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 thing about this that sucks is that if you have a chronic illness, you end up using all your PTO as sick and you get no actual breaks. (Whereas if you run out of sick days you can use FMLA or short term disability without giving up all of your vacation or holidays).
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…
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 Harriso…
Or... they could not interfere in disputes between labor and management, and let those "activist shareholders" eat the losses when they fail to deliver on their contracts.
> 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
She's exactly who I was thinking of when I wrote that post. Everyone should watch her grilling, here's the timestamp:
It is time for the government to step in and do more than force a contract agreement. They need to threaten the Railroad companies and side with America workers. Some suggestions: - Take back the railroads that the public built and maintained. Then charge commercial rail for the use of them. This is a huge issue since it currently is a major limitation of passenger rail in the US, and once again, having these be publ…
Which politicians will do that? The Democrats are over blue collar labor, have been since the 1970s when the New Left captured the party, and the GOP establishment hates that part of their base.
A great deal of Trump's otherwise inexplicable popularity is that he's a 1970s NYC Democrat just like Reagan in the 1980s was a self-described FDR Democrat and he doesn't hate these people. Doesn't care or do much for them, but this is a palpable difference from the GOPe.
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.
Yeah, coming from a country with strong labour laws, it's mind boggling that this is legal in the US. I think the realist view has to be that the market ain't ever going to fix it, companies are always going to try to get away with as much as they can, and the people have to force the Government to bring in minimum standards.
The market is perfectly capable of fixing the problem. The employees should quit, strike, or slowdown work until their employers give them what they want.
>Voting for blues obviously isn’t cutting it. Agree, and furthermore, I'd argue that the blue "Third Way"[1] ushered in by Bill Clinton in the US is what hugely screwed labor, and 20 years later leads to the election of DJT. Why can't Biden/congress make the agreement that the unions want and ratify that ? There are multiple ways to avoid the strike; I don't understand why this has to be on ownership's terms. Long te…
> Long term, (or at least in 2024, which is about as long term as we get in American politics anymore) this is going to let team Red claim to be the pro-worker team. but they are those who are voting those proposals down. >Why can't Biden/congress make the agreement that the unions want and ratify that? because they need 60 votes in senate and obviously don't have them. I just don't understand how you can rationally…
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…
I would support eliminating both the anti-general strike and anti-collusion laws. It seems unfair to ban collusion by capital but not by labor.
Fuck the shareholders. Strike. Yes, I am absolutely willing to pay more in the short term for things so that people are treated with a little basic human decency. Moreover, I'm more than happy to pay a little more for things in the long term to ensure that there's enough slack in the system to absorb the shocks that periodically come around. We've just spent almost three years slowly killing everyone in healthcare be…
They should absolutely strike. And they're in a good position to do so: my understanding is that, unlike, say, the air traffic controllers' strike in the '80s, there's no supply of trained rail operators ready to be brought in as scabs to keep things going. If they strike, the trains just won't run.
I think the thing congress is worried about is how quickly the entire country devolves to anarchy if the trains stop.
We cancelled all flights in the USA for two days after 9/11 and it really didn't do much of anything major, but Walmart turns over all stock every month or so, and groceries are turned over much faster.
Trains also provide a significant amount of coal still used to fuel power plants.
That's shifting where the pie goes. It's not making more pie.
It absolutely is. Workers getting paid more actually spend that money. If you pay more dividends to the Saudi wealth fund or even a local billionaire the economy doesn’t grow as much of that.
Yeah, every study I've seen about economic stimulus indicates it's really, really hard to do better than "give ordinary people more money". That's what you do if you're serious about giving the economy a kick in the ass (and politics and/or bribery don't get in the way). Which makes sense.
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.
This would be a more reasonable critique if the Democrats had not been the minority party in the US Senate from 2012-2020. For the last 2 years they only have 51-50 tie breaking lead in the Senate which give a very slim margin to get anything done. I'm sure the Democrats could do more but it is a bit unfair to blame them for the actions/inactions of their (frequently more powerful) rivals.
The Democrats' failure to run good campaigns, always keeping congress teetering between the two corporate parties, is part of their culpability. If they all ran on, for example, abolishing health insurance companies, and won (because the majority of the population actually wants universal health care), and got elected, suddenly they'd be in the awkward position of having to do something that their big donors don't want and not having Republican control of congress as an excuse. The Democratic party is controlled opposition. They allow a sprinkling of 'progressives' in the party because it makes for a better show.