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

#241

Post by ascagnel_ » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #174

next_xibalba wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Household debt in the U.S. is at 20 year highs. Household savings levels have completely collapsed. Inflation is still ripping. Clearly the Biden administration understands that these factors, when combined with a huge supply shock caused by a rail strike, would devastate households (the vast majority of which don't earn premium tech salaries - the median household income in the U.S. is $70K). How many millions would…

> Household debt in the U.S. is at 20 year highs. Household savings levels have completely collapsed. Inflation is still ripping. Inflation is largely caused by the same issues driving this rail strike: corporate profits. Maybe Biden should actually tackle directly that rather than continuing to shit on the working class.

Here's a podcast with Rep. Katie Porter where she dives pretty deep on this issue. I'm not sure how much of this is businesses trying to get ahead of inflation and how much of it is pure profit-taking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai6B8e-C8k8

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

#242

Post by digdugdirk » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:07 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…

Freight railroads are highly regulated in the same sense that police departments are highly regulated. There are lots of rules that apply, but they generally decided to make (or accept) those rules themselves. And the entrenched players make it almost entirely impossible for outside forces to enact change on the system as a whole.

Your comment is accurate, I just want to put this here as an analogy to help people in case they read your comment as a defense of PSR or the rail industry as a whole.

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

#243

Post by davidgay » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:07 PM UTC

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…

> This is how many (most) jobs work.

US jobs, really. The concept of sick days / requiring taking time off from some pool always struck me as a) horribly abusive, b) ripe for employee abuse (sick days when not sick), c) bad for everyone (workers work when sick).

I grew up in Switzerland which doesn't have those. And (to prevent abuse...) you are required to have a doctor's note when sick for more than 3 days. Of course, a bunch of commenters find this kind of requirement abusive... (There is no system that pleases everyone?)

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

#244

Post by HDThoreaun » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:08 PM UTC

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…

Such a surface level explanation. The real answer of course is politics. The railroads know the government won't let them shut down for even one day, so there's no reason for them to negotiate in good faith. So they negotiate in bad faith. Why would they give into labor demands when labor can't strike and their customers being big businesses won't substitute away in the face of political controversy?

Every large company would rather make more money than spend more on labor. Railroads are in the unique position of having the government break their workers strikes.

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

#245

Post by UncleMeat » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:08 PM UTC

lazide wrote: post #230

mikewarot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#246

Post by orwin » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:09 PM UTC

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.

They don't have weekends. They have 90 days off, while the average worker have 104, without paid leave.

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

#247

Post by bombcar » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:09 PM UTC

crote wrote: post #173

tomrod wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are good reasons retirement at 20 years exists. Jobs that wear out your body and have union support tend to pay better. We should keep the 20 year option and pay more, give more sick days, and fully fund insurance. Employees should be agents, not cogs.

20 years seems very short, though. Retirement age for train drivers in Europe (BE, FR, NL) seems to be around age 60, so that's a good 40 years of work. Are US railway working conditions really so much worse that people's bodies basically fall apart in half the time?

It may be more related to having to work your way up to engineer. I don't know how it works in the US but I could see having to have 10+ years experience in the industry in other jobs before you can become a train driver.

Same thing with airline pilots; they're all older.

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

#248

Post by bumby » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:10 PM UTC

smcl wrote: post #197

bumby wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a couple issues I have with this. The 20 year rule for jobs that “wear out your body” is a blunt heuristic. The military uses this, but it applies to both infantry and admin while they aren’t equal in terms of physical demands. Same goes for civil servant positions etc. it’s a bad measurement. Secondly, the idea of retirement is an anomaly in human history. And it’s not clear that it’s particularly healthy fo…

Sounds like you think they should do a job-body-difficulty based means testing on the retirement the unions have fought and won for their members. That would be an excellent way for the bosses to divide-and-conquer the rail workers, diminishing the negotiating power of the unions and ultimately for them to end up with even worse pay and conditions in the future. Sorry if that sounded too harsh, but I take a dim view…

>means testing on the retirement

It depends. If the primary principle is that retirement is necessary because of the wear-and-tear on one's body, then, yes, we should have some way to gauge that wear-and-tear. It seems odd to me that we can use this as the primary mechanism to justify retirement but also push back on the need to measure it.

As far as this leading to diminishing the collective bargaining of the unions, the unions are in the drivers seat there. I prefer to think of union members as smart enough agents to understand and weigh those ramifications. If it's in their best interest to maintain solidarity, I'd hope they would. But maybe you're right and it plays on short-sightedness inherent in people.

FWIW, I am in favor of giving sick days to the rail employees. It seems a bit absurd not to. I don't know the particulars of the way PSR works, but it seems like the objective function/constraints need tweaking to capture the negative externalities to employees. To me, it's the govt's role to ensure those negative externalities are accounted for and they probably have a number of tools to accomplish this, up to and including regulation.

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

#249

Post by HDThoreaun » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:11 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.

> They could easily have refused to vote for it and let the strike happen w/o real sick days.

No they could not. That would lead to economic catastrophe worse than march/april 2020. Dems would get swept next election and the workers wouldn't even win because dems would be forced to pass this exact law within a week of the strike starting. The government can't let 100,000 unrelated people lose their jobs, and they really can't let grocery stores run out of stuff or coal plants run out of coal causing blackouts.

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

#250

Post by notch656a » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 4:12 PM UTC

tomrod wrote: post #87

bestcoder69 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on the strike. Hearing they have 0 sick days (plus penalties for missing) was unbelievable to me. Strike and make it so the rail company shareholders have to live with completely fucking the US economy over their profit margins. And if they do, we all have a duty to point the finger at them.

Strike, and turn it into a general strike. Some things in the US need to change, and the formerly convenient routes of legislation or lawsuit are perceived as nonfunctional by a large and growing portion of the population. Clear the constipated logjam of current politics.

Looking forward to the general strike. It will open up some great position for scabs. I'll be moonlighting in your job; sure I'll probably be shit at it but they'll be desperate to fill the seat.