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Comment by mauvehaus | Hacker News Reader

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 because every "inefficiency" in the system has been trimmed to the bone. We've been asking people to shoulder crushing loads to make up for the lack of what is normally excess capacity. We shouldn't need a reminder that all that inefficiency is what adds resilience to the system so soon.

Airlines claim to have learned this. They say they're reducing schedules to more realistically match their ability to absorb hiccups during the holiday travel season. Time will tell, but it seems nobody wants a repeat of last year. If you make flying awful enough, evidently people will find ways to not do it.

Maybe part of the solution is to treat other industries like the banking and finance industries. Banks get periodic stress tests; perhaps it's time to do the same for all of the other systems that we rely on holding together but don't have to think about until they're falling apart under load.

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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.

FYI, many, many millions of people in America that work low paying jobs have zero paid sick days (or paid time off in general).

As evidenced by the fact that there is no federal law about it, and only a handful of states required a small number of paid sick days.

Very aware of that (I’m American), so I should have mentioned that it’s surprising to me given their critical & central role in keeping our whole-ass system functioning. ie even these workers get 0.

I think the rules are shocking because these are NOT low paying jobs. These are "good union jobs."

But they get PTO days, right? Many people in tech don't have sick days, just PTO days which include vacation, sick, etc. Unless I am missing something.

From the article:

>if such workers wish to recuperate from an illness or make time to see a doctor about a nagging complaint, they need to use vacation time, which must be requested days in advance. In other words, if a worker wants to take time off to recover from the flu, they need to notify their employer of this days before actually catching the virus.

Ahh, you can't really call off sick when you are actually sick. Yeah, that's a problem. There has to be some slack in the system for unscheduled time off. We should have learned that by now.

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.

Careful. Not so safe to be a scab if labor gets serious about keeping capital from fucking it so hard.

Sweet the risk will command an even higher premium for the labor. Not the first time I've been shot at.

And when the dumbasses crashes the train they’ll realize that that was actually a lot more expensive and wasteful of an option.

This is just a political talking point supported by a friendly media. From the union's mouth:

>Q: Why did the railroads reject proposals to add benefits on top of the framework recommended by the PEB?

>A: The request for additional benefits made by the few unions that have not ratified tentative agreements is similar to a proposal which was carefully considered and rejected by President Biden’s Presidential Emergency Board (PEB). It comes weeks after these same unions entered into tentative agreements that included the most generous wage package in almost 50 years of national rail negotiations.

>The health, safety, and wellbeing of rail employees is a top priority for all railroads, and any suggestion that rail workers cannot take time off when sick is easily disproven. Rail employees can and do take time off for sickness and have comprehensive paid sickness benefits starting, depending upon craft, after as few as four days of absence and lasting up to 52 weeks. The structure of these benefits is a function of decades of bargaining where unions have repeatedly agreed that short-term absences would be unpaid in favor of higher compensation for days worked and more generous sickness benefits for longer absences.

https://raillaborfacts.org/news/bargaining-status-faq-2022/

What's happened is that the unions negotiated higher pay for worse benefits. Now some of them are leaning on friendly politicians to get the benefits they traded away back without having to give up the higher pay.

Why is it that only management/ownership gets monotonic increases to their total compensation?

>What's happened is that the unions negotiated higher pay for worse benefits. Now some of them are leaning on friendly politicians to get the benefits they traded away back without having to give up the higher pay.

They didn't negotiate anything with the current contract being imposed on them. The contracts have been voted down by membership, hence the union does not agree with the terms.

The group who has "leaned on friendly politicians" is in fact management, who got Biden and the spineless Dems to impose this not-agreed-to contract via legislation.

Tell me you didn't read my link without telling me you didn't read it.

Make the argument yourself, you're a grown up. How can you describe the negotiations for this contract when the contract has not been agreed upon?

Rail Labor Facts is from the NRLC, which is the rail company organization, which is to say that aint from the union's mouth at all.

