That’s a long-winded way of saying: ‘We’d rather make more money than care about the health of our employees.’
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.
As soon as the Soviet Union went away, the negotiating power of labor started to weaken.
The statements above are not to be taken as an endorsement of the various kinds of genocide and horrors Communism created in the places where it ruled. It is just an observation that power, or the implicit threat of applying it, is what rules in the end. Lots of words are used to cover that raw reality.
We also do need people to operate the rail system. "Everybody just leaves and becomes a software engineer" isn't good for society.
With that said, I don’t think this is about everyone leaving as much as it is about forcing the rail industry to capitulate.
But for the aforementioned reasons, this is unlikely to happen, and rail companies know that.
It’s a really sad state of affairs, and I’m not sure what fixes it aside from drastic political shifts during elections, but even that seems highly questionable.
I think I know someone that could start working on it.
The managers and leaders keep pushing things because they can.
Which is a legislative form of ‘keep working your field peasant, or else.’
They are 8 hours on, and 8 hours off. The on call call is also 90 minutes ahead of time. So more like 6.5 hours off.
Many end up sleeping in the parking lot.
There's an alarm that rings every minute on the train - a dead man's switch. Oftentimes this is the only thing keeping them awake.
To top it off, no sick leave.
And these people are overseeing fucking trains.
Congress backing these companies in any way is absolutely disgusting.
Just to be clear, Congress is not backing them, the Republican Party is.
As I understand it, all but one Democrats (Manchin) voted for the 7 days paid sick leave amendment giving it 52-43 but it needed 60 votes.
The question is why did Team Pelosi not first try a bill with both measures, that's how you get something "hard" passed, bundling it with something "essential."
It's pretty damning that the only politicians making noise about how awful this legislation is are the republicans looking to find a wedge issue and Bernie Sanders.
And since no one can predict when a substitute might be needed, it would take many more spare engineers and conductors to cover for those out on a sick day. This has to be why the railroads are fighting so hard against this apparently trivial benefit, despite the bad optics etc.
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.
That said they slash jobs, but because it's specifically-skilled labor slashing jobs also slashes the labor pool, when there's no jobs people either never develop the skills/experience or they leave the field --and don't come back-- when they get laid off.
This is an odd straw man. Who would claim that any economic mechanism happens “on its own”?
> as long as you can ignore the demands of that labor pool it doesn't necessarily do anything.
_Specifically with regard to salaries_ this article very clearly says that the opposite is occurring:
> the companies agreed to a 24 percent pay increase by 2024, annual $1,000 bonuses, and a freeze on health-care costs.
> […]
> The freight carriers can afford to make concessions on pay. It isn’t that painful to increase wages by a sizable amount when you’ve recently slashed your head count by 30 percent
It seems weird to argue in the hypothetical about what the railroads’ actions might do to constrain salaries when there is ample evidence that’s not true.
I meant the labor pool in existence at the company at that moment in time... the current employees and those that could be contracted in, pulled down from management, etc. The supply of labor physically available to run the trains in that instance, not market wide.
Instead of single random days off to get healthcare taken care of, they'll have random worker unavailability of weeks, months, or forever [0]. But, it's postponed so their numbers this quarter look good, but the system is rotting.
Any forking idiot can make numbers look good for a while by rotting the underlying system. This seems to be the trained remit of MBAs. Outside of managing the already-earned profits in the accounts, MBAs really are toxic to the long-term health of any business and especially its workers.
[0]from the article: >>Last June, one middle-aged union engineer postponed a doctor’s visit for work then died of a heart attack on the job weeks later. A conductor who spoke with the Times began feeling rundown last year but declined to see a doctor for fear of being disciplined for taking an unplanned day off. Instead, he waited months for the next doctor’s appointment that aligned with a scheduled day off. He then learned he’d been suffering from an infection that could have been treated with medication weeks earlier but would now require surgery.
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.
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.
I wanted to come here to say the same thing, so I'll quote you instead. Greed over all other things, how swell.
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.
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.
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.
So it makes the companies more money at the expense of everything else and you think that detracts from the OPs point?