Devon residents to be asked to volunteer to fill their own potholes in.

[SpookyFrank]

Would you explain to the sacked road worker that it's OK that he's on the dole, because someone will do his job for free?

No, but then I haven't said that on here either. Because it's not what I believe. I'm not into the big society, I think someone doing a job of work for the benefit of the community should be paid for it. I don't think it's fair to ask people to do something that their ever-rising council tax payments are supposed to cover. But none of that is the fault of someone who decides, as an individual, to do something that's going to help the general public.

By your logic anyone doing any kind of socially useful voluntary work is a scab. And maybe they are a factor in the erosion of public services, but that's not their call to make. The cuts will keep coming regardless of whether anyone fills the gaps left behind. Volunteers don't have a say in what the government does to their local authority's budget or how that budget gets spent, but they do have a choice in what they do, and it's a choice between 'nothing' and 'something'.

And I genuinely believe that the more communities feel capable of doing things for themselves, the more people experience genuine co-operation, the more easily the bastards in power who are solely responsible for all these crappy decisions can be shown up for the useless parasites they are and eventually done away with altogether.

 

[Dr_Herbz]

No, but then I haven't said that on here either. Because it's not what I believe. I'm not into the big society, I think someone doing a job of work for the benefit of the community should be paid for it. I don't think it's fair to ask people to do something that their ever-rising council tax payments are supposed to cover. But none of that is the fault of someone who decides, as an individual, to do something that's going to help the general public.

By your logic anyone doing any kind of socially useful voluntary work is a scab. And maybe they are a factor in the erosion of public services, but that's not their call to make. The cuts will keep coming regardless of whether anyone fills the gaps left behind. Volunteers don't have a say in what the government does to their local authority's budget or how that budget gets spent, but they do have a choice in what they do, and it's a choice between 'nothing' and 'something'.

And I genuinely believe that the more communities feel capable of doing things for themselves, the more people experience genuine co-operation, the more easily the bastards in power who are solely responsible for all these crappy decisions can be shown up for the useless parasites they are and eventually done away with altogether.

I feel the exact opposite is true. The more work the public do that should be done by paid workers, the more the government will take the piss and the less money the councils will receive.

It's one thing doing something off your own back, and I have no issue with that but when the public are asked to do work that should be done by paid workers, that's a different matter entirely.

 

[bubblesmcgrath]

No, but then I haven't said that on here either. Because it's not what I believe. I'm not into the big society, I think someone doing a job of work for the benefit of the community should be paid for it. I don't think it's fair to ask people to do something that their ever-rising council tax payments are supposed to cover. But none of that is the fault of someone who decides, as an individual, to do something that's going to help the general public.

By your logic anyone doing any kind of socially useful voluntary work is a scab. And maybe they are a factor in the erosion of public services, but that's not their call to make. The cuts will keep coming regardless of whether anyone fills the gaps left behind. Volunteers don't have a say in what the government does to their local authority's budget or how that budget gets spent, but they do have a choice in what they do, and it's a choice between 'nothing' and 'something'.

And I genuinely believe that the more communities feel capable of doing things for themselves, the more people experience genuine co-operation, the more easily the bastards in power who are solely responsible for all these crappy decisions can be shown up for the useless parasites they are and eventually done away with altogether.

But it's not a group of volunteers volunteering on behalf of their communities off their own bat. It's the council asking people to volunteer to do the job.
Big difference. ...

 

[SpookyFrank]

I don't think there is much difference. Whether or not the government or the local authority is asking the public to plug the hole they've left, there's still a hole that needs plugging.

The government hasn't asked people to set up food banks, but people have decided to do it because it's either that or let people go hungry. It wouldn't make the benefit cuts that are sending people to foodbanks any more or less right if David Cameron had said, 'we've created all these hungry people, could you lot please feed them?' and asked for people to volunteer to set up food banks. It's the cuts that are the issue, the loss of services. Whether we're explicitly asked to replace those services ourselves or simply expected to, the actual situation we're in is the same.

How you can put the blame for something bad on people who are trying to rectify it is beyond me.

 

[bubblesmcgrath]

Would you expect to have to go into your kid's school and take turns cleaning toilets?

 

[SpookyFrank]

Would you expect to have to go into your kid's school and take turns cleaning toilets?

I would be extremely surprised, given that I don't have kids.

But assuming I did, no I wouldn't be very happy about that. And I'm not happy about people being told to fill their own potholes in either. I just don't think people who do decide to volunteer to do something that has been cut by the state should be villified. I think those people are in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation through no fault of their own and whatever they choose to do is their decision.

