It's difficult to write or speak honestly about what happened when death is so close to home and there hasn't been enough time to calm tempers and clarify the facts. After several weeks, the media hype, generated to capitalize on the accident on the one hand and morbidly increase its audience on the other, is beginning to subside. The theory that a crack in the welded rail caused the derailment of the Iryo train (a company majority-owned by Trenitalia) seems to have been accepted as true. The consequence of this derailment, which occurred on Sunday, January 18, in Adamuz, in the province of Córdoba, was the occupation of the adjacent track by several of its rear carriages, which collided with a Renfe train traveling in the opposite direction. This accident caused 46 deaths and over a hundred injuries. Two days later, a train driver died on a local line in the province of Barcelona after hitting a wall that had fallen onto the tracks due to heavy rain, leaving him without time to react. What's happening, and how did we get to this point?
In Spain, the railways have had a history that perfectly exemplifies the role of the state in the capitalist system. At the beginning of the 20th century, several private companies built a series of railway lines across the country. MZA (Madrid-Zaragoza-Alicante) or Ferrocarriles del Norte, for example, viewed the railways as just another profitable venture. But with the destruction of infrastructure and rolling stock caused by Franco's fascist coup and the ensuing carnage, in 1941 the state was forced to take charge of rebuilding the railways, and thus the public company RENFE (National Spanish Railways) was born. By bringing together all the activities that contributed to the company's operation, from train drivers to foresters who cut down trees to make sleepers, Renfe came to employ approximately 120,000 people.With the country's adaptation to international neoliberal standards and Spain's accession to the European Union, the entry of private capital into the rail transport sector became apparent. All services that could easily be outsourced to other companies, such as cleaning, security, and train maintenance and repair shops, were gradually privatized. The workers laid off from Enatcar after its privatization (a bus company owned by Renfe that guaranteed road trips in the event of train breakdowns) fought a significant struggle until they managed to be reinstated in the public company.
In the midst of this process, the Madrid-Seville high-speed line was opened in Spain in 1992, operating for the first time at speeds between 250 and 300 km/h, the section where this latest tragedy occurred. In the years that followed, every effort was made to increase the construction of high-speed lines, absorbing the majority of the public budget allocated to railways, to the detriment of slower conventional lines that nevertheless served many villages and small towns. Entrepreneurs saw it as advantageous for their businesses to quickly connect the major capitals by train, to the point of competing with air travel, unconcerned about leaving vast swathes of the country's interior depopulated, thus abandoning the countryside and the infrastructure that enabled communication, including the train itself. New high-speed lines were subsequently designed and built towards Barcelona, Galicia, and the Basque Country. Between 2004 and 2005, a key event occurred that shaped the current structure of the railway sector. Renfe was dissolved, and two new companies were created, along with all its employees: Renfe Operadora and Adif (Administrador de Infraestructuras). The former was established as an additional "railway operator," although at the time it was the only existing one. Adif would be the public company responsible for the infrastructure on which the "operators" would operate. Shortly thereafter, trains operated by private companies began to operate, albeit only in the freight sector. Passenger trains entered the market 15 years later with Ouigo, owned by the French public railway company (SNCF), and Iryo, a brand of Intermodalidad de Levante S.A., a company with an Italian majority but also owned by pension funds from three countries and a private Spanish company (Globalvia).
Throughout this transformation from a single public service company to a corporate entity operating a few public trains, accidents due to safety issues have occurred, but without serious injuries. But when there have been victims, they have been among maintenance workers, infrastructure construction workers, or train drivers. These accidents have received little coverage in the national media and none in the international press. From memory, in recent years, a train driver had his leg amputated near Barcelona after hitting a tree, a female train driver died instantly after a head-on collision with another train, and another worker died after being electrocuted during the construction of a rolling stock maintenance facility in Madrid. These are just "minor" examples, as there have been other accidents, and one in particular that chilled our blood. In 2013, 80 people died and nearly 150 were injured on a train to Santiago de Compostela (Galicia) due to human error on a section of the route where Adif had decided to remove an available safety system that would have prevented the accident. The conviction of the train driver and the acquittal of Adif's safety manager who gave the order have just been upheld.
While it is true that, in parallel with the changes, the most serious accidents were studied and subsequently developed and implemented safety systems that infinitely reduce the likelihood of re-experiencing past tragic situations, it is equally true that the push towards a frenetic lifestyle far from our emotional core (work, hometown, family, friends), combined with the uncontrolled impulse of tourism, has led to a dramatic increase in rail use in less than five years. Business logic has prevailed, increasing the frequency of trains until the rolling stock has virtually run out. Madrid's Chamartín station clarifies any doubts on this matter: in 2000, 20 million passengers passed through, in 2020 that number rose to 28 million, in 2023 it reached 36 million, and in 2024 it increased to 44.4 million. The railway reality is completely different, and so accidents are to be expected.
But what are workers' organizations doing? In the former Renfe and also in the current Renfe Operadora and Adif, there are numerous unions of all kinds with a certain tradition of struggle. This has certainly made working conditions significantly better than normal, but when they have had to bow to state planning and company management, they have done so to shameful extents. Despite the increasing claims these days that there is a problem with subcontracting services and that tasks performed by private companies should be returned to workers employed directly by public companies, the majority unions UGT and CCOO, as well as the corporatist train drivers' union (SEMAF), have been allowing and justifying this process for years without doing anything. Although everyone knows that improving workers' conditions (especially rest periods) improves their safety and reduces the risk of errors, no action has ever been taken in this direction, and companies have been allowed to increase their profit margins at the expense of greater exploitation of their staff. Ultimately, a faulty weld, possibly performed under pressure, caused the deaths of 46 people-including the train driver-on one of the trains involved in the Adamuz tragedy.
Time is money, goes a saying that seems to have been specifically conceived for capitalism. And we all know that reducing workers' training time or the tasks they perform, reducing travel times by increasing speed, or reducing the time between two trains bound for the same destination, inevitably leads to a decrease in safety, increasing the likelihood of error or the occurrence of even greater tragedies, as happened this time in Adamuz. But for SEMAF, the material conditions of other workers who are not train drivers have never been a concern, let alone any other issue that impacts our work, such as uncontrolled tourism or real estate speculation. The betrayal of some and the structural shortsightedness of others, immersed in an absolutely hierarchical system, are also part of the problem.
Given all of the above, if we want these tragedies to never happen again, it's essential to prioritize human life and reduce the risks that could threaten it. It's not about curbing all technological development, but rather analyzing the product of the lifestyle we're forced to lead, its ecological cost, and fighting to make this world and this life more enjoyable, which inevitably means fighting capitalist logic and the state that manages it.
Julio Reyero
https://umanitanova.org/spagna-deragliamento-ferroviario-una-tragedia-capitalista/
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Link: (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #6-26 - Spain: Train Derailment. A Capitalist Tragedy (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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