Fighting for rail safety

Earlier this year on a cold, snowy morning on February 16 in a quiet suburb south of Brussels called Hal/Buizingen commuters boarded a train shortly after 8am to go to work.
By 8.30am the train had collided with an express train, killing nineteen people and injuring 170 others.

The next day Belgian rail workers walked out in protest because they knew why it had happened. FGTB rail union general secretary Gerard Gelmini said that cutbacks and attacks on working conditions had increased since the European Commission had deregulated European rail traffic in 2005.

That year, in line with EU rail directives, the Belgian government split the SNCB, Belgium’s national rail network, into three separate subsidiaries after 170 years existence operating as a single company.

Mr Gelmini slammed the “mad rise in productivity” that endangered rail workers and the travelling public. “You can have as much safety and security as you want but it doesn’t mean anything if there is insufficient investment in training and unless there are decent working conditions,” he said.

This tragedy is just the latest in a long line of disasters outside of Britain that have occurred due to the implementation of the EU’s mania with deregulation. In fact there has been a succession of major freight train accidents since ‘liberalisation’ in 2006.

On April 26 2008, a runaway ‘Veolia’ freight loco ran through Montauban station at over 60 km/h.  Without the presence of mind of French national railways (SNCF) staff, it would have struck a crowded regional passenger train.  "The pursuit of profit is leading companies to cut back on jobs, working conditions, operational procedures and training", said the union SUD-Rail.

At Livernan, in Southwest France, a trainload of tractors hauled by Euro Cargo Rail, a DB Schenker subsidiary, hit an SNCF freight train in May 2009, hospitalising the driver.  "What would have happened if it had been a passenger train? We fear that people would have been injured or worse" said Didier Le Reste, French CGT rail union general secretary.

At Viareggio, in Tuscany, central Italy, on June 29 2009, 26 people were injured and 32 people killed in a fireball following derailment of a ‘liberalised’ freight train made up of LPG fuel tanks.

Didier Le Reste said that rail freight liberalisation had provoked "a spate of proven incidents and accidents”.

"Railway safety cannot become a variable of neoliberal policies, in the name of competition and liberalisation as pushed by the European Union," he warned.

There was a time when political pundits scoffed at such warnings about the results (or even the existence) of EU rail directives, but that was a long time ago. That is why around a thousand transport workers from across Europe protested in Lille, France against the EU-led privatisation of rail networks earlier this month. Rail unions from Belgium, Portugal, Hungary and many other countries gathered outside the headquarters the European Rail Agency, an EU institution that implements the various EU directives and rail packages that open up rail services to the private sector. They were joined by French rail workers from the SUD union who were in their seventh day of strike action over continued liberalisation of the French rail network. Just outside of Lille is the Somain rail freight yard where over 300 jobs are threatened by the continued dismantling of France's freight industry which is being ‘liberalised’ as demanded by the second EU rail package.

RMT general secretary Bob Crow told the noisy protest that workers were uniting against the systematic destruction of national rail networks, jobs and safety standards brought by EU diktats. “Liberalisation might sound harmless, but we have already seen fatal crashes like the one in Belgium and now there are demands to dilute the Channel tunnel’s safety rules to allow competition. Millions of people across Europe believe that railways should be a public service not a commodity to be smashed up and exploited by privateers who, ultimately, are only interested in profit. Big business and faceless Eurocrats are implementing this dangerous experiment without any democratic mandate to do so,” he said.

To recap, the EU's First Railway Package in 2001 built on the foundations of EC Directive 91/440, imposed on July 1991 to introduce market mechanisms into rail by requiring the separation of the management of infrastructure and train operations , as was done in the case of the privatisation of British Rail and of the London Underground.

The Second Railway Package of 2004 accelerated the so-called ‘liberalisation’ of rail freight services by bringing forward the date for open access to the entire EU rail network to January 1 2006 for all types of rail freight services. The Third Railway Package of 2007 made provision for the ‘liberalisation’ of international passenger services requiring open access to infrastructure in all EU member states by January 1 2010 at the latest.

A stark picture of what this has led to was painted by Hans Gerd Ofinger representing a German pressure group Bahn von Unten, (Railways from Below). "The process of privatisation started in 1994 when the German state railway was transformed into a stake holding company and split up into 300 subsidiaries. The drive for profit has meant that there has been less investment in infrastructure and safety and, as a result, the intercity express trains to Berlin had problems with the wheels and axles. The number of jobs has halved since the privatisation started and contract Labour is almost slave labour. Recently we had a very harsh winter and it was revealed that a sub-contractor hired Bulgarian workers who were paid just two euros an hour to clear the snow from the tracks," he said, adding that Deutsche Bahn was now trying to create a feeling of competition between German and French rail workers as the two countries battle for control of Europe’s rail networks. “They are trying to tell the German workers that the French are their enemies but what we need are rail networks under democratic control operating on the basis of cooperation not competition."

Brian Denny is an official of the British transport workers union RMT, which has produced a DVD about EU rail privatisation, available from him by sending an email request to bdenny@rmt.org.uk