Ah, they caught me. But really it was just the most convenient cite. The facts are true and can easily be verified from other sources. Most of the rail unions have approved the contract and these machinations are a last ditched effort to get a better deal.

It's also worth looking at which unions ratified it, for instance SMART Yardmasters and Mechanical ratified it, but TD, the branch that is on the train, have not.

IBEW? thats the electric workers union they aren't on call 24/365 to drive a train into the middle of nowhere sit for 12 hours then be shuttled to bunkhouse.

TCU, BRC that communications and car maintainance...

ATDA, dispachers

IAM, machinists

NCFO, well the Firemen and Oilers there refers to fixed plants not locomotives, and they've been part of the service industry union for the last 30 years, I don't know who exactly they cover but it's again probably not the engineers/conductors.

All of which is to say that the unions that have ratified the agreement are the ones that aren't being fucked by PTO/sick day shit (which isn't to say unaffected but, not fucked).

It’s not “from the union’s mouth”! The National Railway Labor Conference represents the railroads, not the workers:

> National Railway Labor Conference (NRLC) is an association of all U.S. Class I freight railroads and many smaller freight and passenger lines.

I can see how you assumed the reverse, given the misleading name, but that tells us something too, doesn’t it?

This approach is taken with regulated utilities and telcos as well--natural gas utilities design their systems with enough capacity to serve all firm customers on the expected coldest day of the year (called a "design day") and circuit switched telephone networks were designed to handle the traffic expected on Mother's Day.

Not in NL. Train schedules regularly go haywire whenever a track switch freezes or -- less funnily -- there's a "person collision". The infrastructure is so congested there's no slack; indeed WFH (or remote, perhaps a local professional setting cowork) would do wonders to reduce commute overhead.

It's a lot faster and cheaper to add more telephone circuits than to build more train tracks and stations. Our infrastructure in many places was just never designed for so many people.

In Stockholm we're joking that as soon as there's a singe leaf on the tracks in autumn, trains are screwed. Wet leaves on the tracks are no joke, and can be hazardous, but the commuter trains have been quite badly mismanaged

This seems to be happening less and less often, though.

ProRail has pretty aggressively been removing most track switches not in regular use, reducing their chance of failure at the cost of not being able to reroute around any issues that do occur.

At the same time they've been replacing busy railway crossings with tunnels, and closing or protecting the 150 or so remaining unprotected crossings. The total number of accidental collisions is down to less than one a week. There's still about 200 suicides a year, but they are also actively trying to prevent those by adjusting the infrastructure.

There are significant issues at the moment, but most of them are at NS and other transporters. They are critically short on personnel, and recruiting new people isn't going very well. They've had to cut the number of trains by about 10% already!

Except in Texas, of course. But then, one might argue that utilities in Texas aren't meaningfully regulated.

They are, actually. The PUCT has historically done a great job.

But, legislation (outside PUCT) has allowed the utility (generators and transmission/distribution asset owners) to cut the system to the bone and defer maintenance and expansion despite a new city's worth of people (~100k) relocating each month to Texas.

Texas’s population is not increasing by 100k/month. Sure, people may be flocking there but actual population growth is less than half that rate.

50k per month is still 600k/year! The point remains that the population growth (which is known and anticipated) is not having utility growth to match.

So you're saying that except for the laws the control what PUCT can regulate, regulation is working fine?

Were they, though?

In my experience calling, text messaging, and WhatsApp has basically always had capacity issues on New Year's Eve, as literally everyone is trying to contact their family members the moment the clock hits twelve. Failed connections/messages are basically expected, and many people even intentionally call earlier or later to avoid this.

Yes, they were.

Cellular networks and Meta’s app, likely not so much. It is what happens when you regulate monopolies, you can attach performance requirements.

I agree with the sentiment of your post. I can absorb a 10% bump in prices without really blinking. But the bottom 50% of Americans cannot.

