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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

#51

Post by mikewarot »

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 finally get the freight in monstrously long trains moving through a system that wasn't designed for it.

The SECOND problem is that slashing the labor pool, and thus reducing the labor cost at the expense of reliability and system performance, appears to be the actual goal of PSR.

I stand with the workers, no essential worker should be forced to work "on-call". Especially not people so important to safety and National Security.

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

#52

Post by thesuitonym »

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…

If you chase that idea, you end up deregulating the railroads, and history has shown us that when a company is treating its employees terribly, the answer is never less regulation.

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

#53

Post by lesuorac »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #29
chiefalchemist wrote: post #2

Given what we we've went though with Covid (i.e., "if you're the least bit sick, stay home...") this makes zero sense. Such double standards don't do well to mend confidence. That said, I won't be surprised if there are sick outs in the coming weeks. This negotiation might be over for now, but it's not over for good.

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 you.

Unclear how you know if you're not contagious if you don't actually know what you're sick with.

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

#54

Post by cool_dude85 »

danielvf wrote: post #35
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…

From stats I can look up, the average US railroad worker earns $130,000 year in total comp in 2021. Railroad retirement begins full strength at age 60, and looks to be $4,838/mo for an ex railroad employee and spouse. In contrast, Social Security on $130,000 earnings would be $1,919/mo if you retired at age 62. The railroads pay for the retirement expense via tax. So yes, by US labor standards, railroad employees are…

"Pensions are expensive" is a classic lie cooked up by finance (who want high fees in 401k individual accounts) and cheap companies who want to cut every benefit to the bone.

I'll preface this by stating that I have not looked into the railroad pension, but instead I will draw a parallel to my own. I can get 80% of my top recent pay when I retire after 32 years, which is quite generous as pensions go. The long-term cost of this is around 16-18% of payroll - 8-9% from my employer, 8-9% from me. Current cost to be in the social security program is about 12% of payroll. Increasing current retirement spending by 1.5x is enough to get you to an extremely generous pension. This is a decent amount of money but far from back-breaking.

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

#56

Post by chii »

georgeplusplus wrote: post #43
mauvehaus wrote: post #19

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…

>>>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. Each day the rail industry strikes costs 2 billion dollars. This type of loss would most certainly have a permanent effect on prices. Given how bad inflation is currently, this would further drive inflation higher. This complicates the decision to strike…

it is not the worker's responsibility to sacrifice their own interests for the interests of the wider society (such as lowering inflationary pressure by not striking).

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

#57

Post by nasmorn »

treis wrote: post #45
AlexandrB wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions already do something economically useful - increase wages. How would you have a consumer economy if no one had any disposable income?

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.

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

#58

Post by [deleted] »

danaris wrote: post #39
mauvehaus wrote: post #19

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.

[deleted]

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

#59

Post by JohnFen »

georgeplusplus wrote: post #43
mauvehaus wrote: post #19

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…

>>>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. Each day the rail industry strikes costs 2 billion dollars. This type of loss would most certainly have a permanent effect on prices. Given how bad inflation is currently, this would further drive inflation higher. This complicates the decision to strike…

It is a sick society that can decide that some people can be sacrificed just to make things a bit cheaper.

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

#60

Post by cr1895 »

mynameishere wrote: post #15

Sickness is kind of a red herring in the discussion. Everyone uses sick days as surprise vacations and that is more disruptive for railroads than, say, my desk job.

I like how it’s done in the Netherlands.

There are vacation days (guaranteed by law!). And then there is sick leave, and there is no fixed number of days.

They’re totally separate. If you’re sick, you’re sick - if you’re sick long term it’s covered by insurance. If you’re sick on holiday you even can get your vacation days back.

It’s so gross to me how this is handled in America. Certainly there are flaws in the Dutch approach, but it’s inhumane and precarious for so many people in America.

Makes me never want to return to life in the US.

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