The general secretary of CCOO, Unai Sordo, has warned this Monday that he will demand "responsibilities of all kinds", starting with those of a political nature, if it is finally established that the State Secretariat for Communication—dependent on the Office of the President of the Government—was behind the leak of the audio recordings of the recent rail accident in Urda (Toledo), in which 69 people died.
In an interview with Europa Press, Sordo criticized the disclosure of the recordings between the Atocha control center and the drivers of the trains involved in the accident in the first hours after the incident, at a time when the Government had already pointed to a possible human error as the cause of the accident.
In this way, the union leader has considered "perfectly understandable" the "outrage" of the rail workforce for the fact that, barely a day after the collision and while the technical causes were being investigated, private and protected conversations were disseminated in the media.
"To find yourself in the media, out of context, with a colleague's voice in conversations that people who work on the railways know are encrypted conversations and that, therefore, they had to have been decrypted, generates outrage that I fully share," the head of CCOO has emphasized.
In his view, this operation sought to center the debate on a single aspect: "It puts the focus on one of the dimensions of the matter, which may have been a human error, but by putting it out of context from everything else when they were analyzing the possible technical errors that are a necessary cause of the possible subsequent human error."
Asked directly about what steps the union will take if it is confirmed that the leak originated from the Executive itself through the State Secretariat for Communication, Sordo was clear: "All kinds of responsibilities would be demanded. Responsibilities, first of all, political ones."
Failing at the origin of the problem
The leader of CCOO has likened this approach to what the union repeatedly observes in workplace fatalities, where it is often intended to place the blame on the weakest link in the production chain, the worker, holding him responsible for his own accident.
"This is a logic that we know a lot about from workplace accidents, when the focus is placed on what the worker did at the very last moment that caused the accident," he said.
As he has explained, acting this way means overlooking structural failures: "Previously there are surely structural errors, that the timely preventive measures were not taken, or that that worker did not take hold of a lifeline, or that there is no machine stop system when something or other circumstances occur. We know how unfair it is to focus on the person the last element of error that it is intended should be the one that explains the entire catastrophe".
Rejection of a "Roman circus" after the resignations
In relation to the resignations already submitted by the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, and the President of Adif, Luis Pedro Marco de la Peña, Sordo has said that the head of Transport has assumed his "political responsibility in a sequence of two very serious accidents and a perception of the worsening state of the rail system, especially high-speed rail, but also Cercanías".
However, he has ruled out that the response to problems in the rail system consists of continuing to accumulate dismissals in the public structure: "This country has to get used to addressing structurally the problems that public services, in this case infrastructure, may have, rather than that this seems like a Roman circus where the idea is that every week we lower the thumb on someone".
For Sordo, the immediate priority must be "to identify exactly all the causes that have led to this accident, to assess whether the safety and control systems are adequate and function properly to provide certainty to the Spanish population".
Along these lines, he has called for a deep review of the rail model in force since the separation of Renfe and Adif, taking into account the emergence of new private operators.
"You have to see whether there is some element of discoordination in a country where traffic on the high-speed rail lines has multiplied in recent years in terms of trains, frequencies, passengers and journeys," he said, calling for strengthening safety systems and increasing investment in maintenance after carrying out a "near audit of how things stand," as the unions in the sector have been proposing.