Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[McTraveller]

I've been trying to find details about this whole rail labor thing.

So far all I've seen is that rail workers currently get zero paid sick days, and they were requesting fifteen, and were offered a single personal day.

What I can't find anywhere in my easy/lazy searching what the general vacation policy is.

To be fair, if you assume a 250-day working year, (5 days x 50 weeks), 15 sick days is only a 6% reduction in working days. I can't imagine that allowing 15 paid working days would really result in a 6% loss of output.

[Egan_BW]

Freedom is cringe

Oppression is based.

[Frumple]

To be fair, if you assume a 250-day working year, (5 days x 50 weeks), 15 sick days is only a 6% reduction in working days. I can't imagine that allowing 15 paid working days would really result in a 6% loss of output.

The chatter I've seen (mostly over on spacebattles, which has a pretty large thread on it, if you have an account to get to the politics section) notes that, particularly for newer workers, that's not a solid assumption. There's some poor bastards that have apparently been seeing like 30 days off total, over the course of a year. That's not a 250 day working year, it's a 335 one, and seeing regular 12 hour shifts for entire weeks straight (the technical limitation I've seen cited is 12 hours every 22 hour period, without some kind of limitation for sequential periods, which you can imagine is exactly as fucked up as it sounds like).

You'd have to do some solid digging to look up primary sources/actual legislation causing the issues, but the major problem the workers are having is that the protections and basic limitations for railworkers is... fucked up. More fucked up than apparently pretty much every other industry in the country outside of maybe, like, literally illegal labor, and with specific carveouts in the law to prevent normal protections from applying to them.

Their situation's pretty shit, which combined with the difficulty of a lot of the work is basically the big reason they're having difficulty hiring and retaining workers, to the detriment of more or less everyone that relies on railway to some degree or another (i.e. all of us).

Meanwhile the companies involved are, of course, posting record profit figures

[McTraveller]

Wow I knew the laws for rail labor were different, but I didn't realize they were that different.   You'd think that if they are working 335 day years, 15 additional days is only a 2% reduction... and companies would probably make that up in better productivity just due to better morale.

It's an odd situation where the companies would rather promise 25% raise over 4 or 5 years (which is a promise for more cash, based on non-guaranteed revenue) instead of giving 15 days paid leave which is a promise which doesn't rely on any forecasts at all to guarantee.

It's a shame that logic doesn't often prevail.

[Sirus]

I work as an intermodal truck driver, so my job is dependent on freight trains. If they want to strike, I say they should go for it. Hopefully they'll get some better conditions, but sadly I'm not expecting it.

[Lord Shonus]

The big issue is that the railroads are massively understaffed for a large number of reasons, not least of which is that rail work was one of the jobs on the "DO NOT ENTER THIS FIELD! AUTOMATION WILL MAKE IT GO AWAY in ten to fifteen years!" list ten to fifteen years ago. It doesn't help that the people driving the train are (from what people in the field have told me) trained for specific routes - if all the guys who drive a train from NY to Chicago call in sick, there will be no trains going from NY to Chicago that day. At present, losing staff would have a very strong chance of making portions of the rail network not run.

There is also very little ability to coerce the rail companies, because a rail shutdown would cause Black Thursday levels of economic damage. Which is also why the unions don't have the leverage people assume they do - if they strike, the huge numbers of people who lose their jobs as a result will blame them, not the companies. For practical, political, and legal reasons the government's only real power here is to force the currently negotiated agreement into place.

Which is why if you dig into the actual votes on the Biden-brokered deal, there is probably an absolute majority of rail workers that voted for it. The 4 out of 12 unions that have so far turned it down did so by a slim margin, and in at least one a majority of workers voted Yes on it. But in that union, a contract requires every sub-union to also vote yes on any contract, and one or two subunits voted No.

[Dostoevsky]

My understanding is that the Biden-brokered deal isn't that bad, except for one particular group (the drivers, I think). That particular group gets an excrement deal, though, and so the no votes are mostly in solidarity with that group.

Either way, as you say congress is going to impose an 'agreement' on them just like last time.

[Magmacube_tr]

Freedom is cringe

YOU'RE CRINGE!!!

[Micro102]

They could also force the conditions the union wants, and given that these companies can afford tens of billions of dollars in stock buybacks, they can afford some sick leave. It's a serious problem that the government can basically go "O, this monopolistic company refuses to give it's workers comfortable jobs and is threatening the economy to become even more monopolistic? Guess strikes and protests aren't legal anymore!".

