Britain:
Rail safety crisis
by Steve Metcalf* Threats against union reps have become two-a-penny since rail maintenance was privatised in April 1996. My bosses recently lost an Industrial Tribunal case after they tried to stop me attending a union Health and Safety course. They are also trying to stop statutory three-monthly safety inspections despite warnings that they may be about to break the law. They have also arbitrarily changed how track patrols to detect faults are done, despite our protests. Nobody with any decency or intelligence thinks privatisation has done anything but compromise the safety of both staff and travelling public on the rail system. The one hundred plus contracted rail companies stand open and vulnerable to the present government. A recent (British) Guardian poll showed over 70 per cent of people want the railways re-nationalised, yet the Transport Minister, Prescott, seems to be allowing the cowboys to buy time until the outrage [over recent accidents] blows over. Companies like Tarmac, which got involved in the Tory rail sell-off in order to make a quick killing, have also got involved in a situation where they may contribute to real killings. Statistics show Tarmac has had to pay out more in recent compensation claims to people killed and injured in its service than other companies of its type. Rail's crisis is not unique. The dogmatic drive for profit at any price proceeds apace world wide. Nor are these problems new. A footnote in volume 1 of Karl Marx's Capital says: "Reynolds Newspaper January 1866 — Every week this same paper has, under the sensational headings, `Fearful and fatal accidents', `Appalling tragedies' &c, a whole list of fresh railway catastrophies." In the main text Marx says of this: "In London three railwaymen — a guard, an engine driver and a signalman — are up before a coroner's jury. "A tremendous railway accident has despatched hundreds of passengers into the next world. The negligence of the railway workers is the cause of the misfortune. "They declare with one voice before the jury that ten or twelve years before, their labour lasted only eight hours a day. During the last five or six years, they say, it has been screwed up to 14, 18, and 20 hours, and under a specially severe pressure of holiday-makers, at times of excursion trains, it often lasted for 40 or 50 hours without a break. "They were ordinary men, not Cyclops. At a certain point their labour-power failed. Torpor seized them. Their brain ceased to think, their eyes to see. "The thoroughly `respectable' British jurymen answered by a verdict that sent them to the next assizes on a charge of manslaughter, and, in a gentle `rider' to their verdict, expressed the pious hope that the capitalist magnates of the railway would, in future, be more extravagant in the purchase of a sufficient quantity of labour-power, and more `abstemious', more `self-denying', more `thrifty' in the draining of paid labour-power." Sound familiar? The "capitalist railway magnates" are back again today. They cut staff, connive at increasing hours worked, cut corners to meet "targets" and impress share owners. And they do it with an "acceptable risk" outlook also — risk to others, not themselves. We workers must stop them, forever, we must take everything off them, with no compensation, and run things right, for the benefit of everyone. *Steve Metcalf is a British Labour Party member, Regional Councillor of the RMT rail union, and Safety Rep for RMT members maintaining Britain's West Coast Mainline.* * * New Worker