Transportation

Railway Workers' Courageous Struggle
to Affirm the Human Factor

Railway workers are facing huge challenges in the fight for their rights and the rights of all, including the important battle for their own safety and that of the public. They have been waging a courageous struggle for many years to affirm their rights in the face of anti-social concepts and practices of all kinds put forward by the rail monopolies and successive federal Liberal and Conservative governments. The outlook of the ruling elite negates the human factor and social consciousness putting maximum profit for private interests as the deciding factor on all issues.

Railway workers face industry deregulation allowing the rail monopolies to determine their own policies with the government rubber stamping them. This includes safety programs that are private and privileged and not open to scrutiny by anyone outside the railway companies themselves.

Workers face what is called risk management rather than having an all-out effort to eliminate all risks and hazards as much as possible as a matter of principle for those who work and the public. These risks include worker fatigue caused by management putting workers on-call 24/7, amongst other things. The openly-avowed goal of the rail monopolies is to run the railways without the presence and input of human beings and any norms or prescriptions of social responsibility. This has resulted in workforce downsizing, disciplining workers under various pretexts, including those who raise issues of operation safety, spying on workers through recording devices etc resulting in denial of rights and constant rail accidents.

Rail workers are fighting to affirm the human factor, the role played by socially conscious human beings, particularly those who actually operate and maintain the trains and who seek to uphold their own safety and that of the public. Workers are organized into collective defence organizations, which become the collective force to back their individual efforts to defend themselves and the public. They are fighting to have a decisive say over how railways are operated so as to bring them into the modern realm of social responsibility. Their fight deserves the full support of all Canadian workers and the broad public.

Workers' Forum is reproducing below an article written by Lyndon Isaak, newly elected President of the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, which highlights some of the railway workers' concerns at this time.

This article was published in

Number 7 - February 28, 2019

Article Link:
Transportation: Railway Workers' Courageous Struggle to Affirm the Human Factor

    

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