I wish it was as cut and dry as telling them to just strike, but I don’t think it’s that simple.

The bottom 50% can strike and request the share they need to survive the price hike too. All boats rise.

It's not the railroad workers' fault that half of Americans can't afford food and basic necessities.

You're not wrong, but policy is often not crafted on just the concept of fairness, but also other considerations like the stability of society.

No, it is crafted on the stability of asset prices to benefit asset owners. If stability of society was the goal, then workers in the US would have a minimum wage tied to CPI, and minimum PTO, etc.

The way events seem to unfold is that asset owners get to take societal stability to the brink to maximize profits, and then non asset owners are the ones forced to blink to prevent societal instability. Aka privatize the profits, socialize the losses.

I tend to agree. It's unfortunate, but some of the primary ways we use to measure stability and health is strictly economics, both societally and individually.

Maybe (In the US) we need society to fail a little bit. "Christmas to be canceled," as the President likes to say when justifying why the railworkers will have to accept not having sick days.

The government could nationalize the railroads. (There's even precedent.)

But instead they get the same treatment the airlines do: public support for private profit.

Between the extremes of doing nothing to maintain the status quo and nationalizing an industry, there are countless options. Many of which would be more realistic, more palatable, and more beneficial. In fact, nationalization is so repulsive to most politicians voters that suggesting it is an effective tactic to squash efforts to create meaningful change. A beneficial suggestion would seek to address issues in a way that could be realistically achieved by balancing competing interests.

> Many of which would be more realistic, more palatable, and more beneficial. In fact, nationalization is so repulsive to most politicians voters that suggesting it is an effective tactic to squash efforts to create meaningful change.

Why though? Railways are a natural monopoly and critical infrastructure, so either they have to be state owned or heavily regulated.

Right, so regulation would be the middle ground between state-owned (nationalized) and unregulated.

Union pacific alone is worth 132 billion dollars. Nationalizing the railroads would probably cost $500 billion and then they would lose money because they'd pay their workers a reasonable amount instead of what is happening now.

I haven't followed this super closely (as an aside, it's also really discouraging how little I've seen this story talked about. Buried in the newspapers, etc) but am I off base in thinking that gov't could have just sided with the workers and req'd the railroads to give sick days rather than just siding with the RRs and saying "no sick days"?

Wow what a run-on sentence! :P

The trade off seemed to come down to "sick days for workers" vs. "lower costs for consumers"

The government went with "lower costs for consumers"

Why "mandate on-call employees to cover sick employees" wasn't an option, I don't know.

> The trade off seemed to come down to "sick days for workers" vs. "lower costs for consumers"

It doesn't have to raise prices. The costs imposed by the sick days (millions) are absolutely dwarfed by annual profits (billions).

I think the issue is that the railroads are running thin crews and extremely tight schedules. So Jim the engineer calling in 3 hours before he is due to commandeer 2,500 tons of freight for 500 miles creates a dire situation that not only delays that train, but throws off the schedule of dozens of other trains.

I'm just hypothesizing here, and I feel like I am missing something since it doesn't seem like having/adding on-call employees was an option.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. The railway companies estimate the costs of the sick time to be in the millions. See their official submission to the President here: https://ble-t.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/PEB_250_Recomme...

They would have considered everything you mentioned in their cost estimate.

Short answer: yes.

Longer answer: It is within the federal govt's authority to write the labor agreement from scratch. They could have used the workers' preferred agreement.

In fact, the bill the House of Reps passed did include the seven sick days. The Senate held a vote on whether to include the sick days in the deal; it received a majority of the votes but due to Senate rules (filibuster) that was not enough, and thus the provision failed.

There is a bill that would do just that. Passed the house but then couldn't get past the filibuster even though it had 52 senate votes.

With only 43 votes against, that is 1 Democrat voting against (Manchin for some reason I can't imagine) and 6 Republicans voting for it, we have a deficit of 5 Democrats just not voting. We also see the same deficit in the 26-69 against 60 more days of negotiations.

