We’re all familiar with the usual trade union cliches: it’s not about us, it’s about passenger safety; staff morale is low; and strikers are being ‘victimised’. Or, in the words of Aslef general secretary Mick Whelan on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, train drivers are being ‘demonised’. More so than government ministers, who are forever portrayed by union leaders as callous evil-doers?
But it is what Whelan said next that really catches the ear. Asked whether he thought the public should be sympathetic towards train drivers on £60,000 a year turning down an offer which would take their pay to £65,000 a year, he said:
‘It isn’t about what we earn, it is about what other people don’t earn. I want every nurse in the country, everybody in the fire brigade, everybody in the public sector, every teacher to have what we have.’
Whelan seemed to be accepting that train drivers actually get rather a good deal – in which case why is he still not satisfied? But let’s leave that aside and try a little thought experiment: what would happen if every nurse, fire-fighter and teacher really were to be paid £60,000 – or even £65,000 – a year.
Whelan seemed to be accepting that train drivers actually get rather a good deal
At present, the median UK salary for a full time worker is £640 per week, or £33,280 per year. Let’s now increase that to £65,000 a year. Multiplied by the 24.6 full-time workers in Britain, that would increase the national wage bill by £780 billion a year. The size of the UK economy is around £1.8 trillion. Government revenue in 2021/22 was £819 billion. But let no-one say that the money couldn’t be found. As the BBC was ticked off by Andrew Dilnot this week, it is wrong to equate public debt with household debt because governments have a facility which private households do not: the ability to print their way out of debt. So let’s print the money, and give every employee a Wage Guarantee – rather like the Energy Price Guarantee – which bumps up their wages to £65,000 a year.
What does Whelan think would happen then? Most people would have a very pleasant surprise when they opened their next pay slip – only around seven per cent of the working population currently earn more than £65,000. Their sense of satisfaction would rapidly fade, however, when they went shopping. With all that massive extra spending power you don’t need too much imagination to work out what would happen to prices. You can print money, but you can’t print wealth; the corrective mechanism is inflation.
I don’t think that Whelan has quite worked out the implications for train drivers. The Wage Guarantee wouldn’t give them much of an uplift in their nominal pay because they earn so much already. What the resulting rampant inflation would do, however, is to eat away at their real earnings. Suddenly, their £60,000 or £65,000 a year would feel more like £33,000 does today.
If equality of income really is what Whelan seeks, I don’t imagine his members would be too pleased with the result. What suits them – and very much doesn’t suit taxpayers, given that they contributed £13.3 billion in subsidy to the operational costs of the railway in the year to last March – is the current situation. The reality is that train drivers are a highly privileged group of workers whose wages are far out of line with nurses and teachers.
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