So it looks like the London tube drivers are striking again!

@wildbill83 It's different with Aslef. It's a semi-closed club, You don't become a tube driver unless you have worked for Tfl, no-one else can apply. The jobs are like gold dust.

@SW-User getting a job as a Tube driver has sweet fk all to do with whether or not you're an ASLEF member - many Tube drivers are members of different unions. It's difficult to get a job as a Tube driver because (surprise) it's an extremely demanding job which many people simply aren't up to doing - it is the selection tests which weed out so many.

@wildbill83 What do you want to do? Regress to mid-19C conditions of exhaustingly long hours, very poor pay, no company pensions, very limited and usually fixed holidays, serious male/female inequality, no proper health & safety provisions...?

I don't know know what you did or do for a living, but if your employment terms and conditions were at all decent that is very much due to over 100 years of union campaigning across all trades and professions... and NOT all by strikes or "go-slow" actions.

Or were you a company owner - if so how well did you treat your staff?

@wildbill83 Have you and I run up against very different systems, work ethics, employment legislation, etc.?

I live and until retiring several years ago, worked, entirely in the UK and although I am not blind to faults as well as good on both / all "sides", I don't recognise your bleak picture of American industrial relations as mirrored Over 'Ere.

We did have a lot of very bad industrial relations in the 1960s and '70s, arguably a factor in the end of a lot of the nation's heavy industry; but on the whole those days are over, thank goodness. Modern companies or state organisations and their staff (especially via the unions) do co-operate far more than in the past. Though you might not think so at times; probably because it's only the disputes that gain the publicity, whether over pay or something else.

I do wonder though if American companies are terrified of unions, if the recent experience with Amazon's UK operation is a guide. It narrowly won a ballot on union recognition in its warehouses; and the GMB Union, the main one involved, later said the company had spent a lot of money on trying to persuade employees to vote against union recognition. As far as I know, Amazon has not said why it so desperately wants its staff not to be represented by trades-unions.

@ArishMell It isn't cooperation, unions have pretty much lobbied/bribed government to cater to them. And it's nearly destroyed any trace of privatization in shipping industries (ship, rail, truck); basically, they've turned everything into labor conglomerates to get around anti-trust laws (monopolies)

any free thinker with half a brain should be terrified of unions, as they conduct business like a cartel (and aren't above blackmail and/or intimidation if someone encroaches upon their business/profits). ie, "do what we say, or we'll strike you out of business"; One would think the British would understand that, given that many of their once proud, exclusively British companies are now owned by India...

@wildbill83 you clearly know nothing of the anti union laws in the UK which are amongst the most draconian in Europe, and also understand very little about the Tory fetish of selling off our core industries to the either lowest bidder, or their corrupt chums.

@Philth I am in a union myself and I don't see the law as anti-union nor especially draconian; but I do agree with your remark about selling everything off to the lowest bidder. Many are Americans to whom "special relationship" means, "what's mine is mine and what's yours, I will take". Not all buyers are private companies, though. Some are countries.

With one caveat though: although selling off the public services was started by the Conservatives in the 1980s, never forget the following Labour government continued this, if anything even more zealously.

My own employer was privatised by Tony Blair's "Champagne Socialists" in a grubby deal helped by some shady Wall Street outfit greatly under-valuing it. (I was a low-ranking, industrial-grade civil-servant in that employment, doing technical not administrative work. )

The same Labour PM also wanted to give the Post Office to the Dutch company, TNT; and it is a Labour government now that has just invited so many foreign investors to Britain... They are not here to invest in Britain for Britain for their own companies or even countries. So all the profits after tax (if they pay it) go abroad. About the only one not invited was Elon Musk... good - they can keep him!

I live in the South of England. If I travel by train to the North the initial leg, to Bristol, is courtesy of the First Group, based in Edinburgh. That from Bristol to Leeds uses Cross-Country Trains: a service brand hiding that the owner is Germany, the country!

Similarly, those who buy their electricity from EDF, help France's national exchequer.

Labour or Conservative, they are as short-sighted as each other over this "inward investment" myth!

@ArishMell i would argue that the 'Labour' Government led by Bliar was not a true Labour (ie led by socialist principles) Government. How else can one explain Rupert Murdoch, staunch opposer of the left, switching his support from the then Tory government to instead, support Blair? Murdoch didn't of course have a sudden personality swap, instead, he saw what Bliar presented as the next, least unpallatable choice in the face of absolute disarray from the Conservatives. Which is why under that Government we saw a diluted continuation of previous Tory policy.

Of course, we have since seen Labour leaders with true socialist values - and the media machine swung into a frenzy of work in arranging what must be the most orchestrated, sustained and far reaching smear / discredit campaign ever to be carried out against one individual. Now that this person is no longer Labour leader, the proles have largely forgotten all their hatred against the 'terrorist sympathiser' who 'hates Britain' and instead, accepted a different 'Labour' leader who does not represent a challenge to the British Establishment, a safe pair of hands, in the shape of Keir Starmer.

@Philth I don't worry about "threats" to any "establishment"; let alone to clowns like Murdoch, Musk et al.

Nor really, about which Party is in power.

I worry more about what the Government, via Parliament, does or doesn't do to or for the country; and that includes falling for this "inward" or "overseas" so-called "investment" nonsense that basically may as well be sending container-ships full of cash abroad.