This situation does not lend itself to pat answers, including why Team Pelosi didn't first try a bill with both provisions combined. This trainwreck (sorry) could be seen coming for weeks, there was plenty of time to try to do the right thing. Except of course for both parties' establishments hating this segment of the population.

There have already been more than a year of (non)negotiations. Railroads are just waiting for the government to bail them out, more time wouldn't change a thing. They didn't try a combined bill because they can count, and knew it would just be a waste of time that would cause fear in the economy. There was no time for fucking around here

Agreed. This is a huge opportunity to reset employment terms, and not just in this industry. Also, allegedly many current railroad workers started in 2004 and will be eligible to retire in 2024. If we don’t fix this now, we’ll be in a worse position in a year or so. All who can will retire, and recruiting new hires will be even harder. Long term, we probably need to bust up the railroads and create a nationalized and/or worker owned/controlled ownership structure. Else we’ll end up here again eventually.

>2004 and will be eligible to retire in 2024

This isn't a push against your overall point, but I think a larger systemic view is necessary. E.g., maybe the idea of retirement after 20 years is outdated. Or maybe the system needs to be re-thought in terms of how to keep that paradigm funded, particularly in economies with declining birth rates.

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.

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 for the individual or society.

I think there’s an argument to be had that in a productive society, people shouldn’t feel financially insecure. But I’m not sure giving 2 years of retirement for every 1 year of employment is the best way to do that.

Funding better benefits is certainly an option, but hard to do while also keeping costs down. Unfortunately, it seems like Americans prefer a consumerist economy and are addicted to cheap shit.

My personal opinion is that if rail (or air traffic controllers or whatever) are so vital to the economy, we should be willing to treat the workers as such.

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 of the idea that we - in our well-paid industry with all of the benefits that come with it - have any business suggesting that workers who probably already have less than us will need to make do with less pay/holidays/healthcare/retirement or anything like that

>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.

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.

I think the point is, if the current contract without sick time gets pushed through, anyone who can retire soon may hold on until they hit 20 years, even if they’ll still have to work another job. People in the military do this very often. It’s exactly what I would do in their shoes.

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.

Well, then, maybe Congress should mandate paid sick leave for the people running those trains, rather than mandating that those workers should just shut up and deal with it.

But that would involve congress doing the right thing instead of the easy thing. But luckily we’ll do the right thing eventually, after having exhausted all other possibilities.

Here's hopin'.

Why does it depend on each independent company, instead of just stating it by law? I mean, it seems that everybody across all industries should enjoy the same minimum sick days, not letting companies decide below that, because otherwise some (or most) will decide that number to be zero, as is the case.

Otherwise these people will strike to gain some decency in their labor conditions, but it will be "wasted" effort in the sense that other industries will still lag behind with similar problems. Wouldn't it be better to have a more general change that applies to everybody? Companies are greedy, they'll always try to get as much as possible from their workers, if law allows for it.

(note: not american. I'm just an observer from afar, in an european country where a lot of these worker rights are coded in the law; companies can offer perks above those rights, but never below)

> Fuck the shareholders. Strike.

It might not remain legal to strike (for this set of workers on this occasion).

On several occasions, Congress has intervened to delay or prohibit strikes. For example, in 1994, Congress passed P.L. 103-380, which extended the final cooling-off period by four months to allow the United Transportation Union and the Soo Line Railroad to continue negotiations. In 1970, P.L. 91-226 imposed a tentative agreement ratified by three unions but rejected by a fourth, similar to H.J.Res. 100.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN11966

Oh, no, I guess they'll just have to do everything as slowly and by the book as possible. Darn.

>>>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 when people are already having trouble affording basic necessities as it is.

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).

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.

>such as their right to strike.

True, but like all rights, they aren't unlimited. There are both lawful and unlawful strikes and the delineation between the two is sometimes hard to determine.

Total comp by class 1 rail employees is $130k a year [0].

