Nepotism debate at Spain's ADIF, INECO and TRAGSA

ADIF outsources its workforce to INECO and TRAGSA without any public examination

ADIF, Spain's railway infrastructure manager, runs the network with a workforce of 13,000 direct employees. But a substantial share of the staff working inside the company is not its own: they are INECO or TRAGSA employees, hired without having passed a civil service exam. According to the argument that opens this discussion, the mechanism works as a disguised temp agency: the staffing shortfall is covered with external personnel, with no oversight of who gets into those processes, and with the suspicion that nepotism runs rampant. The consequence, the argument goes, is that the state-owned company loses control over its own projects.

Project contracts handed out behind closed doors and competitors shut out

The second front is the business side. Contracts for projects, inspections and site supervision end up at INECO without private engineering firms being able to compete for that work. In other words, a state-owned company in the sector keeps the whole pie while everyone else watches from the sidelines. Some argue this is not a market problem but a design one: if the State ensures that only its satellites administer the business, the result is exactly what you would expect. Friedman's Law, the son's law, the one saying that everything the State does costs at least twice as much, is cited here not as dogma but as diagnosis.

The fruta laundering: first the cushy job, then the exam

The path described is circular. You get in through INECO or TRAGSA, where the nepotistic hire is camouflaged. Then a civil service exam is called in which the internal candidate carries extra points "because you're worth it." And the final pass serves as fruta laundering. When it doesn't even get that far, a second interview settles the file: the desired candidate is hired even though someone else scored better on the exam. The result is that meritocracy vanishes from the process and the selection criterion becomes the contact agenda.

The union factor and the inbreeding of positions

In the background emerges the weight of unions in the company's structure. ADIF is described as a space where positions are assigned among people from the same circle, with union membership as the main merit and technicians replaced by profiles more political than technical. The inbreeding is not exclusive to the public sector, it is noted: it also happens in privatized companies, where unionists' children land at Metro, Telefónica or Endesa. The union, in this reading, not only costs money in subsidies: it places its own people.

The maintenance that never peine and the European funds

The conversation drifts toward the money. 2021 is pointed to as the year the degradation becomes visible, with a question left unanswered: what peine in 2020, the year of minimal traffic, when someone could have pocketed the maintenance budget without carrying out the work. In the Adamuz case, a full track renewal project is described as having been executed in patches, and it is at one of those joints that the weld failed. Were civil servants supervising the works, or were there buddies? ADIF's management of the European funds is flagged as the elephant in the room that Brussels perhaps has not seen.

The alternative: privatize or open up the exams

The proposed solutions go in two directions. One is to privatize and let the user pay only for the train they take, comparing ADIF's management with AENA's, which comes off badly in the comparison. The other is more surgical: public civil service exams, with the scores visible to anyone, so it can be verified that whoever wins a position wins it with knowledge and not with a godfather. Because the underlying problem, it concludes, is not that the public sector is bad by definition: it is that it has become the country estate where they place their own people.

How many railway disasters will it take for someone to audit ADIF's real payroll?