Nine months after January 10, the date on which a national agreement was
signed between the managers of RFI, the FS group, and many of thetransport unions (CGIL, CISL, UIL, UGL, FAST, ORSA), which should have
represented the beginning of a profound reorganization of the entire
railway infrastructure maintenance sector, and four months after June 3,
the date on which the company formally gave the go-ahead to this
restructuring which, beyond the high-sounding declarations of facade and
the slogans paraded like advertising spots, materialized almost
exclusively with a change in the hours of maintenance workers, it is
perhaps possible to draw up a first provisional assessment of the
consequences that this agreement has entailed, both in terms of
achieving the declared corporate objectives and with regard to the
repercussions on the level of safety and quality of life of the operators.
Let's start by specifying (see UN 20/2024) that the January 10
agreement, in order to become effective, should have been ratified by
specific territorial tables in which regional company managers and trade
union representatives, once they had assessed the local specificities,
the possibility of implementation, the critical issues to be addressed
and the changes to be made, should have established its feasibility and
convenience. In many territories these tables reached a synthesis, in
others it was not possible to reach a shared position, and negotiations
broke down. Starting from June 3, the company started the new working
hours both in the "aligned" regions, applying the territorial
agreements, and in the "rebel" regions, unilaterally imposing a shift,
based on repetitive cycles of twenty-eight days organized in continuous
time slots of seven hours and thirty-six minutes alternating between
morning, afternoon and night, seven days a week.
The unilaterally imposed shift, not without reason nicknamed the "gulag
shift", was designed to be as penalising as possible for the staff. Some
of the "pearls" of this schedule are, for example, the eleven
consecutive working days, no free weekends, nights starting on the day
of rest, sixty hours spread over eight days without intermediate breaks,
double consecutive nights, four nights in a week, the impossibility of
taking a lunch or dinner break even when the schedule ends after 9.30 pm
or 4 pm. Not content with all this, the company went further by denying
a whole series of basic rights established by the contract or by law,
such as the use of hourly permits or a minimum of flexibility on
arrival, ten minutes, necessary for workers arriving by train so as not
to lose the whole day in the event of a delay, or by attempting to
discriminate against workers who are entitled to 104. The possibility
for managers responsible for the various maintenance units to be able to
move shifts with only 48 hours' notice has made it impossible to
organize and manage one's private and family life or make any type of
commitment with the certainty of being able to do so. respect, in a
climate of perpetual uncertainty and precariousness; proof of all this
is the fact that more and more frequently young people who have just
been hired are forced to resign, something unthinkable until a few years
ago, paying the expected heavy penalties, and families in which both
spouses work find themselves unable to look after small children or
elderly relatives. Added to this is the need, in order to cover the
entire time slot, to divide the maintenance teams, previously made up of
an average of ten operators, into smaller groups, on average three
people, an absolutely insufficient number to carry out even the smallest
activity, a difficulty aggravated by the fact that many new hires do not
possess the necessary qualifications to be able to independently carry
out the scheduled work; and the simultaneous forced need to have the
staff move even hundreds of kilometers, especially at night, to reach
the service locations and thus be able to reach an adequate number.
The timid response of the regional unions to this unilateral imposition,
a timidity partly caused by the pressure received from the national
unions eager to perfect the agreement of January 10, has materialized
almost exclusively in a series of formal protests and requests for
explanations, to which the top management of RFI has responded with a
deafening silence, an impenetrable wall of silence and a continuous
passing of the buck to the upper rung of the hierarchical ladder, in an
exhausting game of Chinese boxes or matryoshkas that, in the long run,
can only frustrate any attempt to find an interlocutor. The lack of
answers and clarifications has gone hand in hand with the massive use of
disciplinary measures and sanctions used as a deterrent against any
behavior deemed inappropriate and as a warning to those less inclined to
passively accept arbitrary impositions, a sort of blacklist for "bad
children" which has been counterbalanced by "prostitution" lists for
"good" ones: a judgment drawn up by the managers responsible for the
maintenance units regarding the various workers, a judgment to which
part of the remuneration will be linked. The purpose of these "gulag" or
punitive shifts seems quite clear, to try to overcome the resistance of
the workers, exhausting them physically and psychologically so as to
make them accept a slightly better agreement and close the game, it
matters little if doing so puts their health at risk, forcing them to
work shifts that do not allow adequate rest, safety, imposing long
journeys to reach the workplace, making them operate in plants they do
not know, often without adequate technical preparation and experience
and the possibility of living their daily lives adequately.
