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> When an employee calls out sick, a Special Inspector may be sent to their home to check if they are really sick and at home. If the employee doesn't answer the door (They're sleeping and don't hear the door? Doesn't matter), they're charged with falsely calling out sick, and face suspension or termination.

I'll never understand why people think it's alright to infantilise other adults like this. If they're sick and go to the doctor, that doesn't count? If they're sleeping (you know, because they're unwell) _that's_ not ok either? I'm not sure why you're advertising this kind of disrespect like its a genuine alternative.

My intent was not to advertise this as an alternative, and I do not see how you came to that conclusion. I was pointing out that this is not unique to the freight railroads to intimidate employees into coming to work on a regular basis.

I got a similar implication from the line "My agency uses a different tactic, but just as effective."

To help convey your meaning here, it may be better to change it to "My agency uses a different tactic, but just as exploitative and just as effective."

If it helps avoid any further confusion, it shall be done. Thanks for the suggestion.

That's fine, in Italy you get a visit from the "Medico Fiscale". It's confrontational for sure, so you just go to your GP, get a certificate with the prescribed days of rest and attach that to your sick leave notification. Easy

Next door in Austria I've seen employment contracts (from local Mittlestand family owned companies in the automotive sector) where it was specified that "in case of sick leave, the employee agrees to health checks by the company's own GP at the company's expense, even if you already have been written off sick by your own GP." I've never been more disgusted.

Then again, I've also read in the news here of employers hiring private investigators to catch employees fraudulently claiming sick leave, then firing them and suing them claiming back wages paid along with the P.I. fees.

To play the devil's advocate, since sick leaves are costly for businesses here, it probably sucks hard if you have a few employees abusing it heavily to avoid work (even though it's common knowledge that everyone here takes a sick day off work every now and then after a heavy night out partying and drinking or stuff like that).

I really don't want to sound like an (unpleasant word) due to the subject, but I always like to see comments like this. Some in America like to portray the image that we are the cesspool of labor relations, and it reminds me we are not alone and there is a lot of work to be done everywhere to improve life.

> Some in America like to portray the image that we are the cesspool of labor relations, and it reminds me we are not alone and there is a lot of work to be done everywhere to improve life.

But you are! Lots of things can be improved in lots of places, but the problems with US labour don't exist and are mind boggling for developed countries. I'd (and I'm willing to bet all those rail workers would too) a potential egregious invasion of privacy to validate I'm really sick in exchange for pretty much unlimited (details vary by country, sometimes after days/weeks/months you're moved to like 60-70% salary) sick time, instead of no sick time at all.

>Next door in Austria I've seen employment contracts (from local Mittlestand family owned companies in the automotive sector) where it was specified that "in case of sick leave, the employee agrees to health checks by the company's own GP at the company's expense". I've never been more disgusted.

In Dutch employment contracts this doesn't even have to be specified, this is a general condition applying to all employment contracts. Most companies won't actually send a doctor over until you've been sick some time but they always have the right if you want to continue to receive sick pay.

I've known people (white collar) to call in sick because their days will expire, in places that have lax enforcement policies, so I'm not surprised that some workplaces get draconian especially if it causes someone else to get forced to work to provide coverage.

Sick days aren't part of your compensation, they are more like insurance. So of course they expire. I've had colleagues use a sick day for mental wellness. I've had colleagues use sick days while on vacation, ie food poisoning downroute. I've never had colleagues try and combine sick days with vacation days. That is considered a no-no.

This is why some companies go to "unlimited time off" where they get to take vacation time off the books.

Other companies have vacation/sick time as PTO and they don't distinguish between them at all.

Taking the question literally, the answer is that because in this kind of system there's plenty of incentive to lie to get the maximum number of days of paid leave. So if you're in charge of scheduling employees and you assume that they're self-interested then you would assume that left to their own devices a lot of them would probably lie about being sick. I mean, it's a lot safer assumption than assuming that everyone in the rank-and-file takes some great pride in the success of the company and would never do something morally dubious.

But, in fact, the problem is that employees can also abuse policies. And in a large group of employees, there will be some that do abuse policies.

Employees get draconian not just because they're wanna-be tyrants. They sometimes get draconian because they're tired of being gamed by a subset of their employees.

Yeah, no wonder workers are striking. This is absolutely insane and at some point one has to wonder if creating a good working environment and healthy, happy employees would do the profit line even better than this fascist structure.

I can't speak for the freight railroads, but morale sucks at my agency.

I would be willing to place a wager it's similar at freight, on the subject of time off: no guaranteed holidays. My commuter rail runs 24-7, the only way an employee gets the holiday off is if it falls on their regular day off.

At my railroad a lot of the workers did not have the resources to go to college or get a job with better conditions. So, while morale is low, some take the view "it could be worse." I'm sure you get a lot of that there, too.

The companies I've been involved with that had "holiday work" (you have to have it if you're 24/7/365) would give double pay for work during that time, and rarely had to assign someone, as there'd be people up for the extra pay.