A scab is someone who does something that threatens other people's jobs, and does it to line their own pockets. You can't threaten the job of someone who has already been fired and who won't get their job back no matter what you do, and you can't line your pockets doing voluntary work. Not really scabbing then is it?

 

[bubblesmcgrath]

I would be extremely surprised, given that I don't have kids.

But assuming I did, no I wouldn't be very happy about that. And I'm not happy about people being told to fill their own potholes in either. I just don't think people who do decide to volunteer to do something that has been cut by the state should be villified. I think those people are in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation through no fault of their own and whatever they choose to do is their decision.

A scab is someone who does something that threatens other people's jobs, and does it to line their own pockets. You can't threaten the job of someone who has already been fired and who won't get their job back no matter what you do, and you can't line your pockets doing voluntary work. Not really scabbing then is it?

If I and others got the sack from our jobs and saw people coming in doing my job for no pay I'd consider them to be scabs.
It's about workers' rights.... using a supposed lack of funds to cut staff and then forcing people to fill their own potholes is just just wrong.
They are not prioritising. Once volunteers take this on they'll be left with it.
It's complete and utter manipulation.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Manchester's roads are littered with potholes. The local authority was on the bones of its arse even before the tories got in, and obviously their budget has since recieved the kind of brutal cuts you would expect tories to inflict upon a city of a million people where nobody and his mate has ever voted tory.

The potholes aren't getting filled in, needless to say. I think that they should be filled in, that the people who do it should get paid, and that the money to pay them shouldn't come out of some other important service. But its not getting done. The council has not, as far as I'm aware, asked people to start filling in the holes themselves. But if people want those holes filled in, they can either do it themselves or keep wanting indefinitely. If the city council went on the news and said, 'do us a favour and fill in all them potholes would you folks?' then the situation would be...the same. Lots of potholes, people who should be getting paid to fill in potholes are still not getting paid or filling in potholes. The public is still faced with the same situation, fix them yourselves or put up with them.

So, what practical difference would it make to the morality of one person's decision to fill in a pothole if the council had asked the public nicely to fill in potholes? What if the council had read out a statement on the telly, but the bloke filling in the pothole hadn't actually seen it and had decided to fill in the pothole independently of the instruction to do so? Is he a scab then?

 

[SpookyFrank]

They are not prioritising. Once volunteers take this on they'll be left with it.
It's complete and utter manipulation.

The people volunteering aren't the ones doing the manipulating though. They didn't sack you from your job, and I'm sure they'd rather not be filling in potholes for free either.

 

[bubblesmcgrath]

It's something you might expect in war time...when money is diverted towards defence and nothing much is left for roadworks.

 

[bubblesmcgrath]

The people volunteering aren't the ones doing the manipulating though. They didn't sack you from your job, and I'm sure they'd rather not be filling in potholes for free either.

But they are being manipulated into a job they don't want to do..probably don't have the skills for and at the expense of another person's livelihood.

 

[SpookyFrank]

If the fire service was cut would you help put out a fire in your neighbour's house, or would that be morally wrong too?

 

[SpookyFrank]

But they are being manipulated into a job they don't want to do..probably don't have the skills for and at the expense of another person's livelihood.

Yes. I'm not making excuses for the people who put them in that position, I'm just saying you cannot hold people responsible for a situation they didn't create.

 

[SpookyFrank]

If the fire service was cut would you help put out a fire in your neighbour's house, or would that be morally wrong too?

If your gaff caught fire would you yell 'scab!' at the concerned citizens forming bucket chains down the street? Would you refuse to fight the fire yourself for fear of being branded a scab?

 

[bubblesmcgrath]

If your gaff caught fire would you yell 'scab!' at the concerned citizens forming bucket chains down the street? Would you refuse to fight the fire yourself for fear of being branded a scab?

I'd call the firebrigade

 

[SpookyFrank]

I'd call the firebrigade

Fire brigade's been cut mate, no fire brigade unless you're in council tax band D or above.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Your choice is to die an honest man/woman, or live on as a scab knowing that all your neighbours are scabs and the little old lady who put out your blazing cat just in time by tipping her g&t over its head is a fucking scab.

 

[SpookyFrank]

In fact your cat is a scab too because he ran away from the fire instead of waiting for the council to hire a new firefighter to come and rescue him.

 

[Knotted]

So you've got volunteers working on Devon's narrow lanes with high hedges and poor visibility without the years of training as apprentices and presumably with minimal health and safety training. Have they been trained to set up traffic management for parking their vehicle (remembering they could be parking on a narrow lane with no verge and they will be wanting to park near the pot hole)? Is it a gentlemen's agreement that they don't cut corners? Does that include when it's raining and miserable and these volunteers really don't want to be there? Yes it's easy to shove some Instamac in a hole and yes it takes just a few minutes, but you are still working on the highway in a dangerous environment. Do volunteers even need CSCS cards? How many fatalities a year are we talking?

