About Statistics
Statistics is a branch of mathematics working with data collection, organization, analysis, interpretation and presentation. In applying statistics to a scientific, industrial, or social problem, it is conventional to begin with a statistical population or a statistical model to be studied.
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Train strike: How much are rail workers paid?
Ahead of a series of strikes, there have been A Number of claims made about how much rail workers get paid.
Members of the RMT Union, which represents guards and other railway staff, said 40,000 workers from Network Rail and 13 train firms would take action on 21, 23 and 25 June, in a dispute about pay and redundancies.
The pay figures quoted have varied dramatically.
Let's start with the highest number quoted.
There was a debate in Parliament on Wednesday 15 June about the forthcoming strikes.
How much are drivers paid?Transport Secretary Grant Shapps responded to a suggestion from Jeremy Corbyn that pay was inadequate by saying: " The median salary for a train driver is £59,000, compared with £31,000 for a nurse and £21,000 for a care worker. "
The median is an average Figure - if you put all drivers in a row in order of their pay, the median wage would be what is earned by the person in The Middle of The Line .
He's mostly right on those figures, which come from The Office for National Statistics ().
For 2021, the median salary for train and tram drivers was £59,189 and for nurses it was £31,093.
His Figure for care workers is a bit high. The median for care workers and home carers was £16,502 and for senior care workers it was £20,105.
Is the median salary for rail workers £44,000?The trouble with using the Figure for train drivers in a debate about The Strikes is that the drivers are represented by their own union, Aslef, which says that 96% of train drivers in England, Scotland and Wales are its members, and most of The Remaining 4% are not union members at all.
Aslef will not be taking part in The National Strike , although They have some of their own strikes taking place at the same time, with drivers at Greater Anglia striking on 23 June and Hull Trains on 26 June.
They are also balloting for action on several other lines.
Mr Shapps went on to say: " The median salary for the rail sector is £44,000, which is significantly above the median salary in the country. "
To get to this Figure , The Department for Transport has taken the median figures from The Office for National Statistics (ONS) for four categories of workers:
It has added up those four figures and divided by four to get an average (known as a mean).
This is not best practice and means that the Figure quoted is no longer a median. Remember, to get to the median for all these workers you'd have to put them All In a line and pick The Middle one. Taking The Middle one for four different groups, adding their pay up and dividing by four does not have the same effect.
It means the actual median could be higher or lower than £44,000.
Even so, it is still likely that Grant Shapps is right that the actual Figure is above the median pay for all employees in the UK, which was £25,971 Last Year .
The RMT Figure of £33,000The RMT union says the figures used by the government are too high because They include train drivers who are almost all represented by a different union and not people like station cleaners who are not categorised in official figures as rail workers.
They say that if you take the £44,000 Figure , exclude the drivers and include cleaning staff you get a Figure of £33,000, which better reflects the average pay of The People going on Strike .
Source of news: bbc.com
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