I'm surprised you even have drivers available, with those work conditions I'm not sure why anyone would apply

> If no crew is available at all, then the train doesn't run.

Cool, then treat them better before they all walk out.

> I'm surprised you even have drivers available, with those work conditions I'm not sure why anyone would apply

Because there are many people for whom that job is extremely well-paid compared to other options they have available. And people put up with tons of shitty situations when they don't really feel they have an alternative.

This song from 1928 indicates this is not a new problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8-PZFPCs3g

> What the freight railroads are doing here is forcing the employees to use their vacation pay when they are sick to discourage them from calling out sick at all, in effect penalizing them for calling out sick. That vacation you had planned with the family? Either lose a day (which may require you to cancel altogether), or come to work sick. If they have paid sick leave, they'd use it when sick rather than showing up to work.

This is how many (most) jobs work. There is a bank of "Paid Time Off" (PTO) which can be used flexibly for sickness or vacation. The term bank is used purposefully to describe it, since it can be paid out as pay at separation. Many employers also limit the total amount of PTO an employee can accumulate. This is done to control potential liabilities from the bank.

While I don't call for the elimination of sick/PTO/etc, I also recognize that they are essentially irrational, similar to employer sponsored health care as an artifact of tax privileged "fringe benefits" that come with working in a large org. Funds paid to a worker for not working come from funds withheld from the worker when working. Sick/PTO benefit just makes a complicated system on top of the work/pay transaction.

> This is how many (most) jobs work.

US jobs, really. The concept of sick days / requiring taking time off from some pool always struck me as a) horribly abusive, b) ripe for employee abuse (sick days when not sick), c) bad for everyone (workers work when sick).

I grew up in Switzerland which doesn't have those. And (to prevent abuse...) you are required to have a doctor's note when sick for more than 3 days. Of course, a bunch of commenters find this kind of requirement abusive... (There is no system that pleases everyone?)

At a base level, what is the source for funds paid to a worker when not working (either by choice or illness) other than funds withheld from the worker when working? The question is the same in Switzerland unless there is cave of sick pay gnomes next to the chocolate making ones.

One might say the funding can come out of a different source, a popular go-to is "profit" or government, but all those are downstream from the value created by the worker.

The problem is the scheduling side of things, not the PTO side.

For "knowledge workers" as most of HN is, they can just not show up today and then do today's work tomorrow. But something like a railroad ceases to function at some point and that has severe repercussions.

Now likely the "railroad" problem could be solved with some work, imagine a nation-wide company that handles railroad staffing emergencies, with on-duty employees available to go to a stranded train at a moment's notice. There's some dollar amount this would cost (even if you utilized jets and helicopters, those are just a cost) and it'd work. But that cost is what the railroads don't want to pay, as they could also do the same thing by hiring more employees (and have some percentage of them "idling" at any given time).

> But that cost is what the railroads don't want to pay, as they could also do the same thing by hiring more employees (and have some percentage of them "idling" at any given time).

At one point the article mentions "on call" (the correct term is "Extra List") and that's exactly what you describe. You'd have say an engineer, who may be new and has no regular assignment - he'd put in his early months or years "on call." The company can call him at any time, and say "get to XXX, your train will be there." The whole issue is having enough to cover shortages.

"The company can call him at any time, and say 'get to XXX, your train will be there.'"

That another part of the problem with bombcar's concept from the viewpoint of the railroad companies, they'd need a lot more people than you might think so a spare could be close enough to "XXX" to get there without throwing off the Orwellian "Precision Scheduling" of this PSR concept.

The train goes when it's built up to an arbitrary number of cars like 150, not at any set time. Since the system is not even designed for trains that long, it would probably generally back up in any give location if a train was too long delayed in leaving. The companies obviously also wouldn't want to pay for "jets and helicopters" to get a spare to XXX really quickly.

I'm not sure your staffing problem can solve the whole problem, because there's domain knowledge in how to handle trains in particular sections of track. Speed maximums are probably easy although they do get screwed up in notorious incidents, but there's also things like how to deal with inclines.

Compare to knowledge workers like programmers needing to know the code base.

Yeah, you'd have specifics that would have to be worked out, but I bet you could do it (it'd just cost money or time and time is money).

For example, you could run slower trains in general which could help with flattening out domain knowledge.

Or you'd pay for engineers to be trained in some large area, etc.

(This all goes to show that the real underlying problem is running at 99% of capacity with no slack at all available.)

Wow. That's even worse.

I'm not even going to say which is worse, they both suck equally in my view. The problem with articles like this, as they (purposefully, perhaps) make no mention of such employer tactics. So, I guarantee most readers are saying or thinking "greedy union workers."

I think a lot of us are thinking, "why can't we automate this industry even further."

It seems strange to me that thousands of tons of goods and materials can be held up by flu season.

In lieu of more reliable methods of managing freight trains, it sounds like railroads put the full-court press on their employees.

