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I'm fairly certain thee's a report out there somewhere detailing the lack of driver training funded by the ToCs. This meant that accredited drivers , where they chose, drifted towards the 'better' train driving jobs, and poorly managed franchises like Southern soon found they could not cover obvious items like roster changes and holidays.
There was no pool of qualified labour available.During the recent RMT strikes the agency companies publicly stated that they were not in favour of supplying labour, not only due to the strike being legitimate, but also the agencies still had no pool of labour to offer.
mespilus-
The accusation has always been that the RMT somehow exercises control over how many people can train as drivers (to restrict supply & enhance labour power) but I have no idea whether there's any truth in that.
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One of the reasons drivers tend to earn so much (in my experience, at my company) is because there are not enough drivers so they are all offered fairly regular "overtime" at double rate to meet demand.
So even the places that offer good service don't have enough drivers.
It's not uncommon for there to be action short of strike and for the drivers en mass to reject any overtime, this brings services to its knees.
NickCJ
Grumpy_Git
Don’t train drivers have to be accredited for both the train they are driving and the lines they can use? Surely there’s not a bank of agency staff waiting to be called up to drive strike busting trains.