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.

[0] https://raillaborfacts.org/total-compensation/

Note that is "total compensation" and not salary. That means it's factoring in fringe benefits, like health insurance, time off, retirement, relocation benefits, etc. I'm not saying it should be disregarded, just that it's important to note that distinction for comparison's sake. By comparison, there's some sites online touting $400k average total compensation for SV computer scientists.

More to your point, why would you tax the employees rather than the company that actually has the land easement? The former seems to absolve the shareholders while the latter would likely affect both the shareholders and the employees.

Labor is neither perfectly elastic nor perfectly in-elastic. Therefore it is fallacious to presume it would absolve the shareholders. Taxes on employment, taxed against the employee, actually get split between the employer and employee as the employer competes on the labor market and is forced to repay some of the tax in the form of elevated pre-tax wages. That is the tax is only nominally only on the employee.

Rail is a near monopoly * (or at least a cartel), so it doesn’t have the same market forces to make that thesis work. There are enormous barriers to entry that prevent much competition, so employees have little market from which to choose. Meaning it shifts the power away from the employee in favor of the employer.

* this is one of the reasons Warren Buffet invested in rail a decade or so ago.

If the workers are so specialized in rail that substitutions from rail to not rail are so poor as to not have an external market as you say, then in turn the workers also have a monopoly as external workers are unable to replace them. If what you say is true I am totally unsympathetic of argumetns against damages being sought from monopolizers who are involved in the shutting down of the rail network for which society gave up its lands.

> If what you say is true I am totally unsympathetic of argumetns against damages being sought from monopolizers who are involved in the shutting down of the rail network for which society gave up its lands.

Great, since the shareholders of these companies are also involved in shutting down the rail network since they refuse to give a humane employment contract, you should be equally unsympathetic to their side. Since all else is equal on who should be blamed for shutting down rail or the economic impact this will have, then should we not be preferring the side that has the better ethical claim?

I'm not talking about collecting damages for ethics violations. I'm talking about real damages as a result of shutdowns. If you want to impose additional damages beyond that for ethics, then sure maybe you can argue about who was more/less ethical.

I believe you are conflating their point. They aren't advocating fining for ethical violations, but fining on the basis of realized damages. If you think both the company and workers are responsible for those damages, it is unethical to disproportionately fine only one side.

If you tax the company, both sides will be affected. The company directly through the fines, but also the workers indirectly as the company pay structure will have to adjust to remain viable. If you only tax the workers, only one side of that equation is affected.

>>should we not be preferring the side that has the better ethical claim?

>They aren't advocating fining for ethical violations,

Your statement is a contradiction of GP's statement. Preferring the side with better 'ethical claim' is in effect a redistribution in the form of discount to the more 'ethical' with a fine to the less 'ethical'.

Again, you are conflating the two points.

1) Fines are appraised for damages

2) When there are competing claims, one should favor the side with a stronger ethical foundation

These are not equivalent. Just because #1 is true does not mean fines are appraised for ethics violations. They also don't have to be mutually exclusive. Not sure if you're trying to misdirect or just misunderstanding the distinction.

>then in turn the workers also have a monopoly as external workers are unable to replace them.

This is exactly why a strike is devastating and the point of the talk about Congress intervening. However, if it goes down like the air traffic controllers in the 1980s, their labor monopoly may be broken while the rail monopoly remains intact. So again it creates an asymmetry in power which is why taxing the employees is wrong-headed.

Tax the companies and they will adjust their rates, pay, and dividends. Tax the employees under a monopolistic employment, all you'll do is make the pay absorb the externalities. It becomes just one more way of socializing the risk of shareholders at the expense of labor.

Lets imagine what you say is true. The workers are under "monopolistic employment" asymmetrically and any tax is absorbed by the worker (thus their employment is inelastic with respect to wage). Theorize to me what their wages will go down to if the railroads are the unethical and greedy barons which they no doubt may be.