Is there a justification for the railroads' practices? Do rail workers frequently call in sick for BS reasons?

edit: also, thanks for weighing in with your viewpoint. from the outside it's kind of hard to understand the emotions and practices that are driving this story.

As an employee and an employer, I like having only one type of paid leave.

It should not matter to the employer why an employee is not working.

If the issue is insufficient time off for illnesses, then the negotiation should be for more paid time off (PTO) in general.

This eliminates all the resources wasted on catching fraudulent use of sick days.

The one issue here is that in many industries, the use of "vacation days" is, per the labor contract, required to be scheduled in advance. Often quite some time in advance. Which makes use of "vacation days" for unexpected illnesses (went to bed last night and felt fine, woke up this morning to fever and chills) difficult to impossible if the requirement for "advance scheduling" is actually enforced.

In many jobs with separate vacation and sick days, the vacation days still require the "advance notice" for scheduling, but the sick days do not require that one know, days in advance, of an unexpected illness. That gives the employee a few days that can be used for unexpected things, and the employer some assurance that a maximum of X days of unexpected outages will occur per employee.

More often than not, the "only one type of paid leave" comes attached with the "requirement for advance scheduling" of those same days, which does not provide for the unexpected illness situations.

I agree. My employers over the last couple of decades have just had a general PTO amount. But for that to work, two other things have to go with it: the PTO amount has to be enough time to cover both uses, and there still has to be a mechanism that allows for unplanned time off.

The true cruelty of "no sick days" isn't that employees have to burn vacation days, it's that vacation days have to be scheduled in advance and approved. Neither of those things leave room for sudden illness or injury, and prioritizes company schedule needs over things like scheduling doctor's visits.

Perhaps this is solved by requiring all accrued PTO to be paid out, and by requiring a minimum of X number of days where you can call out?

States with sick leave policies have stipulations like these:

https://www.lni.wa.gov/workers-rights/_docs/ReasonableNotice...

Where I've worked, this was addressed somewhat loosely. You have PTO. You commit to scheduling time off in advance to the greatest degree you can. The employer commits to accommodating those requests to the greatest degree they can.

If you need to miss work unexpectedly, you do so. The employer just trusts your judgement that it's necessary. If it's going to be more than a day or two, you are expected to talk with your employer and explain what's up -- mostly so the employer can adjust assignments and schedules with a better understanding of what to expect.

Do some employees abuse that? Sure. But, in my experience, that's rare and the people doing it are usually poor workers anyway. They can be handled through whatever the normal review mechanisms are.

This is my most common experience. I don't know how common it actually is, and I'm sure other situations would require different, perhaps more formal, procedures. But it's worked well in the places I've worked.

I suppose the employee can opt to take fewer planned vacation days, reserving the balance for unplanned absences. This would require the balance to be rolled over, or the employee compensated at the end of the year or other period, otherwise it would make employees unhappy.

Perhaps a mechanism that allows for unplanned time off, with a little education on how to properly plan PTO to allow for unplanned leave.

Seems fine in theory, but the types of leave are different. Vacation can be anticipated and scheduled but sick days cannot. If you mandate a certain number of paid days off, you still need to require that some percentage of those days can be taken with no notice. In other words, you're still making the distinction between sick days and vacation days, you're just not using those labels, which seems unnecessarily confusing.

> When an employee calls out sick, a Special Inspector may be sent to their home to check if they are really sick and at home.

If the label between sick and vacation is meaningful, are "Special Inspectors" needed to ensure people are sick when taking a sick day?

Wouldn't that create an incentive to run your employees so hard they develop health issues? No skin off your back, just get a new employee when the first gets permanently broken. I'm cheeky, but I think that is one of the rationales for having sick leave at all.

How would they run you hard if you have sufficient PTO?

California requires overtime after 8 hours of work per day and on the 7th consecutive day.

If that is not enough, make overtime cost 2x.

Lots of ways to ensure employers do not run employees hard without getting into details of sick days and whatnot.

Glad you asked in earnest! I was thinking more about work environment, possibly bullying etc etc, anything harsh on the body and mind. Of course your system could be setup to a working level, but you'd need more of other controls or incentives to rectify the kinds of problems which can lead to work related health issues.

The one thing about this that sucks is that if you have a chronic illness, you end up using all your PTO as sick and you get no actual breaks. (Whereas if you run out of sick days you can use FMLA or short term disability without giving up all of your vacation or holidays).

Technically they have PTO, but it has to be scheduled, and may not be approved, a month in advance. Which is unworkable for almost anything.

>When an employee calls out sick, a Special Inspector may be sent to their home to check if they are really sick and at home. If the employee doesn't answer the door (They're sleeping and don't hear the door? Doesn't matter), they're charged with falsely calling out sick, and face suspension or termination.

This is how it works in the military. So shouldn't you provide the same benefits? You can't expect to treat people this way without holding your end of the bargain. Namely with guaranteed job security, full paid benefits, set time off and vacation, clear paths to promotion, etc. etc.

Capitalists want to have their cake and eat it too. There's no concept of a social contract anymore.