Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave • Hacker News Board

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#251

Post by Avshalom » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:13 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #187

Avshalom wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rail Labor Facts is from the NRLC, which is the rail company organization, which is to say that aint from the union's mouth at all.

Ah, they caught me. But really it was just the most convenient cite. The facts are true and can easily be verified from other sources. Most of the rail unions have approved the contract and these machinations are a last ditched effort to get a better deal.

It's also worth looking at which unions ratified it, for instance SMART Yardmasters and Mechanical ratified it, but TD, the branch that is on the train, have not.

IBEW? thats the electric workers union they aren't on call 24/365 to drive a train into the middle of nowhere sit for 12 hours then be shuttled to bunkhouse.

TCU, BRC that communications and car maintainance...

ATDA, dispachers

IAM, machinists

NCFO, well the Firemen and Oilers there refers to fixed plants not locomotives, and they've been part of the service industry union for the last 30 years, I don't know who exactly they cover but it's again probably not the engineers/conductors.

All of which is to say that the unions that have ratified the agreement are the ones that aren't being fucked by PTO/sick day shit (which isn't to say unaffected but, not fucked).

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#252

Post by bombcar » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:13 PM UTC

scottLobster wrote: post #115

bumby wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Household debt in the U.S. is at 20 year highs. Isn't the largest share of household debt a home mortgage? Implying that talking about the rail strike is a distraction from the root cause. There are still real consequences to Americans from the rail strike, but (very much like the student debt crisis) it seems like tap dancing around the root cause doesn't really fix the problem.

Perhaps largest in aggregate, but credit card debt has spiked in the last year and is continuing to climb higher, close to a Trillion dollars. https://www.lendingtree.com/credit-cards/credit-card-debt-st... A large chunk of the population is clearly dealing with inflation through credit cards. More inflation for them just means more CC debt, and if everyone is getting as many "free balance transfer no interest for th…

A trillion dollars in credit card debt is about $9k per household, or $5k per adult in the US.

And some percentage of that is paid off each month (but I'm not clear how to determine that - seems it might be 54% of cards but that doesn't answer "of dollars").

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#253

Post by mjhay » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:14 PM UTC

dbpatterson wrote: post #196

zopa wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proposal to add seven sick days passed the House and got a majority in the Senate, mostly (though not quite exclusively) ‘blues’. It’s not who unions are voting for that’s the problem, it’s the filibuster.

The "blues" created the legislation & forced the workers to accept a shitty contract with no sick days. They could easily have refused to vote for it and let the strike happen w/o real sick days.

That would require courage and long-term thinking. As of now, this problem has just been punted, while the industry continues to hemorrhage workers

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#254

Post by l72 » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:15 PM UTC

sidewndr46 wrote: post #145

graycat wrote: post #72

The article mentions PSR -- precision scheduled railroading -- or some such as at the core of all this. Okay, it's a scheduling problem. It's an optimization problem. It's possibly to a significant extent an optimization under uncertainty problem. Oh, and it's an optimization over time problem. Did my Ph.D. dissertation in one of those, not for trains but for airplanes. Oh, for math majors in the audience, yes, did u…

Except PSR isn't a scheduling system. It's a system designed to fuck up the usability of the rails in the US by running gargantuan trains that the system can't possibly handle. It even manages to fuckup traffic & public transport & small towns here in Texas. The at-grade crossings are blocked so long you get backups that stretch for 1/2 a mile or more in small towns.

This is a big issue. In my city some of the neighborhoods were originally steel "company towns". They literally have one entrance/exit into them and it is crossed by a primary railroad track. The trains have gotten so long, that now when they park (almost a mile a way) for hours, they completely block access for people entering or exiting their neighborhood!

And CSX and Norfolk Southern's response is just: "too bad"

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#255

Post by HDThoreaun » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:16 PM UTC

runesofdoom wrote: post #78

thathndude wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the sentiment of your post. I can absorb a 10% bump in prices without really blinking. But the bottom 50% of Americans cannot. I wish it was as cut and dry as telling them to just strike, but I don’t think it’s that simple.

The government could nationalize the railroads. (There's even precedent.) But instead they get the same treatment the airlines do: public support for private profit.

Union pacific alone is worth 132 billion dollars. Nationalizing the railroads would probably cost $500 billion and then they would lose money because they'd pay their workers a reasonable amount instead of what is happening now.

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#256

Post by HDThoreaun » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:18 PM UTC

soupfordummies wrote: post #140

thathndude wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the sentiment of your post. I can absorb a 10% bump in prices without really blinking. But the bottom 50% of Americans cannot. I wish it was as cut and dry as telling them to just strike, but I don’t think it’s that simple.

