When you’re in the situation of a union making detrimental changes to members’ terms and conditions, in favour of management, all without consultation or ballot, that is ‘someone else’s fault’.
Why not It’s true.Unions are as likely to act against the interests of their members as for.
Your point blank refusal to see the difference between train and lorry drivers in respect of what might be expected of you in the job role goes a long way in explaining why no employer in the industry wanted anything to do with you.
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I didn’t handball 5 x per week to be fair.
I used to handball 20 ton of scotch seed tatties in the old days which wasn’t great…sometimes off pallets to other pallets, to add insult to injury…maybe literally.
Is it any wonder with the amount of deluded waffle he posts here. 
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Deluded waffle?
That reminds me of somebody else.
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Are you deliberately obtuse, or do you have a genuine intellectual deficit?
Only in your deluded alternative world.
Ask yourself, why you? It was a job that needed to be done. You presumably were being paid drivers’ rate, an amount greater than a dockhand get paid. You’ve got nothing to whinge about. With the superior skills and accolades you claim were poured on you, why would you be put on the dock? It wasn’t done for no reason. You know the reason, but you won’t admit it to us or yourself.
Obviously management, the union and your coworkers were all sick of you.
The point is the union’s difference in the terms and conditions expected of train drivers v lorry drivers.
Bearing in mind the union had actually defended our terms of no warehouse duties up to that point.
A collective union agreement which put all of us, more than just me, ‘on the dock’.If you read the letter which I posted you’ll see that Danny Bryan acknowledged complaints from his memberS about the agreed changes to OUR terms and conditions, without consultation let alone ballot.
I wouldn’t trust any union to act and make agreements on my behalf after that experience.
Demarcation disputes are caused when one group of workers try to poach tasks from another group, thus increasing the security and reliance on the former group.
You are so bone idle that you are willing to give away any and every task that cannot be performed with your arse firmly planted in the driving seat, of a truck.
Firstly the change from palletised transhipment movements to all handball kicked off an exodus of many of our long serving warehouse personnel.In addition to militancy among those who remained.
The result being that the management then started to ‘ask’ drivers to do the job.
At that point we had a long standing agreement which gave us the choice to tell management to ‘do one’.Which was exactly the answer that the scumbags got.
Or to help out, all at OUR discretion.Which in the case of trundling a few pallets or sometimes a whole trailer load of palletised freight on or off was fair enough and usually met positively.
After the union agreement which tore all that up we also then had redundancies imposed on the remaining warehouse personnel.
Your point being what exactly ?.
You’ve been using that bs for so long, you’re probably starting to believe it yourself.
At a time when apparently all that was needed to become a UK/Euro driver, the job you so desperately wanted, was a licence and heartbeat, you couldn’t get a start. Your reputation and references ensured no employer was going to take you on.
You keep making all the excuses and play the victim card, you’re the only person who believes the garbage.
You referred to the issue of definitions of and the effects of demarcation lines.
Suddenly you’ve now forgotten that and gone off on the usual baseless and incorrect personal attack crusade.
No one is going to get a load far across Europe if they want the driver to spend half their time working as a warehouse labourer.
Which is probably why the issue was never raised by anyone who I applied to for Euro work including even my own future employers before the takeover.
Ironically to who that Union agreement never applied to under their Linehaul driver job description as opposed to our degraded Feeder job title.
So the union not only agreed to a detrimental change in duties but also to a degraded job title and description.
You can count the number of unionised international operations on one hand if even any.
In the words of Danny Bryan’s regime it was considered as poaching the work of foreign workers.
Obviously double two tier standards apply for us.
Genuine question, why were you not able to attain work driving on the continent if that was your end goal?
Euro work was well before my time, I’m 41 and have only been in this industry since 2011/2012 (not that it would have interested me anyway), but I have worked with numerous guys who did it in the 80’s/90’s and purely from what they said it was just considered part and parcel of the job. One week you may be tootling up and down the M1/M6/M5 etc on UK work, the next you would be shipped off to Europe somewhere. I remember one guy telling me how he hated it, being abroad and so far from home but accepted that was part of being a lorry driver back then.
@carryfast Your truth’s not pretty, but your imagination cannot change it.
There were no obstacles to driving on European work then, as long as you had an HGV licence, a passport and a forgiving missus or were single. It was usually a good life / job. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Once you’d cracked Europe you could go further afield to TIR work beyond the EEC / EU. A great adventure for those who didn’t need to be home by teatime.
I’ve heard that story so often on here.
I don’t/can’t recognise that level of opportunity making the move from UK work to international without the all important ‘international experience’ requirement acting as a reinforced concrete road block.
Obviously some lucky ones made it and would have been exceptions to the rule and my guess is those are the ones who obviously set the narrative.The others, unlike me, just lost interest in the whole aspiration, so their story is never told.
Which leaves the question how many of those international nobs were unionised jobs when road transport union/s were generally vehemently against it ?.
As opposed to the reality international work was actually more difficult to get into without international experience, than UK work with no experience.
If it was a firm doing both UK and international usually it would be separate divisions UK and International.As in the case of my own employers.
Also at least one of the firms I applied to.Where ironically an offer of employment on their international side, based at Dover, changed to UK work only on their UK side based at Northampton, before the start date.
Luckily, or maybe unluckily, I thought it sounded too good to be true and had waited to hand in my notice and then told them no thanks.At that time my own job was reasonably ok for UK work and no point in jumping for nothing.
More ironically our international side drivers did eventually find themselves doing UK trunking. BUT were exempt from Danny Bryan’s warehouse work agreement double dealing, which only applied to us.
But lots of moans from the ex Seabourne International trunkers about being degraded to UK work.But at least kept their Linehaul status.
Which is sort of conclusive.
The message is don’t trust unions at least in the road transport sector.