Leaked emails have exposed claims of a toxic culture at Metro Trains, involving bullying, gender discrimination and even positioning trains to look up passengers' skirts.
The emails reveal Metro hired a former senior police detective to investigate an avalanche of staff allegations of harassment and gender discrimination in the workplace, only to suppress the report's findings.
Metro insists it will not release the report, which it commissioned under legal privilege, but some of its details about examples of sexist and abusive workplace behaviour have been leaked to The Age and reveal the company fears some of its staff have "lost their moral compass".
They include:
- A male on-the-job driver trainer urinated in the presence of a female trainee driver while he was assessing her competency. She later made an error and failed her assessment, and was ultimately dismissed by Metro. The trainer still holds a senior instructional role, having been cleared of wrongdoing over the incident.
- A Metro manager's car was vandalised, and threats and abusive comments towards him and a second manager were written on staff toilet walls.
One of the managers, who lived alongside a rail line, was subjected to an alleged campaign of intimidation by train drivers who blasted their train horns when they passed his house late at night and early in the morning.
A message left on a toilet wall. Photo: Supplied
The two managers were in charge of a Metro initiative to teach maintenance staff to move trains inside depots, which was fiercely opposed by the Locomotive Division of the Rail Tram and Bus Union, because the union feared Metro would use the course to create a lesser-skilled and lower-paid train driver workforce. Metro ultimately abandoned the depot driver plan when it struck a new enterprise bargaining agreement in 2015 at the end of a fierce industrial campaign.
- The report also contained claims that some Metro train drivers are deliberately stopping trains a few metres short at one of Melbourne's busiest station platforms, in a position where they can look up women's skirts.
A Metro source separately told The Age this happens during the morning at the platform two escalator at Flinders Street Station.
The workplace report was completed by Val Smith, a former senior detective who headed CrimeStoppers for 15 years, and who now works for Stopline, private investigators of alleged workplace misconduct.
Mr Smith declined to comment when contacted by The Age.
Leaked details of his report are contained in emails written by Jacques Liebenberg, Metro's director of people and performance.
"Some of the conduct identified might be described as demonstrating that a small number of employees have lost their moral compass and seem to be able to justify to themselves treatment of other employees in quite abhorrent ways which is unacceptable to Metro and we would have thought would be unacceptable to the RTBU," Dr Liebenberg wrote.
In a series of emails between August and September last year he wrote that women were being routinely discriminated against at Metro in ways including:
- "Inappropriate comments being directed at some female employees by male drivers, both of a sexually explicit and offensive nature.
- "Observations of some female drivers that to be accepted as a driver you could not be too precious and needed to be a bit of a tomboy" and,
- "Comments of some [on-the-job trainers] to the effect that females were only being employed to make up numbers and similar."
Metro would "take what action it considers necessary" to eliminate bullying and discrimination, Dr Liebenberg wrote, through education and training and by working with a suitable anti-bullying and harassment organisation.
He called on the RTBU to commit to its own reforms, including an agreement to report to Metro any drivers who are caught "stopping short on platforms to enable the driver to look up female commuters' skirts".
Metro spokeswoman Sammie Black said the company did not have a culture of bullying and did not tolerate workplace discrimination or harassment.
She said claims a driver trainer urinated in the presence of a female trainee – which Dr Liebenberg wrote in the leaked emails had been "fully investigated and the appropriate action was taken" – were unsubstantiated.
Ms Black also said regarding Mr Liebenberg's claim that drivers may be looking up women's skirts that "no such allegation was substantiated".
The Ebola Railway is a term some staff use to describe Metro Trains. Photo: Supplied
Ms Black said the company embraced gender diversity.
"Since 2009, the proportion of female train drivers has increased from just 2 per cent when Metro's franchise commenced to 16 per cent today, with more than half of new driver recruits female," she said.
The RTBU's state secretary, Luba Grigorovitch, said the union did not tolerate bullying, and had created a new role of women's advocate last year to give female employees more of a voice.
"The RTBU will continue to fight to eliminate this culture," Ms Grigorovitch said.
Marc Marotta, the secretary of the union's locomotive division, said Dr Liebenberg's summary of the report's findings had conveniently left out instances of harassment by managers, but in any case he had not closely followed the investigation.
"This stuff is not top of the pops for me," he said.