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

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

#141

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

eecc wrote: post #112
ckolkey wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When an employee calls out sick, a Special Inspector may be sent to their home to check if they are really sick and at home. If the employee doesn't answer the door (They're sleeping and don't hear the door? Doesn't matter), they're charged with falsely calling out sick, and face suspension or termination. I'll never understand why people think it's alright to infantilise other adults like this. If they're sick and…

That's fine, in Italy you get a visit from the "Medico Fiscale". It's confrontational for sure, so you just go to your GP, get a certificate with the prescribed days of rest and attach that to your sick leave notification. Easy

Next door in Austria I've seen employment contracts (from local Mittlestand family owned companies in the automotive sector) where it was specified that "in case of sick leave, the employee agrees to health checks by the company's own GP at the company's expense, even if you already have been written off sick by your own GP." I've never been more disgusted.

Then again, I've also read in the news here of employers hiring private investigators to catch employees fraudulently claiming sick leave, then firing them and suing them claiming back wages paid along with the P.I. fees.

To play the devil's advocate, since sick leaves are costly for businesses here, it probably sucks hard if you have a few employees abusing it heavily to avoid work (even though it's common knowledge that everyone here takes a sick day off work every now and then after a heavy night out partying and drinking or stuff like that).

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

#142

Post by ramesh31 »

ragingrobot wrote: post #49

Hey, something maybe for one here I can shed some light on, for those who want a little more than the article gives. ;) I am a supervisor on a commuter rail, and in this respect they operate in a similar fashion. Like any other business, profits are key. Someone figures out staffing. Pretty much cut and dry. For a line from terminal A to B, there is one train per hour in each direction, 48 trains in a day. We need fo…

>When an employee calls out sick, a Special Inspector may be sent to their home to check if they are really sick and at home. If the employee doesn't answer the door (They're sleeping and don't hear the door? Doesn't matter), they're charged with falsely calling out sick, and face suspension or termination.

This is how it works in the military. So shouldn't you provide the same benefits? You can't expect to treat people this way without holding your end of the bargain. Namely with guaranteed job security, full paid benefits, set time off and vacation, clear paths to promotion, etc. etc.

Capitalists want to have their cake and eat it too. There's no concept of a social contract anymore.

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

#143

Post by ragingrobot »

mikedelago wrote: post #134
ragingrobot wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My intent was not to advertise this as an alternative, and I do not see how you came to that conclusion. I was pointing out that this is not unique to the freight railroads to intimidate employees into coming to work on a regular basis.

I got a similar implication from the line "My agency uses a different tactic, but just as effective." To help convey your meaning here, it may be better to change it to "My agency uses a different tactic, but just as exploitative and just as effective."

If it helps avoid any further confusion, it shall be done. Thanks for the suggestion.

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

#144

Post by codekansas »

ckolkey wrote: post #77
ragingrobot wrote: post #49

Hey, something maybe for one here I can shed some light on, for those who want a little more than the article gives. ;) I am a supervisor on a commuter rail, and in this respect they operate in a similar fashion. Like any other business, profits are key. Someone figures out staffing. Pretty much cut and dry. For a line from terminal A to B, there is one train per hour in each direction, 48 trains in a day. We need fo…

> When an employee calls out sick, a Special Inspector may be sent to their home to check if they are really sick and at home. If the employee doesn't answer the door (They're sleeping and don't hear the door? Doesn't matter), they're charged with falsely calling out sick, and face suspension or termination. I'll never understand why people think it's alright to infantilise other adults like this. If they're sick and…

Taking the question literally, the answer is that because in this kind of system there's plenty of incentive to lie to get the maximum number of days of paid leave. So if you're in charge of scheduling employees and you assume that they're self-interested then you would assume that left to their own devices a lot of them would probably lie about being sick. I mean, it's a lot safer assumption than assuming that everyone in the rank-and-file takes some great pride in the success of the company and would never do something morally dubious.

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

#145

Post by sidewndr46 »

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.

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

#146

Post by Avshalom »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #74
JohnFen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. That's even worse.

As an employee and an employer, I like having only one type of paid leave. It should not matter to the employer why an employee is not working. If the issue is insufficient time off for illnesses, then the negotiation should be for more paid time off (PTO) in general. This eliminates all the resources wasted on catching fraudulent use of sick days.

Technically they have PTO, but it has to be scheduled, and may not be approved, a month in advance. Which is unworkable for almost anything.

