Re: Re: RCDrummond, Traffic Manager

IS Edit
Friday, March 15, 2002 2:25 AM

Peter,

Since you were a valuable participant in the struggle against the proposed run cuts and other crazy things with the San Francisco Municipal Railway in 1970, you well know what I'm like in a stoush. I fight hard but seldom get personal and usually maintain a sense of humour.

But it was class warfare of the English variety in the Melbourne & Metropolitan Tramways Board. I'd never seen anything like it. I thought it was like Monty Python but most of the people worked within that social framework or at least did not fight the root cause. And the Tramways Union was nominally Maoist but the relationship between them and Tramways management was quite symbiotic.

Towards the end of the transport reform process following the election of the Victorian state Labor Government in about 1980, the "Task Forces" at the state Ministry of Transport which I was a member of put forward a huge number of problem analyses with options on how to solve the problems. Faced with the prospect of real change, Tramways management and the unions that fought them were as one, and voted almost every time for the least change option.

They were like cats in a bag all those years. Fighting each other and needing each other to fight. Neither really wanted to win. And none of them really wanted to fix the causes of the grievances. Both tramways and union were merely vehicles for the movers and shakers to play games for their own ends.

It was amazing.

And perhaps the tail end of the old Australian "cultural cringe", now almost non-existent. (And why should they have cultural cringe, for what they see in the US these days).

Next question old buddy. When are you coming down here to visit a place you might decide to migrate to, because it is so good?

Cheers,

Bob Murphy

----- Original Message -----

From: Peter D. Ehrlich

To: TramsDownUnder

Sent: Friday, March 15, 2002 12:47 PM

Subject: [TramsDownUnder] Re: RCDrummond, Traffic Manager

Hi, gang! R.T., your tales about RC Drummond are great reading! Thanks for the humor... Milantram

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