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| Men at Work - Dad, plus 'Second Man', in the cab of an 'ED' |
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.
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