Austria: great internal retraining program in Austrian railway is having a hard time taking off

Trim administration and organize transfers.  The issue of personnel costs, i.e. 43% of total exploitation costs, is one of the ÖBB’s numerous problems and forces the public company, every year, to ask the Federal State to absorb its debt.  The company employs 43,000 people, two third being civil servants with a job for life who cannot be transferred without their consent and the WC’s.  When he arrived last summer, Christian Kern announced that he intended to put the company’s finances back on their feet by 2013.  Among the numerous measures announced to that end, are 1,000 job cuts a year as well as the transfer of part of the employees working in overstaffed services to understaffed services.  To that end, the ÖBB already has the KAM (Konzerninterner Arbeitsmarkt), an internal platform created in 2009, a form of internal “labor market.”  Knowledge is obviously already present in the company which has several training centers.  The first sector targeted by the retraining program is the central administration.  On the contrary, trade services could do with more employees.  As for technical departments, the situation varies from one sector to the other, but the union says those that need the most workers are track and building maintenance.  “Turning a train station agent into an account manager is obviously extremely difficult” pointed out Sebastian Kummer, transport expert at the Vienna University of Economics.  Precisely, according to the management, sorting and the maintenance of rolling stock have 3,000 excess employees, and not all of them can become commercial counselors.  Out of 43,000 employees at the ÖBB, about 14,000 aren’t civil servants and can therefore easily be transferred.  Therefore, they are the ones targeted by Kern’s plan.  For the moment though, only 600 answered his call.