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

#147

Post by sct202 »

ckolkey wrote: post #77
ragingrobot wrote: post #49

Hey, something maybe for one here I can shed some light on, for those who want a little more than the article gives. ;) I am a supervisor on a commuter rail, and in this respect they operate in a similar fashion. Like any other business, profits are key. Someone figures out staffing. Pretty much cut and dry. For a line from terminal A to B, there is one train per hour in each direction, 48 trains in a day. We need fo…

> When an employee calls out sick, a Special Inspector may be sent to their home to check if they are really sick and at home. If the employee doesn't answer the door (They're sleeping and don't hear the door? Doesn't matter), they're charged with falsely calling out sick, and face suspension or termination. I'll never understand why people think it's alright to infantilise other adults like this. If they're sick and…

I've known people (white collar) to call in sick because their days will expire, in places that have lax enforcement policies, so I'm not surprised that some workplaces get draconian especially if it causes someone else to get forced to work to provide coverage.

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

#148

Post by ChrisRR »

p0pcult wrote: post #110

When you design systems so "efficiently" that there is no slack, you increase their working efficiency, but also their fragility. We (in America) saw the costs of this "just in time" slackless logistics in the economic reboot as we rebounded from the first waves of COVID: logjams at the ports. Good system design allows for the absorption of interstitial disruptions. There's a reason tall buildings sway in the wind; i…

I think covid and the silicon shortage has shown us how JIT manufacturing completely falls apart if there's a delay in just one of your components.

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

#149

Post by cool_dude85 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #122
cool_dude85 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Pensions are expensive" is a classic lie cooked up by finance (who want high fees in 401k individual accounts) and cheap companies who want to cut every benefit to the bone. I'll preface this by stating that I have not looked into the railroad pension, but instead I will draw a parallel to my own. I can get 80% of my top recent pay when I retire after 32 years, which is quite generous as pensions go. The long-term c…

Defined benefit (DB) pensions are excessively expensive due to the advent of low cost broad market index funds. With a DB pension, you have to add agency risk to the equation. There is no need for that now when you can get a Vanguard/Fidelity/Schwab 401k and pay the same 0.03% expense ratio to get the same investment performance that a pension fund manager would. And you never have to worry about the pension fund man…

>With a DB pension, you have to add agency risk to the equation. There is no need for that now when you can get a Vanguard/Fidelity/Schwab 401k and pay the same 0.03% expense ratio to get the same investment performance that a pension fund manager would. And you never have to worry about the pension fund manager stealing from it, or the politician directing investments to their nephew’s real estate company.

>I would rather have whatever normal cost the employer is contributing for DB pension given directly to me so I can drop it in VOO and cut out all the middlemen and reduce agency risk.

It's a tradeoff. The risks you describe are real, on the other hand, no reason why the pension needs to be actively managed. It's certainly perfectly viable for the pension fund to be managed by plopping money into a few low cost vanguard funds, and the reason it doesn't work that way is probably partly inertia and partly job justification. But your individual investment has a big risk too - what happens when you turn 80 (90? 100?) and the money runs out? What happens if the market takes a shit the day before you turn 65? Time to start buying Alpo if you're not in a pension.

>Assuming you work for the government in the US, this is false. Government entities in the US are allowed to use whatever nonsense assumptions they want to value liabilities, and obviously they undervalue them now and lay the extra cost on future taxpayers. Hence the underfunded DB pension and retiree healthcare crisis plaguing many taxpayers.

You're confusing the pension fund liability with the actual long-term cost of the plan. The cost of the plan can indeed be gamed, but there's not much point. It's just an actuarial calculation with all the assumptions that entails, and the actuary shows that long term, investment of this amount is sufficient to cover all costs.

The liability is the part that can be gamed for political purposes - either maximized to spread fear/blame, or minimized to get a politician money to spend today. But importantly, the liability doesn't really have much to do with the long term cost of the plan, except to express that past funding has not been sufficient to cover all costs.

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

#150

Post by zopa »

bestcoder69 wrote: post #71
mjbeswick wrote: post #26

Rail companies are getting the blame here, but the real problem is that paid leave isn't a statutory employment right protected by law. Here in the UK full time employees are entitled to 28 day paid annual leave, although I have work for companies which offer more, while pay is seperate.

Another possible causal factor is just that labor is weak in the US, and thus is unable to win sick days from their employers AND is unable to convince congress to pass universal sick days either. If that’s the case (I’m biased to say yes) these rail workers really need to strike. Voting for blues obviously isn’t cutting it.

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.
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