Incompetence

For a while there's been a lot of evidence that there's an awful lot money being wasted through incompetent project management in the railway industry. Now this Guardian article on idle jobs shows just how bad things have got.

Two of these jobs are on the railways, and it seems that in this particular sector, old 1970s-style jobs with lots of tea breaks and standing around in groups looking at bits of metal are still very much alive, despite today's weaker trade unions.

Our first reader, who we shall keep anonymous, lovingly describes the progress of a typical shift.

"I was rostered to be on site from 4pm till 4am. When we arrived, the boss didn't know what we were supposed to be doing, and nor did we. We sat in our van drinking coffee till 11.30pm.

"By that time, you have lost the will to work, it is cold, you are in a nice warm van swapping stories and watching silly video clips on phones. We had to get out of the van for 20 minutes and then the boss let us go."

Our reader says that he does one or two shifts each weekend, which leaves the rest of his week free to be idle. Another railway worker says that he gets paid for an eight-hour shift even though the work is usually done in three or four hours.

Furthermore, he adds: "Because of massive amounts of bureaucracy, I reckon that about a quarter of all shifts are cancelled as soon as we turn up on site. So, we get paid for doing eight hours' work for doing bugger all."

As a rail user and taxpayer, I'm footing the bill for this nonsense. I once counted 43 people in orange safety hats wandering around Alderley Edge, and not one of them actually seemed to be doing anything.

However, I don't agree with the author that this sort of practice is a holdover from the 1970s. I think it's got very much worse after privatisation, when the railway was fragmented into a million pieces. Privatisation was supposed to bring greater efficiency through the 'disclipline of the market', or so the crackpot ideologues told us. What rot!