>way of socializing the risk of shareholders at the expense of labor.

The strike would socialize the risk of employees/rail companies at the expense of the public who on average are far closer to the poverty line than the median rail worker.

>Theorize to me what their wages will go down to

If the companies are backstopped by the govt prohibiting a strike, they will go down to the absolute lowest level tolerable, until people retire and nobody is willing to take on that job. Likely, we'd see what happens in other industries that create a bimodal tiered system, where the grandfathered employees are still paid well while the newer tier are paid a fraction. Or, wages will stagnate until the equivalent occurs.

Again, taxing the companies will make sure incentives are more aligned between workers, shareholders, and the public. The problem with one-sided approaches is that it's very easy to levy a fine that someone else has to pay. The public and the shareholders can favor an ever-rising tax as long as long only the employees are burdened with it. Taxing the company will ensure that everyone is incentivized to find a reasonable taxation level.

Theorize the govt owns land that has the sole unobtanium mine that the fulfills some public necessity. I have the only equipment that can process the ore. You have the only skillset to operate it. Overtime, my contract terms get to a point that you feel is unreasonable. But the govt says you can't walk away because the public needs their unobtanium. Your solution is that the government tax you for the privilege to continue to mine - which they've also said you can't walk away from. Meanwhile, I pay no penalty to continue to press you for less favorable contract terms so that I can make ever increasing profits. Does that sound like a reasonable arrangement or is it marching towards a Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas scenario?

By taxing me instead, it forces me to find the right level of salary to you, rates to the public, and profits for myself. Everybody has skin in the game, unlike when your scenario that gives you an ultimatum you can't walk away from.

How does 130k in comp compare to a "tolerable" compensation? Do you anticipate someone earning above 130k USD is representative of the general public of Americans who would be punished for the railroad strikes?

As a matter of imperfect pragmatism I would support a bill that equally collects from the employees and employer as it would still be some way of extracting rent from land provided freely by public for a service they were cut off from.

>Your solution is that the government tax you for the privilege to continue to mine

No my solution isn't to tax for the privelege to mine, it's to tax for damages for loss of use of public lands that were only given up conditionally so they could be used productively by employees and employers of the railroad.

1) you asked for a forecast of where I thought wages would go. The $130k mark is not what I predicted it would remain at.

2) already addressed this once, but that is $130k in total compensation. I don’t have enough information to fully gauge their fringe benefits, but it’s not uncommon for them to total as much as 50% of total compensation. Additionally, rail engineers are often on call 24/7. So is, say, $75k in salary luxurious given no sick days, 24/7 on call, physically demanding job, and lots of travel, for what the country is saying is a critical role? It doesn’t seem so to me. That’s in todays dollars that will be eroded in the future if the companies have their druthers. It doesn’t seem like the great deal you’re painting it as when ignoring the total picture.

3) again, the land easements are to the company, not the employee. So it doesn’t follow that you want to tax the employee for a right given to the employer. It’s such odd logic that it comes across as a trolling effort

>1) you asked for a forecast of where I thought wages would go. The $130k mark is not what I predicted it would remain at.

Yes. And you forecast it will be lower in the scenario you proposed of "monopolistic employment." But it is not lower, which logically concludes there is not the condition of monopolistic employment you claim.

>2)2) already addressed this once, but that is $130k in total compensation. I don’t have enough information to fully gauge their fringe benefits, but it’s not uncommon for them to total as much as 50% of total compensation. Additionally, rail engineers are often on call 24/7. So is, say, $75k in salary luxurious given no sick days, 24/7 on call, physically demanding job, and lots of travel, for what the country is saying is a critical role? It doesn’t seem so to me. That’s in todays dollars that will be eroded in the future if the companies have their druthers. It doesn’t seem like the great deal you’re painting it as when ignoring the total picture.

Then it makes even less sense the employees should socialize the risks onto the general public, who receive (by median) less than 130k in total compensation. The tax on employee is to compensate for these socialized losses for privatized gains, imposed against use of land given freely by the public.

