Railway workers are convenient scapegoats

Shay Niv

Israel Railways is a government company whose directors are almost all Transport and Finance Ministry appointees.

It is so convenient to blame the workers for delays in trains or smoke in the cars. It must be the fault of Israel Railways employees and the workers committee. That is why it is necessary to close, break up, reestablish, and better yet, privatize the railways.

Minister of Transport Israel Katz did not mention that Israel Railways' is a government company whose board of directors is manned almost entirely by appointees of the Ministry of Transport and Ministry of Finance. The directors are the train drivers, they bear the ultimate responsibility. They are the men who approved the appointment of a retired IDF major general as CEO. We demand professionalism from the rank and file employees, but general's stars for the executives, preferably a crony of the minister.

The Ministry of Transport and Ministry of Finance want to privatize Israel Railways' maintenance unit. Only the carriage's manufacturer, a Canadian company, will know how to properly maintain the rolling stock, the government officials claim. A very interesting assertion.

I asked El Al Israel Airlines Ltd. (TASE: ELAL) workers committee chairman Yossi Levy whether Boeing Company (NYSE: BA), which built the airline's planes, maintained them. He laughed, saying that not only did El Al employees maintain its Boeing planes, but that Boeing sent planes from the US for El Al staff to work on. He said that, as far as Boeing was concerned, El Al has one of the best maintenance staff in the world.

The Ministry of Transport and Ministry of Finance are not really interested in train safety. They want to fire 300 employees of the government company, because governments are bad. This is not the worldview of a rolling stock engineer; it is the world view of government officials in Jerusalem. It is the same reason why the officials want to dismantle Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) (TASE: ELEC.B22), even though it provides a high level of service by every measure, and according to opinion polls.

How do we know that the government is not interested in safety? Just recently it was reported that Israel Railways bought 150 carriages with an obsolete standard in order to "shorten the timetable to close the deal". The original tender documents stipulated the procurement of rolling stock that complied with the new standard, but the tenders committee changed the requirement at the last moment. Katz did not convene a press conference about that; he did not demand the removal of the senior railway executives.

Israel Railways needs reform. Not because of its workers committee, but because overnight the government correctly decided to turn a marginal transport company into a real mass transit network with huge budgets. Under these circumstances, everyone, and not just the workers, have to change.

Histadrut chairman Ofer Eini is an excellent partner in this reform. He led the reform that turned the Public Works Department into Israel National Roads Company Ltd., the reform of Israel Postal Company Ltd., the Israel Broadcasting Authority, and most recently, at the Israel Land Administration. But when the purpose of reform is privatization for the sake of privatization, then Eini is also an excellent partner for confrontation.

We will now have to choose.

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on April 17, 2011

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2011

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