© MARC HERREMANS – MEDIA HOUSE
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The staff shortage among train conductors and train drivers is so great that many cannot even take their compensation days for weekend work. Some have “up to tens” of days open. The NMBS decided to pay out the overdue vacation days. But the train crew doesn’t like that. On Friday, the work was spontaneously laid down here and there.
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Koen Baumers
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“I’m away from home about half the weekends. No problem, that’s part of the job. But the compensation days during the week are all too often lost. This makes it difficult to plan the rest of the household. I have nothing to do with youmy wife says. Fortunately, we get along well, but that patience is not infinite.”
Train conductor Maarten (a pseudonym) tells his story anonymously – his employer doesn’t like it much when he talks to the press. But since the NMBS announced in an internal email this week that Maartens is forced to convert saved recuperation days into money, he doesn’t care much about that rule. He still has almost forty there, to be finished by the end of the year.
“I don’t want that money, I want peace and quiet,” says Maarten. “Bite your teeth, you’ll get those days off later: that was the message every time. All those days when you weren’t home, they’re screwing us through the nose now. And I’m not even the worst case in my depot: there are colleagues with 60 outstanding days. They would have to stop working now to finish it before the end of the year. But you can’t take a holiday, because the trains have to keep running.”
Social inspection
NMBS does not provide exact figures on the number of outstanding recovery days – it only refers to a “median of five days”. That is calculated on the total of the 30,000 employees, including people with a desk job during office hours. So 15,000 people have at least five days of holiday in arrears – 75,000 in all – but for many of them the backlog has risen to tens. That number is so high that the social inspectorate at NMBS knocked on the door and forced the railway company to tackle the problem. The solution of the rail company: pay the recup days. “But the staff would much rather take it in time than in money,” says Nicky Masscheleyn of ACOD Spoor.
Other unions also say there is a lot of concern about the decision. Some trains here and there did not leave on Friday because the staff spontaneously stopped work. “People have had enough of it because of the long work, and they have been promised for so long that things would get better,” says Joachim Permentier of OVS. “Now comes the message that they cannot take their recovery days but are paid. They are afraid it will become a habit.”
The NMBS and HR Rail personnel agency acknowledge that “the solution does not satisfy all employees involved”, it sounds in a written response. “A phase-out plan had already been worked out before the arrival of the social inspectorate, but the social inspectorate demands that the current situation be resolved as quickly as possible. SNCB must ensure that the requirements are complied with. Various actions are also being launched to fill the six hundred vacancies at NMBS as quickly as possible.”
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