Is bus strike fair and right?

WE do feel sorry for all the passengers. We are very much aware of the difficulties the strike is causing people, and we feel grateful to the general public for the support they have given us, in letters, in calls to the radio and when we are on the buses.

This is the last thing any driver wanted. But we feel we have no choice. How many people would come to work for £5.36 an hour (the rate for trainees) or £6.58 an hour (the rate for the majority of drivers), at any time between 5am and twenty minutes past midnight? We get threatened with knives, bricked, egged, and we work overtime with no incentive at all, because we get no overtime rate, apart from time and a fifth on bank holidays.

Our top-rate drivers are on £12,500 a year for a 38-hour week. In the bus drivers' charter it says we should be hoping for £15,500 per annum. Even if a driver works 60 hours a week here, and that is actually driving, they only take home £280 a week. These people have families; why should they be working all these hours just to get a reasonable wage?

We've got people who have been refused a mortgage, people who live in Goole or Hull because they cannot afford to live in York. All we want is to be able to have a wage where we can get a home, get a mortgage, pay our council tax and just live.

We feel that £8 an hour is perfectly fair and reasonable. That is £304 a week before tax. We set out the branch's aspirations in January, and the pay rise should be in our wages from May 1 every year. On or around that date the management came to us and said this is all we've got. It was £7 an hour.

We were promised £7 an hour two years ago, when the Metro service came in. We are particularly angry because we were told that we were doing really well, we were meeting our targets. Then last year the management messed up the schedules and we ended up being short of drivers. They brought men in from Leeds, Doncaster and Sheffield, and when you've got drivers in from another depot waving their pay slips and saying they are taking home £900 for two week's work, it really did it for us.

Why should we pay for management's mistakes? Now they are using agency staff from London, putting them up in quality hotels. We don't know how much they are being paid, but I bet it is more than £6.58 an hour.

The stupid thing is this company is spending thousands and thousands training drivers. But we are basically the driving school for East Yorkshire, Arriva and Coastliner. Drivers come here, get their licence, then they go. If management just paid us a reasonable wage, we would stay.

No ...says Peter Edwards, York commercial manager of bus company First.

THE basic facts are well known: most First York drivers earn £6.58 per hour, their claim was for £8 and we offered £7. They have rejected a number of slight variations to the basic offer and are now on strike.

The main reason we have not been able to offer any more than £7 is cost. By investing in a new fleet of buses and trying to keep bus fares as stable as possible, we have seen our business in York grow. But having to pay for the new buses and not increasing the cost of our popular day tickets forces us to keep a tight control on our other costs.

The 42p per hour increase we have offered is double the rate of inflation. We have budgeted for this but the business would not be able to stand the cost of a further £1 per hour that would see our wage bill go up by 20 per cent.

Drivers in York feel they have some catching up to do to get close to their colleagues in Leeds (while ignoring their lower-paid counterparts in Sheffield). Even accepting that, we could not justify such a large single increase either to our shareholders or to the other bus companies that go to make up First Group.

It is difficult for us to understand how the drivers arrived at a claim for £8. These days, wage negotiations tend to be a lot more sophisticated than they used to be in the Seventies. Unions are required to take account of economic factors including an understanding of the financial position of the employers and formulate their claims on the basis of what is realistic and achievable.

It would seem that in York, the local shop stewards prepared their claim without the guidance of the Transport And General officials and without regard for any other of these other economic factors and let the drivers believe that they could attain £8 if they were to press their claim hard enough.

As the full-time officials of the T&G became, somewhat belatedly, involved in the negotiations, it was apparent that the drivers' basic demand for an £8 one-year, no-strings deal would not be fulfilled and serious efforts were made to develop a strategy based on a settlement spread over more than one year and including some of the so called productivity 'strings'.

With the expectations of the workforce built up to such an extent, these proposals were rejected out of hand to the point that the only thing the drivers wanted at that time was a strike.

But what will happen now they've had five days on strike? We are prepared to negotiate at any time and would expect to see a greater willingness to find a solution. But on the basis of what has happened up to now, what chance have they got of persuading a group of increasingly militant bus drivers?

Updated: 10:20 Tuesday, September 02, 2003