Re: LONDON BUS JOBS

My opinion on this is that new drivers (regardless of colour or where they
are from) should a) have the right attitude towards other road users and
customers, and b) That they should be able to communicate effectively in
English.

Indeed, two criteria I deem essential when recruiting.

I just get the impression that these new drivers from Poland, etc can't
speak/understand English very well and I think this brings down the
standard of the industry as a whole.

Yes and no. Like all nationalities the Poles have good and bad un's amongst
them. When Poland joined the EU and bus companies started to take advantage
of the easy source of trained labour they imported only the cream (as you
would). However as more and more companies recruited from Poland they by and
large no longer had the pick of the cream and had to dig deeper into the
barrel of the Polish labour market.

I've worked in depots that have imported Poles directly and also those who
have recruited Poles who have found their own way to the UK. Personally I
don't like the kind of mass importing which has gone on in some companies
because if you import groups of people the weaker members of the group in
terms of language and other abilities will rely on the stronger
communicators and that ain't good. The Poles who have found their own way to
the UK generally have a far higher standard of English and fit in far
quicker even though they may not already have bus driving experience.

Also, if you read some of the industry mags there have been some recent news
stories about foreign drivers employed by some less scrupulous operators
(naming no names) who have recruited drivers with zero English and give them
no conversion courses to driving in the uk before chucking them out in
service and as a result some serious accidents have occured.


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Great Article: Serva&Petroni, An Indo-European Tree & Glottochronology (July 2008)
    ... and a derivative of comparative SIG is English ... Magdalenian offers DOK --- poles used for making a tent ... would then just be an abbreviation of POL DOK and POL PLO, ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Great second cousin?
    ... and speak pretty decent Polish. ... where I teach English to Poles. ... For those Poles who speak German, ... sound does not exist in that pronunciation at all. ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: Subtitutes for English /T/ and /D/
    ... From listening to Poles and noticing that they clip particular sounds ... Then your command of English is, shall we say, not ... The last immigrants came to my town in about 1920. ... father's parents died long before I was born (there's no indication ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: pinoy english criticized in hongkong. some chinese criticize the chinese in hongkong as wogs. w
    ... Filipino mother who said that her 9-year-old daughter returned home ... English is not good, especially their accents." ... wife worked at recruiting company who look for English teachers to be ... To these Korean sumbitches you have to be white to be considered a native ...
    (soc.culture.filipino)
  • Re: Is this true?
    ... The Poles came here to work, to save money for a future back home and they went about their business without any animosity towards English people. ... They are generally hard-working and honest, and all of the Poles I know make "learning English" a top priority, simply because they are a people with a love of "self-improvement". ... I would swap a coach-load of Muslims for a coach-load of Poles any day. ...
    (uk.local.kent)