No; railroad profit margins at unhealthy labor levels are so high that trying to pay for healthy levels of labor (i.e. staffing enough to offer sick leave) will lead to hostile takeovers by investors who want higher profit margins rather than healthy labor.
> A decade ago, the activist investor Bill Ackman won a proxy battle at Canadian Pacific and proceeded to replace its management with a team led by Hunter Harrison, the railway executive who’d pioneered P.S.R. After imposing the gospel of “more with less” at Canadian Pacific, Harrison left to spread the good news to the freight giant CSX. At each firm, P.S.R. succeeded at generating higher returns. Pretty soon, major investors in other railroads started calling on their firms to imitate Harrison’s methods. Testifying to the government’s Surface Transportation Board about freight rail’s performance last spring, industry analyst Rick Paterson said, “Lurking in the background is the constant threat of shareholder activism if any of the railroads’ operating ratios become outliers on the high side.”
It could be considered a key defect of American railroads that they are operated as for-profit corporations with public stock listings and shareholders. In such a scenario, so long as profits can be raised, they must be — or else hostile takeovers will be led to do so regardless. America’s government is poorly equipped to combat this with the usual hands-off approaches. They would need to either pass laws guaranteeing sick days, nationalize rail services to protect against hostile takeovers, regulate that rail networks must be operated by (for example) “B Corps”, or other similar steps taken that interfere with corporate sovereignty. Such interference is typically avoided by modern American labor politics, and so here we are.