nationalization

By Paul Atkin - Greener Jobs Alliance, February 15, 2023

This report from “Democracy Now” on the rail disaster in Ohio last week, in which a 150 car freight train carrying toxic chemicals derailed and a “controlled burn” by the company released “a fireball and mushroom cloud of smoke” into the environment, shows where the Tory “modernisation agenda” for the Railways ends up. 

All their key themes

• cuts to staffing 
• cuts to safety procedures
• restrictions on the right to strike

are all in place in the USA; which is a model for the government’s attempts to deregulate employers while tying up workers’ capacity to resist.

The interviews with Emily Wright, community organizer based near the site of the derailment; Ross Grooters, a locomotive engineer and co-chair of Railroad Workers United; and Julia Rock, an investigative reporter with The Lever tell a cautionary tale everyone in the UK should know about.

 Please think of this next time you hear a government minister chuntering on about “modernisation” and “outdated practices” and pass this on.

“Bomb Train” in Ohio Sickens Residents After Railroad Cutbacks, Corporate Greed Led to Toxic Disaster | Democracy Now!

By Emily Wright, Julia Rock, Ross Grooters, Amy Goodman, and Juan Gonzáles - Democracy Now!, February 13, 2023

Fears of a wider health and environmental disaster are growing, after a 150-car freight train operated by Norfolk Southern derailed and a so-called controlled burn released toxic chemicals last week in East Palestine, Ohio. Residents reported seeing a fireball and mushroom cloud of smoke fill the skyline. Data released by the Environmental Protection Agency shows the train contained more toxic and carcinogenic chemicals than initially reported, including phosgene, a poisonous gas that has been used as a chemical weapon in war. Officials lifted an evacuation order for residents last Wednesday, saying the air and water were safe, but residents have reported sore throats, burning eyes and respiratory problems, and wildlife has been found dead. Meanwhile, scrutiny has turned onto Norfolk Southern, which in recent years has challenged regulatory laws aimed at making the rail industry safer and made mass cuts to railroad staffing while spending billions on stock buybacks and executive compensation. We get an update from Emily Wright, community organizer based near the site of the derailment; Ross Grooters, a locomotive engineer and co-chair of Railroad Workers United; and Julia Rock, an investigative reporter with The Lever.

By Gabe Christenson and Steve Zeltser - Work Week Radio, February 6, 2023

By Mayor Seidel - Sewer Socialists, February 5, 2023

In December, Congress and the Biden Administration forced a deal on railroad workers and stripped them of their right to strike. This made two things clear: how draconian the private freight railroads are to their workers, and yet how essential they are to the functioning of the country. Equally, private railroads are not only essential to the economy, but to the climate. Transportation is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than any other sector, including electricity generation. Within transportation, among the modes primarily used for freight (trucks, rail, and boats), railroads were responsible for only 7% of emissions despite carrying 27% of cargo (in ton-miles). Despite being a net reducer of emissions by taking trucks off the roads, the private railroads are avowed enemies of climate action. Afraid of losing their lucrative coal-hauling traffic, the same four railroads who Congress acted on behalf of have spent millions to lobby against climate action and deny climate change. Capitalists who bankroll climate deniers own the most important system of low-carbon infrastructure on the continent.

The effects of the existing freight railroads on climate change, both good and ill, are minuscule compared to the unrealized potential that they hold. The railroads would have a higher share of freight traffic if not for the shortsighted management of their private ownership. Additionally, 57% of transportation emissions come from “light duty vehicles,” i.e. passenger cars. The strongest opportunities to eliminate car trips are in urban centers, by building inviting pedestrian spaces, safe bicycle infrastructure and robust public transit networks. At the same time, to build a credible alternative to automobile travel, these green transportation systems must be connected to one another into metropolitan and intercity rail networks. This cannot be done without the infrastructure that, outside the Northeast, is controlled by the private freight railroads.

The private railroads are hostile to passenger service, which they see as a threat to their freight operations. Amtrak publishes a “report card” each year, ranking the private freight railroads by how much they delayed passenger trains. In 2021, at least 20% of riders were delayed on more than half of state-supported routes and 14 of 15 long-distance routes. The private railroads even hold back some commuter railroad services. Several Metra lines serving suburban Chicagoland are operated under “purchase-of-service” agreements with freight railroads, leaving commuters at the mercy of their private owners. Newer systems like Virginia’s VRE that use private freight corridors must negotiate complicated and expensive agreements with host railroads to expand service. Confronting climate change must include rationalizing the relationship between freight and passenger rail service, both of which are essential to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

By General Executive Board - United Electrical Workers, January 30, 2023

Statement of the UE General Executive Board

Railroads are a crucial part of our nation’s infrastructure. Nearly every sector of our economy depends on goods shipped by the railroads, which haul forty percent of all long-distance freight in the U.S., measured by ton-miles. A third of all exports travel by rail. Furthermore, the greater fuel efficiency of using rail to move both people and freight means that moving more of our transportation onto the railroads will be necessary to address the existential threat of climate change.

