(lots of ranting snipped)
>when they realize how they destroyed our Profession
The quickest way to destroy your profession is to go on strike and
disrupts service to the travelling public. After each strike, fewer and
fewer people will use public transport, and you will be in a dangerous
spiral of falling patronage, ballooning losses, line closures, pressures
to privatise and even more mass sackings.
What you phillistines down there don't realise (and I'm a union member
too) is that public transport works only if people have faith and trust
that services are reliable and on time. Once people lose that faith
(through ill-conceived actions from people such as yourself) you're left
with nothing - and you've a very big battle to convince people who have a
choice back to using the train.
Some people will never ever return to public transport and you've lost
them for life when they have a bad experience. Luddites like you don't
seem to realise that the key to job security is a reliable service that
causes a lot of full-fare paying discretionary travellers (ie those with
access to a vehicle) to opt for the train rather than the car. And the
more patronage grows, the stronger the case is for maintaining or
improving services. And, in something like public transport, even the
mere threat of a strike is enough to do a lot of damage.
The experience we've had in Canberra over the last two years is
instructive. We had a series of full day strikes and many times when
only some services (no one was told which ones) would operate. Then there
were hardly publicised stoppages during the middle of the day. These
actions of the militant TWU caused a big drop in bus patronage that has
never recovered, despite the comparative industrial peace over the last
six months.
Peter
-- __________________________________________________________ Peter ParkerE-mail: parkerp@pcug.org.au Phone: (06) 285 1004 (ah) Amateur Radio: VK1PK
Home Page: http://www.pcug.org.au/~parkerp/ The home of Novice Notes Online and the VK QRP Web Page. ___________________________________________________________