In the railways there are a total of 6 trade unions, 3 assigned ones (ACOD Spoor, ACV Transcom, VSOA Spoor) and 3 non-assigned/independent ones (OVS, ASTB, Metisp). The legal situation is as follows. Important decisions regarding the railway workers are made in the so-called national paritary committee (NPC), a typical work council situation. The government assigns some unions to represent the workers in this committee (the assigned unions, as opposed to the non-assigned ones). It is important to understand here that this is not based on union membership or workers votes or any other parameter that the workers themselves can influence, they are simply assigned at the discretion of the government. For example one assigned union (VSOA Spoor) has significantly lower membership than one independent union (OVS) but it is of course much more pliable towards the bosses than the OVS, and it gets seats in the NPC whereas the OVS doesn't.

As for the other component, the right to strike, to make a very very long story short: it doesn't exist. It exists in theory but not in practice. A good example here is the wildcat strike in the depots in 2018. This strike broke out among the traindrivers because the assigned unions had signed off in the NPC on an increase in productivity for the drivers without even consulting them. Metisp, which had just become the latest union in the railways a good month or so earlier, immediately supported the strike and used its new-found rights as a union to turn in a bunch of strike notices to cover the strike. Management rejected the strike notices. The other independent unions (OVS and ASTB) started turning in their own strike notices to support the strike, they were also rejected by management.

This is another important thing to understand, strike notices are more like strike requests, management is free to accept or reject these notices as it sees fit. Hence my statement that the right to strike exists in theory but not in practice. In practice, in general the independent unions get their strike notices rejected and the assigned unions get theirs accepted. But then the latter also don't support independent strike actions by the workers themselves. Indeed, that strike in 2018 was precisely _against_ the decision by the assigned unions to sign off on an productivity increase for the train drivers against their will and without even consulting them.

All of this presents some obvious problems when it comes to workplace organizing. Firstly, as there is no legal way to engage in strike action, any such action will be immediately illegal. This isn't necessarily a problem that's going to stop people, the strikes of both 2016 and 2018 were similarly illegal and that didn't stop anyone either. But a problem is that due to the way the sanctioning for this works, you can basically do this 2 times and by the 3rd time you are automatically laid off. And many of the most combative people have already used up their 2 times with the 2016 and 2018 strikes, so people aren't quite willing to take an action that will result in them simply being immediately laid off.

Secondly, given the inaccessibility of strike action, different people have different ideas on what to do. There are basically two main camps. The first argues that because only the assigned unions get seats in the NPC, we should try to change those unions from within. The second argues that just because we can't go on strike doesn't mean we can't throw one lawsuit after another at the railway management, and the workers should remain in independent rank-and-file unions. Both have obvious flaws from an anarcho-syndicalist perspective, and the latter is the only one which has at least actually gotten some results.

The method suggested in our call, of other people blocking access to the workplace, was determined to be infeasible. Firstly because there are numerous depots throughout the country so such an action would require large-scale coordination, and thereby not only be difficult to pull off but also difficult to keep hidden from the police so they don't just get there first. It's not like a single gate at some specific factory or something. Secondly because the work hours are not in shifts but individually. So the first person starts work at say 2:20, the next at 2:45, then one at 3:30, and so on. At any given time a blocking group would at most block a single worker from entering, and by the time the next worker would start the police has already arrived. Unlike the drivers, the signalers do work in shifts but the blocking of signal posts gets violently broken up by police within the hour with no results, this was also tried back in the 2016-2018 period.

That being said, plenty of workers are sympathetic to anarcho-syndicalist views on direct action, but I think something bigger will need to happen for a sufficient number of them to be willing to step over the barrier of illegality again. As I mentioned earlier, the most combative ones have already used up their 2 strikes in 2016 and 2018, and the newer ones who weren't yet around in 2018 are generally easily scared off. Many of them are scared of even getting 1 sanction even though that doesn't really do all that much on its own, it's only by the 3rd one that you get laid off.