Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nymag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 388 posts

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

#211

Post by thatfrenchguy »

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…

More money short term. When you make sick employees work, bad shit starts happening.

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

#212

Post by bombcar »

yardie wrote: post #179
sct202 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sick days aren't part of your compensation, they are more like insurance. So of course they expire. I've had colleagues use a sick day for mental wellness. I've had colleagues use sick days while on vacation, ie food poisoning downroute. I've never had colleagues try and combine sick days with vacation days. That is considered a no-no.

This is why some companies go to "unlimited time off" where they get to take vacation time off the books.

Other companies have vacation/sick time as PTO and they don't distinguish between them at all.

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

#213

Post by Workaccount2 »

fineIllregister wrote: post #195
Workaccount2 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trade off seemed to come down to "sick days for workers" vs. "lower costs for consumers" The government went with "lower costs for consumers" Why "mandate on-call employees to cover sick employees" wasn't an option, I don't know.

> The trade off seemed to come down to "sick days for workers" vs. "lower costs for consumers" It doesn't have to raise prices. The costs imposed by the sick days (millions) are absolutely dwarfed by annual profits (billions).

I think the issue is that the railroads are running thin crews and extremely tight schedules. So Jim the engineer calling in 3 hours before he is due to commandeer 2,500 tons of freight for 500 miles creates a dire situation that not only delays that train, but throws off the schedule of dozens of other trains.

I'm just hypothesizing here, and I feel like I am missing something since it doesn't seem like having/adding on-call employees was an option.

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

#214

Post by pwg »

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.

The one issue here is that in many industries, the use of "vacation days" is, per the labor contract, required to be scheduled in advance. Often quite some time in advance. Which makes use of "vacation days" for unexpected illnesses (went to bed last night and felt fine, woke up this morning to fever and chills) difficult to impossible if the requirement for "advance scheduling" is actually enforced.

In many jobs with separate vacation and sick days, the vacation days still require the "advance notice" for scheduling, but the sick days do not require that one know, days in advance, of an unexpected illness. That gives the employee a few days that can be used for unexpected things, and the employer some assurance that a maximum of X days of unexpected outages will occur per employee.

More often than not, the "only one type of paid leave" comes attached with the "requirement for advance scheduling" of those same days, which does not provide for the unexpected illness situations.

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

#215

Post by bombcar »

ragingrobot wrote: post #164
Mo3 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, no wonder workers are striking. This is absolutely insane and at some point one has to wonder if creating a good working environment and healthy, happy employees would do the profit line even better than this fascist structure.

I can't speak for the freight railroads, but morale sucks at my agency. I would be willing to place a wager it's similar at freight, on the subject of time off: no guaranteed holidays. My commuter rail runs 24-7, the only way an employee gets the holiday off is if it falls on their regular day off. At my railroad a lot of the workers did not have the resources to go to college or get a job with better conditions. So,…

The companies I've been involved with that had "holiday work" (you have to have it if you're 24/7/365) would give double pay for work during that time, and rarely had to assign someone, as there'd be people up for the extra pay.

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

#216

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

kvandy wrote: post #180
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.

I live on the east coast of the US and have only been to the UK twice, but I was blown away at the efficiency and relative cleanliness of the London and surrounding area rail systems.

Lots of things change when your country is an island the size of Mississippi.

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

#217

Post by sofixa »

ragingrobot wrote: post #168
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hir…

I really don't want to sound like an (unpleasant word) due to the subject, but I always like to see comments like this. Some in America like to portray the image that we are the cesspool of labor relations, and it reminds me we are not alone and there is a lot of work to be done everywhere to improve life.

> Some in America like to portray the image that we are the cesspool of labor relations, and it reminds me we are not alone and there is a lot of work to be done everywhere to improve life.

But you are! Lots of things can be improved in lots of places, but the problems with US labour don't exist and are mind boggling for developed countries. I'd (and I'm willing to bet all those rail workers would too) a potential egregious invasion of privacy to validate I'm really sick in exchange for pretty much unlimited (details vary by country, sometimes after days/weeks/months you're moved to like 60-70% salary) sick time, instead of no sick time at all.

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

#218

Post by thatfrenchguy »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #161
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.

The rail workers have 4? 5? weeks of paid leave already. The issue at hand is "sick days" i.e. days off on short or no notice.

Yes, which are clearly important ones: you don’t want someone with an infectious disease to come to work because otherwise they couldn’t pay their mortgage.

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

#219

Post by toss1 »

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…

Yup. Worse yet, it is doomed to fail — just like deferred maintenance.

Instead of single random days off to get healthcare taken care of, they'll have random worker unavailability of weeks, months, or forever [0]. But, it's postponed so their numbers this quarter look good, but the system is rotting.

Any forking idiot can make numbers look good for a while by rotting the underlying system. This seems to be the trained remit of MBAs. Outside of managing the already-earned profits in the accounts, MBAs really are toxic to the long-term health of any business and especially its workers.

[0]from the article: >>Last June, one middle-aged union engineer postponed a doctor’s visit for work then died of a heart attack on the job weeks later. A conductor who spoke with the Times began feeling rundown last year but declined to see a doctor for fear of being disciplined for taking an unplanned day off. Instead, he waited months for the next doctor’s appointment that aligned with a scheduled day off. He then learned he’d been suffering from an infection that could have been treated with medication weeks earlier but would now require surgery.

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

#220

Post by ab123456789 »

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…

The reason why labor received more rights in Europe after WWII is that the rulers were worried about labor following the example of the Soviets. Carrot pre-empting geopolitical problems.

As soon as the Soviet Union went away, the negotiating power of labor started to weaken.

The statements above are not to be taken as an endorsement of the various kinds of genocide and horrors Communism created in the places where it ruled. It is just an observation that power, or the implicit threat of applying it, is what rules in the end. Lots of words are used to cover that raw reality.

Post reply on HN