That's without going into the whole issue of putting people out of work.

Incredible stuff.

 

[SpookyFrank]

One of my least favourite things about this whole 'volunteering' thing is how it implies that any idiot can mend a road. Any idiot can mix up a wheelbarrow full of concrete and chuck it in a hole, but that's a long way off actually fixing the road.

 

[DownwardDog]

Would you expect to have to go into your kid's school and take turns cleaning toilets?

You'll be doing that anyway CTR if Urban's habitual meditations on post-revolutionary life are any guide.

 

[bubblesmcgrath]

You'll be doing that anyway CTR if Urban's habitual meditations on post-revolutionary life are any guide.

If that happens the kids will be doing it themselves.

 

[bubblesmcgrath]

Fire brigade's been cut mate, no fire brigade unless you're in council tax band D or above.

Well it's a good thing I'm in Ireland. .phew...

 

[coley]

Anyone who fills in a pothole is facilitating the sacking of workers, and is no better, nay, worse than a scab.
Report the hole to the council and if it isn't filled within a few days, have an accident in it and sue them.

And due to legal costs and settlements even less money in the budget, more workers to be sacked.

 

[coley]

Easy there Captain Daily Express. Highway inspector / area surveyor picks up the pothole on the scheduled inspection regime (or on a tip from the public) and issues directly to the maintenance contractor. Too many chiefs has got nothing to do with pothole repairs.

I have issues with public work being contracted out instead of being part of the public service (where I work used to have a far more efficient in house maintenance team) but better economists than I have run the numbers, there is an argument for cross-boundary shared services in terms of shared plant, materials and warehousing costs. Different issue, I digress.

Pothole repairs, or lack of, boils down to lack of money, plain and simple. So, this Devon example is a straight admission that this austerity bollocks is just that - public money is no longer about public services, it's turning real money from real people into numbers on a purely theoretical balance sheet. Cheers, capitalism!

No, you make it sound rational and simple,eg, the painting of 60 yards of double yellow lines in a new development has, up to now,taken six site visits, involving numerous people from various departments, though the local CC was involved in each (juicy expenses) two lots of consultations for the residents involved and still hasn't been resolved
Just deciding who is responsible for grass cutting can use up 100s of hours of LGT!
Mebbes just having elected councillors on basic expenses would free up a whole load of money for essential services?

 

[coley]

If I and others got the sack from our jobs and saw people coming in doing my job for no pay I'd consider them to be scabs.
It's about workers' rights.... using a supposed lack of funds to cut staff and then forcing people to fill their own potholes is just just wrong.
They are not prioritising. Once volunteers take this on they'll be left with it.
It's complete and utter manipulation.

But if the local authority said it would maintain its budget and workforce but could only do so by maintaining major roads and could only promise this if local communities took over responsibility for minor roads?

 

[coley]

If that happens the kids will be doing it themselves.

Not a bad idea

 

[Wilf]

A scab is someone who does something that threatens other people's jobs, and does it to line their own pockets. You can't threaten the job of someone who has already been fired and who won't get their job back no matter what you do, and you can't line your pockets doing voluntary work. Not really scabbing then is it?

Whilst they have made cuts already, you don't seem to have read the OP:

Officials reckon they can shave off £260,000 by reducing their neighbourhood highway team by a fifth.
They want to save a further £430,000 by cutting the number of lengthsmen - responsible for keeping roads neat and tidy.
The proposals are part of a package subject to a nine-week public consultation period looking at various ways to save money.

Showing an interest in volunteering for this is 100% scabbing. And if you want to quibble over the word, it's certainly facilitating people losing their jobs. How about a bit of fucking solidarity?

 

[SpookyFrank]

But it's not a group of volunteers volunteering on behalf of their communities off their own bat. It's the council asking people to volunteer to do the job.
Big difference. ...

I wouldn't volunteer for local authority work, but I do volunteer for stuff local authorities should be doing. The 'off your on bat' bit is important. Otherwise you're just on community service only you didn't get to commit any crimes first.

 

[likesfish]

One of my least favourite things about this whole 'volunteering' thing is how it implies that any idiot can mend a road. Any idiot can mix up a wheelbarrow full of concrete and chuck it in a hole, but that's a long way off actually fixing the road.

Unfortunately that appears to be the approach around here some of the so called repairs around here are shocking