The Decline Of Moral Within The Rail Systems

[Mal Bigg <parkdrive@my-deja.com>]

State Rail, like many other government utilities is only now paying the
price for adopting the promotion by merit system.
During the early 90’s, many experienced campaigners with 20 years plus
service were being beating to promotion by quick mind kids or
unemployed semi professional students or fully qualified professionals
needing stop gap employment.
Frustrated by the system, many of the experienced employee’s simply
opted to dig in or resign out of frustration.  To a degree, this is
when national rail services appeared to enter a period of decline..
Many industries today have only realised that the experience
campaigners were the backbone of the industry.  As these experienced
employees started to thin out, [by resignation / retirement or other]
leaving many of these 5 minute wonders running the system at the actual
coal front, the evidence of insufficient knowledge, experience and
commitment slowly started to become evident.
Many of these individuals quickly understood the lousy hours and
shiftwork on the frontline and sort promotion to junior & middle
management positions.  Promotion by merit allowed such quick promotion
to these positions, which in the end resulted in people [in so much as
years of service and experience] being directly responsible for train
running infrastructure or policy.  Now I don’t blame these individuals
for seeking advancement, I’m critical of the system that allowed it.  I
always found these people whom achieved quick promotion had a certain
distain of people with many years service.  Either they felt
uncomfortable [or intimidated perhaps] by the knowledge the old
campaigners had acquired by their continuous years service, or they
were in short, jealous.
As time passed, it was these people who conducted the interviews for
people seeking promotion.  I remember that years service and experience
many people held was seen as practically worthless at the interview.
If you had stayed in a certain position for many years, likely due to
job satisfaction or other relevant reasons, [like you lived close by]
you were seen as being complacent and stagnant.  How ironic it was to
see some individual perform so brilliantly at interview, successfully
get the job and than quickly found to be almost totally useless [in
practical terms] when it can to hands on work.  No sooner had they
achieved promotion, they had applications in for another job.
By the late 90’s, experience was getting so dangerously thin on the
ground that State Rails precarious under-belly had quickly became
glowingly apparent.
As an old rail employee once observed: "experience was worthless while
you had abundant staff with it, today it’s that thin on the ground,
it’s almost invisible".
Another hidden wisdom he stated:- "promotion by merit was set up and
encouraged by people whom needed such a system to advance their own
ends".


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