Until he retired, my father worked as a train driver.
A heart attack in about 1992 took him off the main line and into the
'depot' for the last few years of his employment, which had seen
both the advent and the demise of British Rail.
Even
before the heart attack, Dad's work had brought him into fairly regular
contact with the NHS. There were frequent trips to the old
Southampton Eye Hospital in the early years of diesel propulsion, as the
new locomotives chucked out tiny fragments of metal in their exhaust,
which then required specialist removal if they got into your eyeball and rusted. That the same machines made
such an unholy racket now means regular fitting and tweaking of hearing
aids and, on several occasions in the last few years, he's been back in
the Coronary Care Unit - most recently for the fitting of his second
Implantable Cardioverter Defibulator.
Dad's
working life and that of the doctors who've kept repairing him have
always had one thing in common - a necessity to work unsocial hours.
Recently, however, I've noticed another.
It was The Sun's stories about "Moet Medics" that triggered the deja vu
moment. Of course I hadn't seen them in the actual paper - I wouldn't
so much as wipe my backside on that rag - but I had laughed at the
Junior Doctors' clever Instagram/Facebook parodies mocking allegations
that they led the high life on inflated salaries. One of the joys of
Social Media is that you can instantly strike back against the media
establishment if you are misrepresented. In 1982, that wasn't so easy.
I mention 1982, because that was the year that Dad and his colleagues got the "Moet Medics" treatment from The Sun.
There was a dispute in progress between BR and the drivers over
something called 'flexible rostering'. Most people outside the industry
thought this must be something quite positive, like 'flexitime' for
office workers. For the drivers, it was a fundamental attack on their
terms and conditions of employment since their work patterns were
already pretty 'flexible', with the starting time of a shift able to be
moved up to two hours between one day and the next. So a week of
2am shifts might start at that time on day one but at 00.01 the next
night, back to 02.00 after that and then 03.50, depending on
requirements, with the next shift's start time advised at booking off
from the one before. If he was on nights, Dad would leave my mum a note
when he came home and before he went to bed, to say what time he was due at work the following night and, on that basis, when
he was likely to be up and about and what they could therefore do during the
day.
The
pay-off for that flexibility was, if the right guy was 'running
foreman', a degree of goodwill in letting staff go home early if there
wasn't work for the latter part of their shift and there was a bit of
emergency cover. During the summer holidays we might get an odd day at
the beach on the basis that Dad had been allowed to 'slide off' and so
got a longer early morning sleep than usual. The same was true when
booked on 'spare' - to cover for unexpected absences and emergencies -
when some of the crews might get to 'slide off' early if everything was
quiet. That goodwill was repaid by the drivers with great enthusiasm
for their job and commitment to their industry, despite the diabolical
hours and conditions - for example, many diesel locomotives' cabs were so
poorly insulated that old newspapers had to be rolled up and stuffed
into the gaps and cracks to stop the draughts. No fun at 100mph on a cold winter's night!
'Flexible
rostering' meant further uncertainty, allowing the basic hours of a
shift to last between 7 and 9 hours of standard time, rather than the
basic 8. Operationally, you can see the sense of this; few shifts could
be devised which neatly used eight hours work. However, with drivers'
income heavily dependent on an arcane system of overtime and anti-social
hours payments ('time-and-five-eighths' being one rate - train drivers
were impressive mental mathematicians on payday), 'flexible rostering'
threatened both their income and that last little bit of predictability
in their working lives - a guaranteed eight hour day. That disputes
like this were lost is arguably where the road to the 'zero-hours
contract' begins.
In
1982, the train drivers - and their 'militant' union ASLEF - were very
much a part of the 'Enemy Within' to the Tory establishment and it was
therefore necessary to undermine their cause as thoroughly as possible.
So when two young 'second men' from Dad's own depot were prepared to
sell their story - of 'sliding off' to go to the disco in work time - to
none other than The Sun, it did the drivers' cause no good at
all. At no stage did any of the mainstream media properly explain the
dispute and even the left-leaning Not the Nine o'clock News sketch-show
couldn't resist a reference to the 'disco' story. By no means a
communist, the only paper Dad said gave the drivers' case a fair airing
was the Morning Star. (We had quite an eclectic mix of
newspapers in the house when I was growing up, depending on what
Dad found left behind by that day's commuters).
All
this was going on when I was in my last year at sixth-form college and
had a massive impact on my political outlook, not least through trying
to explain the reality to fellow students who thought it was funny to
ask if they should look out for my Dad at the disco that night. I saw
how difficult it was to get fair coverage for your case and how quick
politicians and the media were to condemn the 'selfishness' of workers
supposedly 'holding the country to ransom' over something as trivial as
fair pay and decent working conditions.
Today,
I'd like to think it would be easier to fight back, with
send-up Instagram pics of train drivers on the picket lines in their
flares, open-necked satin shirts and medallions, and 'I'm in work,
Peter'* Facebook posts. In some ways, though, looking at how meekly
much of the media take the Government line on the current Junior
Doctors' dispute, I fear it would be much the same. I can't help
noticing that it's always "The Doctors' Union, The BMA" from our newsreaders these days (because Unions are a bad thing, of
course, and God forbid that the general public mistake the BMA for
anything legit), though we're never introduced to think-tank
spokespeople as, for example, "Jack Slyme from The Centre for Social
Justice, founded by Iain Duncan Smith to promote his personal agenda on
Welfare."
At
least in their dispute over pay and conditions the Junior Doctors do
still have overwhelming public support - not least because a lot of
people, like me, owe their lives or the lives of people they love to
their dedication. I think most people understand that intelligent
professionals don't take action lightly and that if they say this deal
is bad for both their profession and their patients, they're more likely
than a politician to know. Sadly, the opposite
assumption tends to be made of blue-collar workers who, when they
aren't simply being 'selfish', are still rarely portrayed as better than the
dull-witted dupes of their unscrupulous, politically-motivated 'Union
Bosses'. If you'd ever seen a train driver checking the sums on his
payslip in his head, before quibbling with the pay clerk over whether he'd
got time-and-five-eighths rather than time-and-three for the overtime
last Sunday, you would never dare assume that blue-collar workers are easily
bamboozled.
*Sir Peter Parker was Chairman of the British Railways Board in 1982.
