THE MONDAY, JULY 2, 1979. Damaging the railways

Press, 2 July 1979, Page 16

THE MONDAY, JULY 2, 1979. Damaging the railways

The original cause of the dispute between the National Union of Railwaymen and the Railways management is being buried by the events which have flowed from the industrial action taken by some members of the N.U.R. Railwaymen have refused to handle cargo from bulk freight forwarders; freight is piling up and men who have refused work, or for whom there is no work, are being laid off. The lay-offs have themselves become the subject of a further dispute between the N.U.R. and the Railways Department; if freight forwarders’ goods remain banned some of their staff, too. will have to be laid off.

To the firms whose goods are held up, and to the public who will ultimately be paying for the delays, this must seem a long way from the reorganisation of passenger services on the North Island Main Trunk which began the dispute. The railwaymen claim to find a connection in that, they say, the Railways Department proposed to reduce some passenger services which operate at a loss while “selling out” the profitable bulk-freight service to private enterprise.

The result of the railwaymen’s ban on the freight forwarders surely demonstrates the speciousness of their argument. The Railways Department still has a critical part to play in the nation’s transport system. When the railways are not handling that freight, as at present, the system quickly comes to a standstill. But the actions of the railwaymen in penalising those who have no connection with the original dispute only give further weight to the arguments

in favour of scaling down the place of the railways in the nation’s transport system.

That would be an unfortunate move, especially when the increasing price of fuel gives new importance to the railways’ ability to move bulk freight cheaply over long distances. The potential abilities of the railways are of no use to anyone if the men who must make the system work refuse to do so. The action of the railwaymen is a telling argument against the protection which the railways enjoy from competition by road transport. Two weeks ago the Railways Department offered to meet the representatives of the N.U.R. to discuss any submissions they had to make on freight forwarding as it affected the union’s members, provided that the ban on moving freight was lifted. Since then thousands of tonnes of freight have piled up throughout the railway system. The union is insisting it will deal only with the Government and not the department’s management. There is some hope that the Federation of Labour will intervene in the dispute early this week. It will have pressing reasons to do so as the ban on freight forwarding threatens the jobs of members of other unions. Even if a way to a speedy settlement can be found, the railwaymen have succeeded in damaging still further the reputation of the railways as a transport organisation. They have become their own worst enemies in any further rationalisation or reorganisation of the country’s transport system.