[Lord Shonus]

You seem to think this is purely a money issue - that they aren't offering sick leave because they're greedy and want to keep all their cash. Except that they've agreed to massive pay raises. They're quite open about the core problem being that if they have too many unscheduled call-offs, they will be unable to run trains at all. They literally face a potential "we have nobody to run this route this week, don't know when we will, all these carloads of perishables have to be thrown out" scenario. You can't chalk it down to deliberate understaffing either - there's dozens of job postings at $67K+/year with essentially now requirements. It is a matter of not enough applicants and an extremely lengthy training period required.

[McTraveller]

Yup this is an interesting specific case of a more general political problem: at what point does legitimate individual concern, when applied to a collective, cause problems to an even greater collective.  We see it in things like pandemic response, monetary policy, and this labor issue.

Consider a contrived example: What would happen if every single supplier of insulin, say, just decided they didn't want to make it any more.  Would people accept the government forcing people to work to make it? Even if the government took imminent domain of the facilities, and offered massive salaries to people to take it over, there would be a ramp-up gap to train the new people. Could the government force the workers that wanted to leave, to keep making the product so there wouldn't be a literally deadly shortage in the interim before the ramp-up time was complete?  Whose "rights" win here - the bodily autonomy of the workers, or the "right" of people needing the product to have it?  (This is intentionally worded to be as argumentative as possible, by the way...)

What happens in the reductio ad absurdum where even with offering stupidly high wages, they don't get enough people to operate the insulin factories, so there isn't any supply anyway?

I do see the rail operators' concern with this - sure they can give individuals lots of sick time. But if they do get too many people simultaneously using sick time - that's a problem, and it likely can't mathematically be solved just by hiring more people: after all, if they keep increasing wages and people still aren't accepting jobs (as hinted by the earlier post), what happens.  Can we "force" companies to be unstable by over-hiring and having smaller profit margins? Sure companies may have record profits today, but if they aren't saving some of it, then any disruption will cause problems - this isn't even a question, we have numerous examples of what happens when companies have no reserves.

Now personally I think society as a whole would be better if it shifted more of its focus to sustainability rather than growth, but the incentive structure is heavily weighted to growth. This isn't just Wall Street either - it's in many people's personal view too; not satisfied simply with current standard of living, always wanting increase either now or in their retirement accounts.

[Frumple]

You seem to think this is purely a money issue - that they aren't offering sick leave because they're greedy and want to keep all their cash. Except that they've agreed to massive pay raises.

I mean, they clearly are greedy and want to keep all their cash, though -- despite all the problems they're having, the major companies involved are posting record profits. They're extremely clearly unwilling to cut into that in order to fix shit, because if they weren't, shit would be fixed and their profits wouldn't be appropriate for a satire. It's almost certainly not solely a money issue, but there's absolutely signs it very much is to a large degree.

You can't chalk it down to deliberate understaffing either - there's dozens of job postings at $67K+/year with essentially now requirements. It is a matter of not enough applicants and an extremely lengthy training period required.

If you're not getting enough applicants at 67k+/year (though that's actually pretty shit if you're talking some of the schedules that are apparently involved -- if you're getting that little for 80+ hour weeks, you're getting screwed, hard), then you're clearly either not offering enough for what you're asking of people and/or there's something else wrong with how you're operating. You can be hiring at 67k a year and still be deliberately understaffing if you're asking people to work themselves into an early grave with long hours and shit scheduling and such.

[MrRoboto75]

IIRC part of it is they're running half as many trains, which are twice as long, in order to need less train crews and reduce labor cost.  And rail infrastructure such as it is isn't built to handle the double length trains.

[bloop_bleep]

There are certainly plenty of jobs that are essential to always be staffed and yet offer sick leave, less than 12-hour shifts, and more than 30 days off a year.

[lemon10]

The obvious solution if there aren't enough people is to pay to train more.
The issue is that is expensive and requires planning for the future. Since American capitalism is a snake that eats its own tail and burns the future for present profits they (and many other businesses like the airlines) don't do that.

The other obvious thing is to not treat them terribly, which many businesses also can't seem to stop doing even to their exceedingly highly trained and skilled workers (eg. Doctors and nurses).

Obviously they think that legally screwing over their workers is easier/cheaper then the above, and they could very well be right.
E: The railroad companies have a profit margin of 50%. 50! It's huge, if they wanted they could easily fix the issue. But it would cost money, so they are playing hardball instead.