Pay Comparisson - Bus Drivers

[Barney]

RE: Pay Comparisson - Bus Drivers

(19/11/2014 08:35)Penny Return Wrote:  Correct,very little difference between the big two,blair is a bigger tory than thatcher was,no wonder
ukip are gaining ground people are sick of the same old garbage

Unbelievable! As this site is concerned with issues pertaining to all things buses are you aware that Ukip's avowed intention is to reduce to zero the government's financial support given to all forms of public transport? I doubt very much whether Nigel Farage lies in bed at night worrying how he can improve the lot of those poor people who don't own their own Bentley.

Anyway, back to reality. By chance I found an interesting and very readable article called Memoirs of a Buck King on a site called Busset. The guy who wrote it recounts his experiences of working as a conductor, then driver, out of LCPT Speke depot in the early 1960s. It gives a fascinating insight into how things were in those days but the fact that stands out is the rates of pay at that time. Basic pay was slightly less than £10 for a 42 hour week which roughly equates to £190 per week today. In order to survive many busmen worked double and, on one occasion, triple shifts, something that is now quite rightly illegal under EU employment law

I accept that inflation as measured against CPI and RPI on a range of goods in the last fifty years varies widely but if you make a crude comparison between 1963 and 2014, bus drivers are generally better paid now than then. If I was to hazard a guess, I would suggest that, in real terms the best time to be a bus driver was just before Deregulation. Can anybody verify that?