271–280 of 388 posts
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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.
I think I know someone that could start working on it.
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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.
(Note: You did not state whether you endorse the possibility you describe, so duly noted given the style of reply, as it seems that omission is accidental.)
> ”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…
Just to clarify, did you mean slashing a given company’s jobs? The labor pool is the group of people in the job market available to perform a function. Slashing _that_ would drive salaries and thus labor costs up, not down.
>Four of those companies collectively control more than 83 percent of the freight market. And the vast majority of train stations in the U.S. are served by exactly one railroad. Monopoly behaving like a monopoly. The only real power the employees have in this situation is to leave, especially when the government's interests are also not aligned with employee interests. Numbers tell us there are 10M open jobs in the U…
This lock-in give the companies more leeway to abuse the workers if the unions are prevented from functioning to protect them. Which is what's happened thanks to Congress throwing the workers under the bus.
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Society (and the authorities/governments) were completely inconsistent with it. I still see people who freak out over COVID but don't care about any other contagion. People still talk about COVID testing as if it is a "Are You Contagious?" testing. Even medical facilities keep pushing COVID testing even though it doesn't change the diagnosis, treatment, or outcome; even if you test negative for COVID, you could (1) s…
> Even medical facilities keep pushing COVID testing even though it doesn't change the diagnosis, treatment, or outcome (X) Doubt If you're not very sick then sure the treatment isn't going to change much (just fight it off with OTC drugs). But if you actually need any sort of intervention (rare) they'll give you different drugs than say an Ebola infection. > If your not sick (or sick but not contagious), then you do…
Another difference perhaps is that the SOP treatment, US, U.K., don't know where else is to give anyone bad off enough to require supplemental oxygen a steroid to suppress the innate immune system.
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By that same logic, it's not the shareholders responsibility to sacrifice their own interests for the interests of larger society. Taking that approach is a prisoners dilemma.
You're right, it's not their responsibility to give up their cushy profits, it's the government's responsibility to ensure its citizens rights are protected, such as their right to strike.
I support their right to strike. It should not be impeded in any form. I also support the right for society to take back all the land they freely gave for use of the railroads, and then to rent it back by imposing a tax against the paycheck of railroad workers equal to whatever gains they made by shutting down freight to the US.
> ”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…
Maybe this is better than the old way, but I still don’t see it as optimal.
If their target is to profit 10 cents on every $1 in cost, does that mean they wouldn’t take a job that profits 9 cents off a $1 in cost?
As a shareholder, I just care about total profit. If a railroad grew its revenue 3x but halves it’s margin, I’d be as happy as can be, profits just went up 50%. But it’s PSR would look awful.
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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.
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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.
Yes but now they can't change because the first one to do this becomes uncompetitive, the only way to introduce this in a fair way that otherwise maintains market competition is to introduce a rule that applies to all the companies in the market that says you must offer paid sick leave. Edit: A more extreme example; there is a rule that says airlines mustn't make pilots work more than a certain number of hours withou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.