they can.
DP writes..
Trains are so 18th century. They should be used for goods. So too the Tube. Then it can be fully automated, with no fear of danger to people.
Driverless cars for those who want them. Many enjoy driving, as it is one of the few pursuits that give us freedom of journeying where and when we want it.
Part of life is to enjoy it. The governments and nosies seems to think that it is their duty regulate what we do, how much of it, and when. And they are prepared to use the police force to do it.
wanted also to add.
one thing that the epidemic has shown is that, in cities, only a very small minority of people actually needs to physically go to the office. very few factories in the cities too.
100% of bureacurats, for instance, can WFH. rthat would also eliminate the need for people to go queue at the desks of the ministry of silly walk in order to get a stamp on a piece of paper.
i know that in Rome, when there is some form of strike in the public sector, traffic drops dramatically.
rather than spend money and resources in eliminating a small number of train drivers (they would be anyway needed, no complex system can work without human supervision), who make for a a very tiny part of the cost of the infrastructure, i would spend money and resources in stopping this madness of millions of people who commute to move from one keyboard to another.
the savings in terms of time, transport costs, traffic, energy, would be enormous.
i am WFH since several weeks, and i see only advantages. my quality of life, and that of my family, has improved greatly.
The total ignorance, idiocy & overall Gammon-ranting in this ignorant post & the evn worse comments astaounds me. Readwald - YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER - really, you should!
HINT: I know somethng about railway operation
SECOND HINT: It is NOT the drivers who usually strike - ASLEF has more sense.
THIRD HINT: Vivtoria Line trains have a man in the front cab for emergencies ( It's my local line ) AND the DLR has no drivers, but management's arrogant incompetence drove ( oops! ) the staff to strike, so that even on driverless trains, the service collapsed
Post a Comment