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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

#221

Post by InTheArena »

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 operations and individual car switching at hump yards, to emphasize point-to-point freight car movements on simplified routing networks. Under PSR, freight trains operate on fixed schedules, much like passenger trains, instead of being dispatched whenever a sufficient number of loaded cars are available. In the past, intermodal trains and general merchandise trains operated separately; under PSR they are combined as needed, typically with distributed power. Inventories of freight cars and locomotives are reduced and fewer workers are employed for a given level of traffic. 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.

PSR is the reason why half of the US rail fleet is in storage, they are no longer needed. this has significant positive and negative benefits. On the positive side, this includes the environmental impact, on the negative side, it makes US rail systems totally unusable for anyone other then the freight railroads.

Freight railroads (and rail in general) remains one of the most regulated business out there, but the rail companies are aggressively pushing back on new regulations that would address significant problems.

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

#222

Post by coffeebeqn »

smileysteve wrote: post #105
forgetfreeman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet you'd have a really tough time finding a white collar gig where paid leave wasn't a bog-standard part of the package. So nah, rail companies are getting caught out because they are absolutely fucking around with this.

Glares in "startup" "untracked pto" where it's white collar and paid leave isn't guaranteed but for the power of the worker.

I take at least a month of unlimited. Many people just assume the world will end if they take a week off

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

#223

Post by bumby »

scottLobster wrote: post #205
bumby wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of these can be true. All I’m saying is it makes more sense to focus on the biggest issue for the biggest impact. Average credit card debt is roughly on par with pre-pandemic levels. Dipping during Covid is probably an artifact of the govt stimulus (speculatively). Without digging further, it’s not clear to me that it’s not a return to normal. If that normal is still bad, my guess is there are more deeply rooted…

I guess the question is are saving rates low because of mortgages or because of CC debt? I'd tend to lean toward CC debt, as a good chunk of the population doesn't even have a mortgage, the cost is typically fixed, and you don't take out an extra mortgage to pay for 15% inflation in food, you put it on a CC. CC debt is also far more damaging to household finances, particularly during high inflation as you're just pil…

>I'd tend to lean toward CC debt

I think I would lean toward household mortgage. The reason is simple. With a quick (and admittedly superficial) search, the average minimum credit card payment was $110, while the average monthly mortgage or rent payment was $2100. Despite the fact that many people don't have mortgages, they still need a place to live, and you can't decouple rent and home prices. Which is particularly pernicious for renters because their home costs are not fixed. Add to it that many people use their home equity as a revolving credit line and I don't think the costs are as fixed as one might first assume.

I think an underlying issue is that people have an optimism bias in terms of budgeting. They live riiiiight up to their level of income. I think the stat goes back at least a decade, but something like 65% of Americans cannot afford an unforeseen $500 emergency. Some of this is attributable to wage stagnation, but I also think much of it is due to another type of inflation: lifestyle inflation.

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

#224

Post by bombcar »

adolph wrote: post #170
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…

> What the freight railroads are doing here is forcing the employees to use their vacation pay when they are sick to discourage them from calling out sick at all, in effect penalizing them for calling out sick. That vacation you had planned with the family? Either lose a day (which may require you to cancel altogether), or come to work sick. If they have paid sick leave, they'd use it when sick rather than showing up…

The problem is the scheduling side of things, not the PTO side.

For "knowledge workers" as most of HN is, they can just not show up today and then do today's work tomorrow. But something like a railroad ceases to function at some point and that has severe repercussions.

Now likely the "railroad" problem could be solved with some work, imagine a nation-wide company that handles railroad staffing emergencies, with on-duty employees available to go to a stranded train at a moment's notice. There's some dollar amount this would cost (even if you utilized jets and helicopters, those are just a cost) and it'd work. But that cost is what the railroads don't want to pay, as they could also do the same thing by hiring more employees (and have some percentage of them "idling" at any given time).

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

#225

Post by coffeebeqn »

ransom1538 wrote: post #204
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.

For context: UK software developers are paid 50% less than US developers. I would rather keep my money.

Software developers also get all those benefits. Whenever people talk about how terrible working in the US is- almost none of that applies to software. You get plenty of time off, sick days are a non issue, work remote if you don’t feel like going in, health care insurance is free/cheap and good, etc

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

#226

Post by prewett »

Tangurena2 wrote: post #98
rowls66 wrote: post #18

This problem does not seem unique to railroads. Any business that depends on human labor to deliver a service would have this problem. Airlines, restaurants, theatre companies. The way to deal with this is to have excess labor available (slack in the system). Are railroad profit margins so small that paying for excess labor will bankrupt them? Maybe labor in the railroad industry is so highly regulated that labor fle…

> Are railroad profit margins so small that paying for excess labor will bankrupt them? No. Railroads have the largest profit margins in American business. > For the nation as a whole, profit margins generally sit at about 9% (8.89% to be precise), however, in transport, specifically railroads, this stands at 50.93%, the highest in the US. https://ajot.com/news/railroads-are-usas-most-profitable-ind... > US freight r…

It looks like that article mixes its units. "Profit margin" is usually taken as net profit margin, and 8.89% is a reasonable average. No business stays in business with a 9% operating margin. So then the article compares net profit margin of the average company with the operating margin of the railroads. This is completely invalid. So much so that either the author of the article is incompetent or deceptive. Union Pacific has a net profit margin of about 29%, which is a little higher than Apple (25% most recently), so definitely quite a nice margin, although not as good as Visa (about 50% the past few years) or Equity Residential (50%; I believe they own large numbers of apartment complexes in cities).

I'm not defending the lack of sick leave, but that profit margin figure is just wrong.

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

#227

Post by sillystuff »

mjbeswick wrote: post #84
bestcoder69 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's seem like such a far reaching issue that I'm surprised it hasn't triggered a general strike.

A general strike is illegal in the United States. The US government, under the control of wealthy capitalists, has ensured that capital's interests are protected in law to the detriment of the workers who actually create value.

> Among the practices prohibited by the Taft–Hartley act are jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. The amendments also allowed states to enact right-to-work laws banning union shops.

Labor in the US is weak by design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act

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

#228

Post by vannevar »

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…

Paid leave doesn't prevent the railroads from doing PSR, it just makes it more expensive. Right now, they're pushing the cost onto the workers, and also the public, since sick workers ultimately burden the health care system and there are safety risks in having sick workers operating trains. This makes PSR look more efficient than it actually is for the economy at large.

As a matter of public policy, we should make companies bear the true costs of their business and have those costs reflected in their pricing, rather than foist those costs on the public under the table and off the books.

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

#229

Post by InTheArena »

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…

Logjams at the part were a combination of insane regulation, even more restrictive union contracts and lack of slack capacity. For example, there were rules around stack depth, rules about truck loading and unloading, lack of automation and the fact it was simply cheaper to leave boats stacked up.

Agree on the point - we have a huge amount of fragility built into the system, and just - in - time logistics are a huge driver of that.

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

#230

Post by lazide »

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…

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.
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