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Comment by thathndude | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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

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