Slypdexia Stirkes!!!!Quote:
Originally Posted by mattx
Without coming down to heavily on anyone ... no pedantry or grammar/spelling flames please.
This is a political discussion ... that should be reason enough for flames!
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Slypdexia Stirkes!!!!Quote:
Originally Posted by mattx
Without coming down to heavily on anyone ... no pedantry or grammar/spelling flames please.
This is a political discussion ... that should be reason enough for flames!
You have to keep in mind that when Maggie came to power the UK was broke, bankrupt and effectively crippled. The actions taken by the Conservatives at the time were similar to those used by a surgeon trying toQuote:
Originally Posted by mattx
save someone with a cancerous limb. Do you remove the limb and guarentee the patients survival, or try and operate on just the affected area taking the risk that it may not get all of the cancer? I grew up close to the British Leyland plant at, well, Leyland, that too went to the wall once privetised, but when they were dismanleing the place they discovered hidden 'sleeping' rooms where a large portion of the shifts workers would get a sleep because they had second jobs to go to. Many industries simply could not survive. Both France and Germany are now facing such challenges. Many of my freinds lost their jobs due to privetisation, but none ever argued that their respective companies had a chance. Most in fact tell me that they were a joke and had it coming anyway due to poor working practices and militant unionism.
I tend to lean to the right because I belive that people should try to stand on their own 2 feet where possible. I find an all enveloping state a chilling prospect. I've spent many years working in failed eastern Euopean staes to know that socialism doesn't really work, just as total capitalism does not.
Well you obviosuly didn't as you would not have posted the picture of the English book !!Quote:
that you can see things which arnt written?
Says the person who openly thinks its ok to take the pi55 out of someone's dyslexia by posting images on how to read.Quote:
Come on, grow up eh.
Definitely ... he almost had me and a friend that we should stand as soon as we could vote, but that would have put us up against Frank Field ... and since he actually campaigned on a number of the Loony policies we wanted to we thought it would be better to save the deposit and just go the pub instead.Quote:
Originally Posted by mattx
Now thats my sort of politics !!Quote:
we thought it would be better to save the deposit and just go the pub instead.
@mattx: Sorry, don't normally step in to these things but I think you are possibly seeing the worse. He didn't mention your dyslexia or any other impediment. As far as I can see he was alluding to you missing out some parts of his post that he felt explained your points. Admittedly he did it in a very over enthusiastic way that may have seemed a bit brash but I can't see any direct insult towards dyslexia. I have to say it just makes you seem very touchy about it.
Back on thread: always annoyed me when they were trying to do away with the House of lords, why when it is a stop gap for stupid laws getting though. Ok it may not be the fairest way of them being made lords but it does mean they don't have any real affiliation with the parties or any worries about following the latest fad. Makes it a lot easier to throw out rubbish laws for being rubbish. Strangely enough since all the changes have been made suddenly the House of Lords is rather more full of people in gratitude to Labour, & many more silly laws have gotten through.... But I'm just paranoid and cynical!
Ok ... now I will come down heavily. Any further comments for or against spelling and the use of prods about dyslexia will be removed.
This conversation goes back to politics or it gets locked.
didn't Maggie crush the unions as they seemed to be holding the county to ransom.
don't know, someone tell me as i was too young or not born.
i bet she could sort out the bloody post problems.
...
The unions are another love them or hate them thing in my experience.
The do a valuable job ensuring that employers do not break the rules or take advantage, but they are over the top sometimes and rely on the threat of a strike to force the hand of the employer.
I don't have any problems with strikes as long as we have notice and can make alternative plans ... and often these alternatives mean that you look at different methods of doing things for the future ...
The wildcat strikes hurt the workers, the clients (usually the general public) and the employer ...
I know the PO and Royal Mail sucks, and that working conditions are rubbish ... and that the rules are being changed / goal posts moved ... but if these wild cat strikes mean that business companies (the main revune earner for the Royal Mail) are using alternatives then the workers are more likely to loose their jobs and the whole thing go down the pan.
GrumbleDook
I know what you mean.
just a little joke about it, i have spoken to some postman recently and it does not sound good.
You also have to keep in mind that north sea oil was coming on stream, and that by the mid '80's the revenue from this was so huge that it was enough to pay the unemployment benefit for millions of people for many years without sacrificing the promise of tax cuts for the rich. The 1983 election was all about gaining control of this revenue. Can someone explain to me what the point of keeping construction workers, electricians, plumbers and the like out of work was, when it was obvious that the county's infrastructure (schools, hospitals, roads, railways and public transport) needed rebuilding, and that this was the best opportunity of doing it since Victorian times? What have we got now? BSF and P4S, because Labour are in thrall to this low tax agenda set in train in the '80's.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dos_Box
The Tories behaved like an elected junta, and allowed whole swathes of the country to go to the wall.
The thing with that is, the way things are going, Royal Mail will have lost (and will lose) so much money from this that the changes are even more necessary than before. It will mean that more staff will have to be made redundant.Quote:
Originally Posted by GrumbleDook
I'm afraid that in this case, the workers and their unions are going to have to make some serious concessions else they are going to have a rather large number of unemployed members around...
The underlying problem with Royal Mail is that they have lost the lucrative parts of their business to competition who have cherry-picked, leaving them with the 'low value' stuff that nobody else wants along with the high cost of doorstep delivery. In the past their monopoly enabled them to subsidise their doorstep delivery service from the more profitable parts of the business, now they cannot. For those of us old enough to remember, we used to have two deliveries a day, with the first usually arriving before we went to work....
Couple this with a dose of employee bad practice, bad management, low morale and you can see where it has led to.
Talking of low morale, Unison seems to be heading for a potential confrontation with the employers over the 2007 pay settlement. Members are due to be balloted to see if they are prepared to support a strike in support of the pay claim. The employers have offered 2.475% (Suspected of having set a budget of 2.5%), the Union is asking for 5%, arguing anything less is a pay cut.
Given that our right-wing socialist Government is determined to cap our pay rises at 2%, I wonder what an even more right-wing conservative Government would have set the cap at?
Yep - its extremely disheartening to see what happened to our oil revenue (p*ssed away on dole money instead of used to invest) in comparison to somewhere like Norway (all oil revenues invested in a nation wide pension scheme that will keep them all happy in years to come.Quote:
Originally Posted by beeswax
Thatcher did a good job of breaking up organised labour - whether you think that is a good thing depends on whether you think you can cut yourself a better deal with your employer on your own than you can as part of an organised body. Given the amount of effort that companies put in to making sure that people opt to reject union representation, I think we can safely guess what the answer is.
Most of us here, are the beneficiaries of holiday and pension entitlements that are relatively generous - having come from commercial - I can say that stress and work balance wise - this job is fairly OK in comparison. If I get an out of hours call, then I may or may not respond - in industry it wasn't optional in any sense. Colleagues were often forced to cancel arranged holidays, dragged in for over night and even entire weekend stints, on site client support started at 8:30 in the morning and continued until they were finished with you, wherever in the country you happened to be.
Things that we nowadays take for granted, such as holidays, pensions, paid sick pay etc are not "rights", they were hard fought for by organised labour, and you can see the attrition rate at which they are now being lost, now that unions are not so powerful. Great news if you own or run a big firm, not so great if, like most of us, we are going to spend our lives working within one.
The perception touted about that Local Govt staff are cushioned from real life by a decent pension scheme which should be stopped (even though it is entirely self funded - unlike teachers (oh they aren't keen on unions are they - ho ho) - is extremely misleading - all citizens on the 4th richest country in the world should be able to look forward to a comfortable retirement - and that increasingly is not the case.
Just a thought...