3> again, the land easements are to the company, not the employee. So it doesn’t follow that you want to tax the employee for a right given to the employer. It’s such odd logic that it comes across as a trolling effort

Employees OF THE COMPANY -- the employees in collusion (monopolistic collusion if you are to be believed) to stop operating the railroad on these lands. Who are disproportional beneficiaries of the land, and by your prior statement equally to shoulder of the damages. The damages imposed by the employees are damages against use of the land.

Your absurd trolling accusation, and apparent willing disregard that employees are disproportionate beneficiaries of the land, show you are no longer acting in good faith, so at this point I wish you good day and will give you the joyous benefit of whatever name calling you wish to continue in unopposed.

>there is not the condition of monopolistic employment you claim.

Note the intervention of the govt is the key factors that changes this dynamic. E.g., why aren’t monopolistic utilities constantly gouging their customers? Because they are regulated monopolies.

The trade off with the public that you mention is how these endeavors become regulated monopolies in the first place. Society gets efficiency from the private sector in exchange for giving a public resource. The regulation is the mediating condition of that agreement.

Yes, employees of the company. That doesn’t negate the point. We disagree that the employees are disproportionately benefiting. All you have to do is see who’s equity is most aligned with the land. (Hint: it’s the billions of dollars of company equipment of the company). It’s absurd to tax at a level one degree removed while leaving the primary beneficiaries (the company) without accountability. It’s obvious you have an axe to grind that need not be encumbered with logic.

i dont understand the proposal to tax the employee.

Taxing an activity makes it happen less. If the gov't want fewer railroad workers (or in your hypothetical example, mining equipment operators), they'd tax them like this! there'd be fewer operators as a result, and any shortage of them will cause problems. These operators aren't slaves - they can quit the industry.

The gov't would instead tax those employees _less_, in order for them to keep more of their wages, and thus encourage more of them to exist.

Except the premise given by bumbly above was that the employee's labor is inelastic as they are locked into the industry, and thus the labor would shoulder all of the tax without change in supply. Your comment is directly calling bumbly a liar.

Just stop with the hyperbolic statements and strawmanning. It's against HN guidelines.[1]

Also, I did not say their labor is inelastic (at least not at the collective level). The employees have a right to strike. However, the govt has said their labor is a necessity for the public good and has reserved the right to regulate it. Therefore, there is not a free market to set the price for labor as long as that regulatory mechanism exists.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

the rail companies could avoid a strike by agreeing on the sick leave terms and hiring more workers to add slack to the system. why aren’t they to blame? this is a system where people are dying on the job because they can’t take time to see a doctor. where they can’t help out if their family is sick. how this lasted through covid is beyond my imagination,

> 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 when people are already having trouble affording basic necessities as it is.

Sure would. Sounds like the railroad should give sick days or be nationalized.

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 need to go bankrupt before you would reverse your position? This is the calculus being done by Biden's admin.

>Household debt in the U.S. is at 20 year highs.

Isn't the largest share of household debt a home mortgage? Implying that talking about the rail strike is a distraction from the root cause. There are still real consequences to Americans from the rail strike, but (very much like the student debt crisis) it seems like tap dancing around the root cause doesn't really fix the problem.

Perhaps largest in aggregate, but credit card debt has spiked in the last year and is continuing to climb higher, close to a Trillion dollars. https://www.lendingtree.com/credit-cards/credit-card-debt-st...

A large chunk of the population is clearly dealing with inflation through credit cards. More inflation for them just means more CC debt, and if everyone is getting as many "free balance transfer no interest for the first year" offers in the mail that I am, that's some extra fuel for a crisis.

Both of these can be true. All I’m saying is it makes more sense to focus on the biggest issue for the biggest impact.

