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Disagreement Over Municipal Bonus
Page 66
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FROM OUR INDUSTRIAL CORRESPONDENT
rIA MEETING of the National Joint Council for the Road Passenger Transport Industry, called to discuss the unions' claim for a 40-hour week and a bonus payment scheme for 70,000 municipal busmen, broke up in disorder last week. It followed a series of meetings of a sub-committee of the Council, which also failed to produce any agreement.
After the meeting Mr. Alan Thomson, national passenger group officer of the TGWU, said that the unions had asked for a scheme of bonus payments similar to that operating in London, with payments based on journeys and carrying capacity of the vehicles. But the employers, he said, pointed out that this would lead to disparities in different parts of the country.
"They offered us a service bonus of between 10s. and 30s. with strings, which we could not accept ", Mr. Thomson said. "We never even got round to dis-cussing the 40-hour week. We have
asked them to meet us again as soon as possible".
Negotiations between the bus employers and the unions have been going on since last February. when an independent arbitration board awarded bus drivers an increase of 15s. a week. The employers have accepted that the 40-hour week is inevitable, but so far the two sides have not been able to work out how the shorter hours are to be applied.
Numbers Only? Buses operating on London Transport central route 73 and country bus route 321 are currently displaying a route number only at the rear, as an experiment to test public reaction to this move. The rear destination indicators have been painted out on buses operating on these routes, and the " via" indicator also painted over apart from a square over the space occupied by the route number. Buses on a number of country bus routes have displayed route numbers only at the rear for some time, and the new Atlantean and Fleetline buses are also equipped with number blinds only at the rear.