Brian Rudman had a column yesterday that clearly articulated how Aucklanders view the bus strike by Infratil management at NZ Bus.
Only a few days ago, my bus had to take an unscheduled stop outside the public toilets in Victoria Park. The driver locked his money box then made the long and very public march to spend a proverbial penny. Chances are, he was on a 12-hour plus day as well, having to work a split shift, hanging around in the middle of the day for up to four hours unpaid.
Hard as it might be for the bankers to fathom, the 80,000 passengers inconvenienced by the lockout are sympathetic to the drivers, not to those trying to label them troublemakers.
As a bus commuter myself, I’m in complete agreement with Rudman, and getting more so as I hear the PR spin from NZ Bus. The other day I heard some moronic spin as a radio ad that implied that the whole thing was the fault of the bus drivers. It isn’t. We have a company of fuckwit managers chasing a 20% dividend and screwing public transport in Auckland in the process.
The union and the employers are clearly close to agreement on wages. The union is wanting to improve the working conditions so that their members can have appropriate piss-breaks. The unions and the bus drivers have said that they will commence industrial action by working exactly to their contract – as is their right. For some reason the company has considered that to be unreasonable (and I still haven’t heard why), so they have locked out the drivers and commuters like me.
As well as screwing public transport in Auckland this week, Infratil have also apparently been whinging about having to justify the subsidies that are being put into public transport.
This year, Infratil chief executive Marko Bogoievski told shareholders they “got totally hammered” by the passage of this act. However, Infratil director Tim Brown reassured them that all was not lost. “We’ve been given assurance by the Government that they will amend it.”
The “total hammering” Mr Bogoieveski was complaining about was simply a requirement that NZ Bus open its books wide enough to prove it deserves the huge subsidies.
In other words, this is a company with its snout deeply in the trough of the public purse, who are relying on their mates in government to make sure that we can’t see how deep. But they aren’t even competent enough to keep the bus service running. This is the principle of the Double Dipton – greed, a sense of entitlement, and bloody idiotic incompetence. They’d piss in the wind for ideological reasons rather than deal with the actual issues of getting a reliable bus service running. Foremost amongst those is dealing with their bus drivers in good faith as the number of passengers rapidly increases, without shafting them with poor working conditions and low wages.
Mike Lee is getting the process started of dropping Infratil from snuffling from the public trough while failing to deliver the services. Sounds like bloody good idea to me. Much better than Joyce (our ineffective transport minister) and his futile hand-wringing. It is better to re-build a public transport service so that doesn’t have such pig-headed idiots like Infratils management involved in it.
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