Workers at Serveis Ferroviaris de Mallorca (SFM) Mallorca Railway Service - have agreed to call partial strikes to demand improvements in the safety of the island’s railway network. The decision was taken at a meeting held at midday on Monday following the fatal accidents in Adamuz (Córdoba) and Gelida (Barcelona), according to sources from the SFM works council reported to Europa Press.
The approximately 70 workers—out of a total of 190—who attended the the meeting expressed their ‘overwhelming’ support for the partial strikes. Only four votes were cast against the proposal.
The works council will meet on Wednesday to finalise the details of the protests, which will begin at a low intensity in order to minimise the impact on passengers.
The sources consulted have indicated that it would be desirable for an agreement to be reached with the government to implement the demanded safety improvements before these partial strikes could take effect, which could begin ten days after the ballot was registered with the Tamib. Despite the desire to reach an agreement with the public company, the assembly was ‘phlegmatic’ and served as an opportunity for workers to present the problems identified in each of the SFM areas.
Shortly before the meeting, the chairman of the works council, Ricardo Más, already took it for granted that the workers would demand the partial stoppages. ‘After so long without being listened to, the only thing left for us is collective action,’ he stressed. ‘If the company does not want this to affect users, we must sit down and talk about safety improvements,’ he added.
The committee chairman considered that now that state and regional rail services throughout Spain ‘are sitting down to review their safety standards’ in the wake of the accidents in Adamuz and Gelida, it is a good time to do the same in Mallorca. ‘We know first-hand that there are many things to improve here, which have been reported for a long time and have been ignored, almost trivialised, and we believe that now is the time,’ he said.
These possible improvements in safety, he pointed out, respond more to “everyday” issues than to ‘macro figures’ and occur at different levels of operation. For example, he explained, workers have been calling for six years for the creation of a traffic safety committee ‘to study each incident and draw up protocols to prevent them’.
He also called for improvements in communication, as he considered it unacceptable ‘that what happens on the track is communicated by telephone and there is no traceability’. Many incidents, he said, are not reported and others are ‘covered up’. Added to this is the demand for greater speed in resolving incidents involving overhead lines, track closures or diversions, which for a long time have been ‘left to the discretion of the drivers’ expertise’.
‘They are given speed restrictions, up to seven times a day, and the broken tracks they have reported are still there three days later, and drivers have to be careful to limit their speed because it is not being repaired,’ he said. Asked about this before Monday’s meeting, the Regional Minister for Housing, Territory and Mobility, José Luis Mateo, said he was open to negotiating with the workers.
However, he asked them to inform him of their safety demands before deciding to take action, as he said he was unaware of them. ‘If a strike is called, it must be based on some reason,’ argued the minister, who assured that all the complaints that have been received from the workers have been resolved, responded to or are at least being processed.
‘We respect any decision taken at a workers’ assembly. What we would like, in any case, is for them to talk to us first and tell us what their needs are,’ he insisted. Mateo also asked that what happened on the mainland, ‘a tragic accident’, be separated from the situation of the railway network in Mallorca. ‘If we have a safe network, our trains are safe and we are responding to the requests and suggestions we receive from the works council... I think that answers the question,’ he said when asked if he would understand the workers taking action.