Paradoxically, this new timetable structure and this organization in
quantitatively reduced and qualitatively inadequate teams is absolutely
not functional even from a corporate point of view, cyclical
maintenance, which in fact prevents accidents and breakdowns, is
practically zero due to the lack of personnel, the inadequacy of the
means available and the increasingly reduced availability of time slots
free from trains, the inconveniences to circulation and the significant
delays of this last period risk being only a first warning of what could
happen soon; all resources are diverted to the escort to the
contractors, responsible for the renewal works, in a now generalized
model that foresees the loss of professionalism, competence and
consequently bargaining power, by the railway workers, in the name of a
corporate de-responsibilization in terms of worker safety, delegated to
the managers of the companies themselves.
The workers' response to these actions has been firm and numerically
very significant. There have been various initiatives and several
strikes called by the unions that did not sign the agreement, USB, COBAS
and ANM, which were joined by the majority of members of the signatory
unions, who for their part continued to defend the January agreement,
arousing no small amount of suspicion among the maintenance workers who,
it should be made clear, are not entrenched in defense of a timetable
that must remain unchanged forever, and are ready to discuss any
changes, dictated however by actual needs: any change in timetable must
only occur if justified by real and not imaginary conditions, and must
above all be the last step of a reorganization that foresees a whole
series of essential conditions before this, hiring of staff, their
qualification, purchase of a fleet of vehicles adequate for maintenance
needs, search for adequate time slots, guarantee of legal rights and
above all allow "the reconciliation of life and work times" as declared
in the agreement of 10 January... The condition for being able to start
negotiating again must therefore be the withdrawal of the January
agreement and the return to the situation before June 3, it is not
possible to sit down at a table on the basis of blackmail which,
stripped of all its superstructure, can be summarized as "we will
massacre you with an inhuman shift until you accept the conditions we
like", especially now that the appeal against the company for anti-union
behavior has been deemed illegitimate precisely because of the agreement
in question, which, beyond the good intentions it had, if it had any,
has revealed itself to be a Trojan horse with which RFI has brought the
workers to their knees with the more or less apparent complicity of the
signatory unions.
The weapons available to achieve the cancellation of this agreement,
given also the legislation on strikes in the public service (which is
such when there are demonstrations to be prevented, but not when there
is the right to mobility to be guaranteed, especially for the low-paid
commuters) and the ever casual recourse to requisition by the zealous
minister of infrastructure, are always the same: "civil disobedience",
trying to implement behaviors that put the company in difficulty (such
as returning for a period to clock in and do the old timetable) and
"uncivil obedience", that is, a firm, rigid and uncompromising
observance of all the regulations and rules that would in fact paralyze
all activity. Clearly all this can have a margin of success only if a
significant number of operators undertake these initiatives, because as
always, and once again, the real difference will be made by the silent
majority, Gramsci's "indifferent" and Dante's "lazy". It is necessary to
get rid of apathy, habit, the search for private stratagems or
shortcuts, which on the one hand can lighten the situation of
individuals but inevitably end up damaging everyone else, the solution
must be collective or it will not be a solution: "No man can emancipate
himself otherwise than by emancipating with him all the men around him"
(Bakunin). The fear of losing what little we seem to have must not be an
alibi to give up fighting and trying to get something better, fear is
the most powerful weapon in the hands of those who try to keep us from
raising our heads and keep us in a perpetual state of submission, we
cannot be satisfied with the life that others choose for us, as Thoreau
says: "Many men have a life of quiet desperation: do not resign
yourselves to this, rebel, do not drown yourselves in mental laziness,
look around you. Dare to change, seek new roads".
A question however remains unanswered in the background, why so much
determination in pursuing an organizational model that in fact boils
down to a change in working hours, which is not even functional? The
first reason, let's say short term, is clearly that of not losing "the
huge resources foreseen by the PNRR investment plan", a declaration that
with the usual foresight of the Italian ruling class translates into a
sort of stagecoach robbery, without any concern for creating the
conditions for structural growth that would allow its effects to be felt
in the long term both in terms of economic development and employment,
but limiting itself to trying to grab as many funds as possible without
verifying the future sustainability of this model. The suspicion is
however that there is a desire to privatize the company at least
partially, and to make the package more attractive to potential buyers
by offering them workers completely free from any regulation regarding
working hours and completely available according to the needs of the
"boss". Broadening our gaze a bit, it is quite easy to understand how
this attack on the working class of a sector that has been "privileged"
from this point of view up to now, could only be the first step towards
a more generalized attempt to erode a whole series of rights in terms of
labor protection, which began several years ago, just think of the
various deregulations on flexibility and "fake autonomous contracts" and
the repeal of Article 18, but which now risks becoming increasingly
aggressive and jeopardizing a whole series of conquests that the labor
movement has obtained with great sacrifices over the course of the past
century.
Alemannaro
https://umanitanova.org/in-equilibrio-precario-sulle-rotaie/
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