By Garry Walters
MELBOURNE — Rail workers are growing more concerned that the much-talked-about National Rail Freight Corporation is heading off the rails because the federal government is not prepared to fund properly the major upgrade of the national rail network which it and all state governments agreed is urgently needed.
From the outset, rail workers have been apprehensive about the barely concealed privatisation agenda in project. Also, the suggestion that the NRFC should begin with "green fields" or a "clean sheet" through the establishment of a new enterprise-based industrial award is seen as a strategy to smash longstanding working conditions of rail workers.
Suspicions were reinforced when federal and state governments, rail authorities and the ACTU tried to exclude and later obstruct direct rail union involvement in the NRFC negotiation and consultation processes.
In response, delegates from various national rail unions met on March 8 and endorsed a Rail Unions NRFC Action Plan which provided for mass meetings to inform the rank and file of developments and the threat of a 24-hour national rail stoppage (not the May 28 stoppage, which was by train drivers around a pay claim) if there was an inadequate response from governments and rail authorities to union demands.
In Victoria at least, mass meetings were held in April, and they overwhelmingly endorsed the action plan.
The national stoppage was initially planed for just before the May premiers' conference but was postponed to an unspecified date because of the NSW elections.
However, a May 20 meeting of rail delegates in Victoria called for union officials to report back in June on Australian Transport Advisory Council meetings held in conjunction with the premiers' conference.
The delegates demanded that the union officials insist that the NRFC be entirely government-owned, that there be a national plan to modernise rail workshops and upgrade track, signalling and communication support services. Any new NRFC award, they resolved, should be only the first step towards a new industry-wide rail award.
These are the core union concerns. Others are that there be a parallel upgrading of national passenger transport and satisfactory funding for other non-NRFC, state-based rail services and other public transport systems.