I haven't followed this super closely (as an aside, it's also really discouraging how little I've seen this story talked about. Buried in the newspapers, etc) but am I off base in thinking that gov't could have just sided with the workers and req'd the railroads to give sick days rather than just siding with the RRs and saying "no sick days"? Wow what a run-on sentence! :P

There is a bill that would do just that. Passed the house but then couldn't get past the filibuster even though it had 52 senate votes.

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#257

Post by bcrosby95 » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:21 PM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #51

cainxinth wrote: post #17

> ”The answer, in short, is “P.S.R.” — or precision-scheduled railroading. P.S.R. is an operational strategy that aims to minimize the ratio between railroads’ operating costs and their revenues through various cost-cutting and (ostensibly) efficiency-increasing measures. The basic idea is to transport more freight using fewer workers and railcars.” That’s a long-winded way of saying: ‘We’d rather make more money tha…

My understanding of the FIRST big problem with PSR is that it creates trains longer than the system is designed to handle, thus all the sidings that used to allow trains to pass in single tracked areas are unavailable, which increases fragility of the system in general. This makes precision scheduling impossible... what this really is, is let's make all the workers wait (for free!) while we figure out how we can fina…

I was talking with one of these on call workers working for BNSF, and calling it on call doesn't do the terribleness justice.

They are 8 hours on, and 8 hours off. The on call call is also 90 minutes ahead of time. So more like 6.5 hours off.

Many end up sleeping in the parking lot.

There's an alarm that rings every minute on the train - a dead man's switch. Oftentimes this is the only thing keeping them awake.

To top it off, no sick leave.

And these people are overseeing fucking trains.

Congress backing these companies in any way is absolutely disgusting.

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#258

Post by Avshalom » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:21 PM UTC

InTheArena wrote: post #221

cainxinth wrote: post #17

> ”The answer, in short, is “P.S.R.” — or precision-scheduled railroading. P.S.R. is an operational strategy that aims to minimize the ratio between railroads’ operating costs and their revenues through various cost-cutting and (ostensibly) efficiency-increasing measures. The basic idea is to transport more freight using fewer workers and railcars.” That’s a long-winded way of saying: ‘We’d rather make more money tha…

PSR is far more then that, but this author doesn't care to go into that since it detracts from his or her argument. From wikipedia: Precision railroading or precision scheduled railroading (PSR) is a concept in freight railroad operations pioneered by E. Hunter Harrison in 1993, and adopted by nearly every North American Class I railroad. It shifts the focus from older practices, such as unit trains, hub and spoke op…

>>The result is often substantial improvement in railroad operating ratios, and other financial and operating metrics; at the cost of less-reliable service, particularly to smaller customers, long-term capacity issues, increased derailments and other safety risks associated with longer trains, and crew fatigue.

So it makes the companies more money at the expense of everything else and you think that detracts from the OPs point?

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#259

Post by sofixa » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:21 PM UTC

marmetio wrote: post #118

runesofdoom wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government could nationalize the railroads. (There's even precedent.) But instead they get the same treatment the airlines do: public support for private profit.

Between the extremes of doing nothing to maintain the status quo and nationalizing an industry, there are countless options. Many of which would be more realistic, more palatable, and more beneficial. In fact, nationalization is so repulsive to most politicians voters that suggesting it is an effective tactic to squash efforts to create meaningful change. A beneficial suggestion would seek to address issues in a way…

> Many of which would be more realistic, more palatable, and more beneficial. In fact, nationalization is so repulsive to most politicians voters that suggesting it is an effective tactic to squash efforts to create meaningful change.

Why though? Railways are a natural monopoly and critical infrastructure, so either they have to be state owned or heavily regulated.

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#260

Post by haswell » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:22 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #245

lazide wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don’t get is why folks don’t just quit and go to an industry with less abusive labor practices - hell even construction laborers get days off.

Switching jobs is hard for a ton of reasons. We also do need people to operate the rail system. "Everybody just leaves and becomes a software engineer" isn't good for society.

I think working in the tech bubble has really created some misunderstandings about the average worker’s ability to just up and leave when things get bad.

With that said, I don’t think this is about everyone leaving as much as it is about forcing the rail industry to capitulate.

But for the aforementioned reasons, this is unlikely to happen, and rail companies know that.

It’s a really sad state of affairs, and I’m not sure what fixes it aside from drastic political shifts during elections, but even that seems highly questionable.