Settlement for Municipal Busmen
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FROM OUR INDUSTRIAL CORRESPONDENT THIS season's long drawn-out bus pay 1 negotiations are now drawing to an end with the announcement of another major settlement. The latest agreement, announced last week after a meeting of the N.J.I.C. for the Road Transport Industry, provides for a pay rise of 8s. 9d. a week for some 70,000 men and women employed in municipal bus undertakings. It represents an increase of about 4+ per cent.
The increase will apply to drivers, conductors, semi-skilled and unskilled maintenance men and is still subject to acceptance by a delegate conference of men from the two unions involved, the Transport and General Workers and the General and Municipal Workers. But this is expected to be only a formality.
This leaves only the third section of the bus industry, the company busmen, to make a settlement. Here the employers have made an offer of 6s. a week which 'was rejected by the unions as "quite inadequate ". A sub-committee of the National Council for the Omnibus Industry, set up to examine the question further, is to meet next Monday for the first time and should find little difficulty in making progress. They will have to report back to the full Council. But it is clear that a settlement in line with the 8s. 9d. increase for the municipal men is inevitable.
For the municipal undertakings the higher wage rates will mean a jump in the payroll of not far short of £2,000,000 a year when overtime is taken into account. For the companies it will be more than £2,500,000.
Both sets of employers rejected a union application for a two-hour reduction in the working week to 40 hours. It has since become known that when the company busmen's claim was rejected, the employers calculated that application of the 40-hour week to its 100,000 employees would cost them £4,500,000 a year.