[London] TfL update ...

[dancefloorlandmine]

According to my latest TfL update email ...

TfL advise completing your journey by 1700 where possible.

Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines are expected to operate normally, but will be very crowded.

Due to knock-on effects, services may not return to normal levels until Friday morning if the strike is not resolved.

EDIT: In the interests of ongoing political debate, I've set up a post as a forum for this, here.

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

No-one - NO-ONE - has a guarantee of no job losses etc in perpetuity

The tragedy is that people have come to see this as a good thing. God... it's like we're turning into americans.

[andrewducker]

I view it as a good thing. Doing job X will at times take more people, and at times take less. Assuring people that they will always be able to work on X therefore seems to be the height of silliness.

Supporting people while they cease to work on X and find themselves a new position working on Y, with the retraining that requires, strikes me as entirely necessary and good for society, of course. And "support" in this case would be rather more than jobseeker's allowance currently does.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Isn't that what most people mean by a job for life... if the company's business changes they offer you retraining rather than sack you?

[andrewducker]

Except that I don't think that having the company do it is the most efficient or effective way of doing it. What if the company produces (say) widgets, and the demand for widgets drops. They now have 200 people and they only need 100. They don't have any use for the other 100 people in any other jobs at all. However, most of the time it's very likely that there are other companies out there that do.

So it makes more sense to have the company pay a percentage of their income to a central body and then that central body would pay for the support during retraining - allowing for retraining across companies rather than just within the one company.

And I think you can see where I'm taking that :->

Personally I think that companies should be encouraged to be as efficient as possible (without externalising their costs) - and governments should then tax them heavily enough to deal with the social consequences and help the people that need it.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

governments should then tax them heavily enough to deal with the social consequences and help the people that need it
Quite right. Although companies actually paying something would be a nice thing - although these days, when threatened by things like increases in tax, the companies just say "fine, we'll go elsewhere, then". [sigh]

[steer.livejournal.com]

I guess it depends whether you see an ideal economy is one which makes lots of things or makes people happy. I think the latter. Curiously lots of people think the former.

Also, it is most certainly the job of a trade union to resist the company downsizing as much as it possibly can.

[andrewducker]

People seem to like having lots of things. At the very least they _think_ it makes them happy.

As a big fan of Having Stuff, I tend to think that therefore an economy that produces lots of stuff _and_ makes people happy is the best kind.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Conversely people dislike being sacked. Weighing up the balance is the trick. However, lots of people ignore this and simply assume that the job of the economy is simply to produce as much stuff as possible. It's like that old Douglas Adams line "which is strange, because on the whole the bits of green paper weren't themselves unhappy".