Average credit card debt is roughly on par with pre-pandemic levels. Dipping during Covid is probably an artifact of the govt stimulus (speculatively). Without digging further, it’s not clear to me that it’s not a return to normal. If that normal is still bad, my guess is there are more deeply rooted issues.

I guess the question is are saving rates low because of mortgages or because of CC debt? I'd tend to lean toward CC debt, as a good chunk of the population doesn't even have a mortgage, the cost is typically fixed, and you don't take out an extra mortgage to pay for 15% inflation in food, you put it on a CC.

CC debt is also far more damaging to household finances, particularly during high inflation as you're just piling ~%20 CC interest rates on top of the inflation rate. So a "return to normal" is going to be far more damaging in 2022/2023 conditions than it would be in 2019 conditions. There's also no indication that CC debt is going to level out, the "normal" in 2019 was an upward spike as it was, and inflation is likely going to continue due to structural factors, which is going to continue to force people to compensate, which likely means an even sharper increase in CC debt.

Getting back to the potential railroad strike, put an extra 10% inflation on top of everything and for many people that's another 30% after they put it on a CC they can't/don't pay off. For many households it would appear we're looking at literally exponentially increasing levels of debt, mostly fueled by CCs and high inflation. That's a crisis.

>I'd tend to lean toward CC debt

I think I would lean toward household mortgage. The reason is simple. With a quick (and admittedly superficial) search, the average minimum credit card payment was $110, while the average monthly mortgage or rent payment was $2100. Despite the fact that many people don't have mortgages, they still need a place to live, and you can't decouple rent and home prices. Which is particularly pernicious for renters because their home costs are not fixed. Add to it that many people use their home equity as a revolving credit line and I don't think the costs are as fixed as one might first assume.

I think an underlying issue is that people have an optimism bias in terms of budgeting. They live riiiiight up to their level of income. I think the stat goes back at least a decade, but something like 65% of Americans cannot afford an unforeseen $500 emergency. Some of this is attributable to wage stagnation, but I also think much of it is due to another type of inflation: lifestyle inflation.

A trillion dollars in credit card debt is about $9k per household, or $5k per adult in the US.

And some percentage of that is paid off each month (but I'm not clear how to determine that - seems it might be 54% of cards but that doesn't answer "of dollars").

> 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.

>Corporate profits

In the social media circle-jerk, yeah. In economist circles that include the advisors consulting on policy, no. Corporations are/have always tried to maximise cost and profits. They didn't suddenly decide to get greedy 18 months ago. "Blaming inflation on corporate profits is like blaming gravity for a plane crash, technically right but totally misguided." Remember, gravity is always trying to crash a plane.

Frankly I will always side with expert opinion over karma farming social media commentary. I know it feels good to blame the shadowy cabal of fat men with a top hats and eye pieces, but it's just not what is going on.

> Corporations are/have always tried to maximise cost and profits. They didn't suddenly decide to get greedy 18 months ago.

Actually they did:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai6B8e-C8k8#t=10m46s

They exploited the supply chain disruptions to justified price increases that weren't warranted. The data is pretty clear on this point so I don't know what "experts" you're listening to.

Nothing you stated or linked contradicts what I said. Corporations have always been greedy and will always capitalise on anything that can be used to increase profits. Blaming corporations is a miss because they are acting exactly the way they have always acted, they way they are expected to act, and the way they will act.

Hence the example "It's like blaming gravity for a plane crash". Gravity's behavior is a constant, its something else on the plane that failed.

> Nothing you stated or linked contradicts what I said. Corporations have always been greedy and will always capitalise on anything that can be used to increase profits.

My original point was that corporate greed was behind much of the recent inflation and that Biden should tackle recent corporate greed directly if he actually wanted to reduce inflation.

You disagreed because corporations didn't suddenly become greedy and so couldn't be behind recent inflation, and I provided evidence that yes, they are in fact the main cause.

I don't really care whether corporations "suddenly" became greedy or were always greedy, that's entirely beside the point.

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai6B8e-C8k8#t=10m46s

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