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Dublin Bus...Bleak future unemployment
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29-01-2009 1:50pm#1
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Notwithstanding rokz`s very obvious anger and despondency at the entire Bus Atha Cliath/Bus Eireann situation and its mishandling there remain aspects which need to be addressed.
Every clerical and wages grade employee of the CIE companies is required to serve a "Probationary" period in their grade of usually 12 months.
That requirement is an integral part of the Job offer and was always made clear at contract signing stage (certainly was for my group)
Essentially once one kept ones nose clean and behaved responsibly the appointment process was largely automatic with only a couple of local management interviews and some performance assessments to be undertaken.
However that is not to take away from the reality that during that period the employment contract is essentially a day-to-day one in terms of security of tenure.
Down through the years I have known of only a handful of probationary staff who were NOT appointed to the full-time staff and these cases tended to be largely no-hopers who most definitely had made a wrong career choice or experienced other difficulties within the job.
However,what IS different here is the scale of the redundancies within the Bus Group companies and the manner by which the companies arrived at this point.
In the case of Bus Atha Cliath we have 160 probationary drivers who were recruited largely to staff an expanding network.
The recruitment process for this new EXTRA staff complement came about only after Bus Atha Cliath submitted TO THE DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORT a Full Business Plan for the utilization of the 100 EXTRA buses.
The Department of Transport (and presumably Dept of Finance) then sanctioned the purchase of the vehicles and the Immediate commencement of a recruitment drive to ensure that the necessary staff were in place when those extra Buses were delivered.
Subsequent to this matters turned interesting as Bus Atha Cliath attempted to deploy the newly approved and delivered resources.
What happened next was an example of high farce in the extreme as the Route Licencing section of the Department of Transport then essentially prevented the 100 extra buses from being placed into service in advance of a lengthy,and by no means success assured application process.
The net result of this example of what could be described as National Sabotage was the 100 buses lying idle for almost a year in Broadstone Depot as the Licencing Section deliberated by the light of a flickering candle.
The results of these deliberations were in themselves somewhat interesting as Bus Atha Cliath found themselves coralled into deploying these NEW resources onto route alignments which largely parallelled EXISTING routes.
Little wonder then that we now find Deloitte wondering aloud about duplication of routes such as with the 4,128,140,145 routes which made up the bulk of the new vehicle allocation.
Whilst the new routes have been successful,that has come at a cost of drawing customers away from pre-existing routes to no good avail and certainly not to the greater benefit of the commuter.
Proposed routings such as the 141 Swords to Rathgar were placed in a considerational limbo as the Licencing Section deliberates on what "Competition" actually entails in Irish Public Transport terms.
So almost 12 months late Bus Atha Cliath finally manages to get all of these new resources in place,only to find it`s customer base has fled...and that it now has a MInister who "suspects" the company is not effectively utilizing its resources.
Having then commissioned Deloitte to confirm his suspicions he recieves a report which does nothing of the sort,and in fact confirms that Bus Atha Cliath and Bus Eireann are as efficiently run as is possible under the pre-existing regulatory framework.
Some scope to do better in both companies,but essentially no "Smoking Gun" so obviously desired by the Minister and instead a set of recommendations which have been the stuff of Canteen Talk within the companies for years now.
It is sad therefore for me to read rokz depiction of a divided company and the description of an old wives tale picture of Bus Atha Cliath staff earning vast sums for doing nothing except pulling sickies.These newly trained low paid drivers are only there to fill in for the large volume of staff who don't turn up for work, and have no loyalty to there job,
This,for example,is no longer an accurate charge to make against BAC staff and has not been a viable one for many years now.
The Company most assuredly DID have a turgid sickness and absence problem (Quite an industry problem across the EU in the face of longer driving hours and worsening conditions).
However a new set of Grieviance and Disciplinary operating systems including Absence Control,Attendance Monitoring,Chief Medical Officer Referrals and Local Management "Interviews" has turned around the entire issue of poor attendance.
The NEW staff were recruited for NEW work which the Company was given to understand was implicitly approved following the acceptance of the Business Plan.
The fact that this NEW work subsequently failed to materialize is surely down to the as yet still unexplained behaviour of the Department of Transport and its Minister in refusing the necessary permissions for NEW Route Licences to serve areas currently NOT served by mainstream public transport.
Sadly the reality of things hinge upon this phrase....
She was promised a bright new career subject to being appointed after 12 months probation period
What we now have is the company simply taking advantage of the legality of that situation,something which I feel given the Minister for Transport`s unique position vis-a-vis the management of the company,should be challenged in the courts.
The other interesting question which remains unanswered is why BAC Management reportedly departed from normal practice in this matter by NOT first discussing these proposals at main or subsidiary Board level,whereupon of course the directly appointed representatives of the Minister sit...HMmmmmm
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
Charles Mackay (1812-1889)
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