Yet the private owners of our nation’s Class 1 railroads have shown themselves utterly incapable of facing the challenge of the climate crisis, dealing fairly with their own workers, or even meeting the most basic needs of their customers. The railroad companies cannot even be said to be in the business of moving freight; they are merely in the business of using their monopoly control over the nation’s rail infrastructure to squeeze as much profit as possible from customers and workers at the behest of their Wall Street shareholders.

Therefore, we demand that Congress immediately begin a process of bringing our nation’s railroads under public ownership. Public ownership of part or all of their rail systems has allowed many other countries to create rail systems that can move people and goods quickly, affordably, and in an environmentally sound way. With public ownership, governments can take the long view and make crucial infrastructure investments — and prevent price-gouging.

Railroads are, like utilities, “natural monopolies.” The consolidation of the Class 1 railroads in the U.S. into five massive companies over the past several decades has made it clear that there is no “free market” in rail transportation. With most customers having no other choice, and no central authority mandating long-term planning, each individual railroad company has little incentive to make investments in infrastructure and every temptation to take as much of their income as possible as profits. Even Martin Oberman, chair of the Surface Transportation Board, the federal agency that regulates rail, has called the railroads “monopolists” who are cutting services and raising prices because “that’s the easiest way for them to get rich.”

In their endless thirst for profit, the railroads have implemented a system called “precision scheduled railroading,” which simply means operating with as few staff as possible — speed-up by another name. Shippers have been complaining about the resulting poor service for years, and during the pandemic our entire economy paid the price with snarled supply lines leading to shortages and price hikes. The railroads do not even seem interested in expanding their share of the freight market, instead seeking to extract more and more short-term profit out of customers for whom rail is the only feasible way to ship their products.

The effect on railroad workers has been even more severe. In order to implement precision scheduled railroading, the companies have imposed draconian attendance policies which make it virtually impossible for railroad workers to take any time off, even for medical reasons. This intolerable state of affairs almost led to a railroad strike at the end of last year, until President Biden and Congress — clearly willing to intervene in the “market” when workers threaten to withdraw their labor — imposed a contract on the workers that did not even contain the workers’ bottom-line demand of adequate sick leave.

By Kenny Stancil - Common Dreams, January 27, 2023

A new manifesto calls for building "a sustainable social pact for the 21st century" in which "our rights are guaranteed, not based on our ability to pay, or on whether a system produces profit, but on whether it enables all of us to live well together in peace and equality."

An international coalition made up of more than 200 trade unions and progressive advocacy groups on Thursday published the Santiago Declaration, a manifesto for "a complete overhaul of our global economic system."

The undeniably anti-neoliberal document proclaiming that "our future is public" is the product of a meeting held in Chile—the "laboratory of neoliberalism" where Milton Friedman and his University of Chicago acolytes' upwardly redistributive economic model was first imposed at gunpoint by Gen. Augusto Pinochet's military junta.

From November 29 to December 2, more than 1,000 organizers from over 100 countries gathered in Santiago and virtually to germinate a left-wing movement against "the dominant paradigm of growth, privatization, and commodification."

"We are at a critical juncture," the manifesto begins. "At a time when the world faces a series of crises, from the environmental emergency to hunger and deepening inequalities, increasing armed conflicts, pandemics, rising extremism, and escalating inflation, a collective response is growing."

"Hundreds of organizations across socioeconomic justice and public services sectors—from education and health services, to care, energy, food, housing, water, transportation, and social protection—are coming together to address the harmful effects of commercializing public services, to reclaim democratic public control, and to reimagine a truly equal and human rights-oriented economy that works for people and the planet," reads the document. "We demand universal access to quality, gender-transformative, and equitable public services as the foundation of a fair and just society."

By staff - Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, January 21, 2023

By Union Jake and Adam - Valley Labor Report, January 16, 2023

By Union Jake and Adam - Valley Labor Report, January 13, 2023

By Workers' and Peasants' Platform for Water and Energy - Workers' and Peasants' Platform for Water and Energy, December 16, 2022

We highlight that the energy area in Brazil was historically built to be a sector of excellence, even though it has countless contradictions. We have natural bases (water, rivers, oil, sun, wind, among others) that through the work of the workers provide comparative advantages at world level. We have an oil and electricity industry with the potential to become one of the largest sovereign industries in the world and in conditions to meet the priority needs of the Brazilian people. We have a goods and services industry capable of meeting the national content of the energy production chains. We have highly capable workers who produce and supply electricity, water, cooking gas, gasoline, diesel oil, agricultural fertilizers and other derivatives of this immense country. We have production and mastery of built and known technologies, and we have experience in how to treat with dignity those affected by the works and workers in the sector.

However, the evidence on the energy issue reveals a dramatic situation left to the country by the Temer and Bolsonaro governments. The savagery of the prices of cooking gas, fuel and electricity have been transformed into an instrument of rapine on the Brazilian people. Strategic companies have been sliced up, strangled and privatised. The main State structures have been destroyed or are being captured by speculators and rent-seekers.

It is a situation of destruction of energy sovereignty, science and technology and all initiatives for the industrialisation of energy. Even the country's independence and energy security are not guaranteed.

Read the entire statement (PDF).