PARIS PROTEST AGAINST EU RAIL PRIVATISATION

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: february 2012 :: RMTnews 14 E uropean rail bosses including British outfit the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) met in Brussels earlier this month to plan out a strategy for bleeding transport services across the continent by exploiting EU rules and its austerity and privatisation drive. ‘Britain’s Rail Value for Money report - An inspiration for future EU Rail Policy?’, hosted by Labour MEP Brian Simpson, heard directly from Sir Roy McNulty on his report’s implications for the European Commission’s forthcoming proposals. The meeting comes weeks after the consultative European parliament rubberstamped a Commission dictat to ‘recast’ all EU rail directives in order to ‘establish a single European railway area’. This EU privatisation model, first implemented in Britain, demands a split between train operations and infrastructure and ‘open access’ rules in order to fragment the industry to force market mechanisms into the industry. European rail bosses are pointing to the British government’s McNulty report as the way forward to rolling out the disastrous experiment of rail privatisation across the EU. The head of the European rail bosses organisation CER, Executive Director Libor Lochman, said that the McNulty report raised questions that are important for all European countries. “What steps can be taken to achieve greater cost efficiency? How can one ensure that the incentives of infrastructure managers and operators are effectively aligned so as to improve the efficiency of the rail sector as a whole? “The case of Great Britain demonstrates the need for sufficient flexibility to allow member states to develop national rail sector models that truly deliver,” he said. RMT general secretary Bob Crow said that it was a disgrace that a British Labour MEP was lining up with the rip-off rail companies with the sole intention of bumping up the profits and dividends of the same corporate welfare scroungers who had bled the British railways dry. “This gathering also shows that McNulty is nothing less than a trail blazer for the whole EU drive to deregulate, cut jobs and services and ramp up fares in the dash for profits at the expense of public service. “RMT will be linking up with rail trade unions from across Europe in Brussels on March 28 to unite the fight back against the greed merchants who are using EU policy directives to smash up rail services from the North Sea to the Mediterranean,” he said. F rench and Italian rail unions have taken “symbolic” action in protest at the first privately operated, European Commission-backed international train route between Italy and France, writes Jeff Apter in Paris. Hundreds of French railway workers led by the CGT and SUD unions and a delegation of Italian rail workers organised a “welcoming committee” at the Gare de Lyon in Paris for the train from Venice. Thello, a company set up by Trenitalia, Italy’s national train operator and France-based Veolia-Transdev, chartered the train. Grégory Roux of the CGT train workers’ union said the venture was “symbolic of the European Union’s choice of policies that seek to destroy public services”. He proposed a different model for the rail sector, including co-operation with public service operators of other countries. “Privatisation aims at pitching worker against worker and ultimately does not bring down prices for the travelling public”, he said, stressing that the demonstrators were equally concerned for safety. He pointed to Britain’s sad record since privatisation, citing the Ladbroke Grove tragedy in 1999, the 2000 Hatfield crash and Selby the following year as examples. Ramiero Casini representing Italian union CUB called for “unity against European Union directives that promote opening public services to competition through social dumping on the backs of working people”. He said that Thello workers are called on to work up to 16 hours at a stretch and earned 20-40 per cent less than the railway workers employed in Italy’s public service transport operations. Meanwhile, over 800 employees recently had been made redundant by Trenitalia’s Wagons Lits subsidiary. Thello is applying to France’s equivalent of Railtrack for slots to operate a Paris-Rome night service and a Lyon-Chambéry- Turin day route from this summer and is considering bidding for a franchise to operate in Britain. RIP-OFF RAIL COMPANIES EXPLOIT EU RULES AND MCNULTY PARIS PROTEST AGAINST EU RAIL PRIVATISATION