"Paul Terry" wrote:

Paul Corfield wrote:



Quite frankly working those sorts of hours is either grossly inefficient

I suggest you tell that to my former teaching colleagues who, having spent
7 hours at school with no breaks, come home to 4 hours of marking,
preparation and form-filling-in (unless there are parents' evenings, drama
nights, concerts, and the like, when it means working weekends as well).
And holidays? That's when you are expected to do training.

That is what teachers would have you believe. No doubt some put in those
hours, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

Teachers now have protected 'non-contact' time for training. Many admin
tasks have been taken on by school office staff, eg photocopying. The
salaries have also increased substantially since 1997.

The real problem area now, in terms of workload and stress, is for Heads.
This has manifested itself in a large number of unfilled vacancies.

In the area in which I now work (publishing), real competition forces down
income to the extent that working long hours are the only way to survive.

Don't understand that. If there's not enough work to go around due to
competition, why are you working longer hours?

Conversely, if you have so many jobs that you *need* to work long hours, why
not increase your pricing to 'lose' some marginal clients?

Chris

On 2 Sep, 18:41, Paul Corfield wrote:
If there's anyone at LUL who works 60-80 hour weeks on a regular
basis, then I apologise to them.

Quite frankly working those sorts of hours is either grossly inefficient
or the sign of someone who is solely chasing obscene amounts of money
with no regard to their well being or else someone in a very low paid
job and virtually no employment rights. None of them is an attractive
prospect nor are they relevant or appropriate in an organisation where
safety is a key factor in the service that the public use.

There are plenty of hard working people in LU and being macho about the
quantity of hours anyone puts in is silly.

Bleh. I'm aware that it's not a good idea for train drivers to put in
80-hour weeks; it just rather rankles when people [not Paul C] who
know very little about how professional services firms work or what
they do assume that people in these jobs don't work hard...

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband.org

Hire Pole and South Africans who do not hold the relative licences, as
you have just sacked the trainers there is no one to train these new
lowly paid unmotivated staff so the railway would be at a standstill a
lot longer than a week.

********: when a company fails, its employees are just as responsible
as its management. Sack the lot of them and rehire on the minimum
wage; if they don't like that there are plenty of people in Poland and
South Asia who'd like their jobs...

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband.org

On 31 Aug, 11:49, Kev wrote:
So how do we find out about this, bugger all on the TfL site. That Ken
really is a smart cookie. Called for Metronet to go bankrupt, got what
he wanted and what is the first thing that the cretins in the union
do.
I'd say that they got exactly what they deserved, or what Ken wished
upon them.

Kevin

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6974841.stm seem to think
it's only the BCV lines that are affected, I assume they are just
being their usual selves and the SSL lines are also going to have
"issues"?

On Mon, 03 Sep 2007 12:16:31 -0000, Paul Weaver
wrote:

On 31 Aug, 11:49, Kev wrote:
So how do we find out about this, bugger all on the TfL site. That Ken
really is a smart cookie. Called for Metronet to go bankrupt, got what
he wanted and what is the first thing that the cretins in the union
do.
I'd say that they got exactly what they deserved, or what Ken wished
upon them.

Kevin

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6974841.stm seem to think
it's only the BCV lines that are affected, I assume they are just
being their usual selves and the SSL lines are also going to have
"issues"?

It now has a table down the page that lists the SSL as affected.

Though the main text of the article says: "Howard Collins, of London
Underground, warned that if the strike went ahead, services on the
Bakerloo, Central and Victoria lines would start being reduced from
about 1630 BST. But he assured commuters that the Jubilee, Northern
and Piccadilly lines would be running." - presumably ignoring the SSL
as it refers to a "tube strike" :-)

On Sun, 2 Sep 2007, Chris Read wrote:

"Paul Terry" wrote:

Paul Corfield wrote:

Quite frankly working those sorts of hours is either grossly inefficient

I suggest you tell that to my former teaching colleagues who, having
spent 7 hours at school with no breaks, come home to 4 hours of
marking, preparation and form-filling-in (unless there are parents'
evenings, drama nights, concerts, and the like, when it means working
weekends as well). And holidays? That's when you are expected to do
training.

That is what teachers would have you believe. No doubt some put in those
hours, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

And, in fact, that's exactly what my friends who are teachers say - it's a
very tough job, for various reasons, and it's not slack during term time,
but the gigantic holidays really are mostly holiday.

In the area in which I now work (publishing), real competition forces
down income to the extent that working long hours are the only way to
survive.

Don't understand that. If there's not enough work to go around due to
competition, why are you working longer hours?

Quite. The reason pay is so bad in publishing is because so many people
want to do it, for reasons other than pay. I've never quite worked out
what those reasons are, but they're there. It's the same in academia -
salaries are rubbish, but people do it because they love it. Well, at
first, because they love it, and after that, because they're
institutionalised and can't even think about getting out.

Now, having said all that, Paul is quite right that long working hours are
grossly inefficient. There's a pile of time-and-motion studies from last
century which show that productivity falls as the working day gets longer,
so someone working a 60-hour week just isn't getting much more done than
someone working their eight hours a day. Managers can't see this, but then
managers are mostly idiots.

tom

--
Thinking about it, history begins now -- sarah

On Tue, 4 Sep 2007 13:16:09 +0100, Tom Anderson
wrote:

Now, having said all that, Paul is quite right that long working hours are
grossly inefficient. There's a pile of time-and-motion studies from last
century which show that productivity falls as the working day gets longer,
so someone working a 60-hour week just isn't getting much more done than
someone working their eight hours a day. Managers can't see this, but then
managers are mostly idiots.

As a manager does the above mean I am also not an idiot? ;-)
--
Paul C


Admits to working for London Underground!

On Tue, 4 Sep 2007, Paul Corfield wrote:

On Tue, 4 Sep 2007 13:16:09 +0100, Tom Anderson
wrote:

Now, having said all that, Paul is quite right that long working hours
are grossly inefficient. There's a pile of time-and-motion studies from
last century which show that productivity falls as the working day gets
longer, so someone working a 60-hour week just isn't getting much more
done than someone working their eight hours a day. Managers can't see
this, but then managers are mostly idiots.

As a manager does the above mean I am also not an idiot? ;-)

Whilst i wouldn't dream of implying the negative, if you check, i think
you might find that your antecedent is denied there!

tom

--
Nullius in verba