Rail workers oust union president who backed labor deal
perfectunion.us
perfectunion.us
In other words, be sure to plan your sickness well in advance.
BNSF is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/dec/08/bernie-san...
Moreover, because employee utilization rates are extremely high (from the rail workers perspective perhaps even over 100% on account of on-call time), adding extra employees will obliterate utilization rates and thus profit margins, at least from the perspective of CFOs and investors who will cry that, for example, a utilization rate dropping from 98% to 90% is a 400% increase in inefficiency.
I'm not trying to defend the rail roads. But if you're a CFO or investor myopically focused on abstruse metrics, the impact would look intolerable.
As executive leadership or an investor, I would be concerned of what happens to critical infrastructure in the event of impacts to national logistics. Losses would be $2B/day. The US government will step in at some point, and there’s nowhere near enough military reserves for them to run a railroad on no notice (150k rail workers, 25k-30k prime movers).
It's not that they can't afford it, it's that they really don't want to and they know that the government will never allow the workers to strike so there's no reason for them to negotiate on this in good faith. The problem with illegal strikes from the workers perspective is that they won't just lose their job, but also their pension that many have been contributing to for a decade plus.
Typically if you cause punishing suffering to your workers, they'll quit.
The problem here is the unions have structural incentives to negotiate for unusual things (e.g. seniority rules, pensions) when in most open markets workers will prefer higher pay to any of that.
But then the company's incentive is to get people to quit before they're eligible for what the union demanded, which is an extremely perverse incentive. Meanwhile the worker's incentive is to not quit before they're eligible, even when it sucks.
No, that isn't the problem.
The problem is that railroad workers have very few choices of employer. There are only five major freight railroads in the US (BNSF, CSX, Kansas City, Norfolk Southern, and Union Pacific), and they're all fairly regional. A railroad worker who's fed up with their employer's policies will often only have one other company they could work for without moving across the country -- and the other company will often have very similar policies anyway.
Why have these workers stayed at a company that caused them "punishing suffering" instead of somewhere else?
And sick days are not so much of a problem for the young, so in their twenties, workers are only looking at their paycheck. That changes when they're 60.
IMO it's cruel and ridiculous to tell people they can only have sick days on certain days of the week. Whoever heard of that?
Instead, the utilization rate dropping from 98% to 90% is less than a 10% increase in labor cost. These are capital intensive businesses, so labor is a small fraction of overall costs. Mulitplying out, it’s probably a 1% increase in business expenditures, that (if mandated industry wide) can be passed directly on to the customers.
The import is that the railroads will likely need to be forced to provide sick days. Both because management and investors are so sensitive to variable costs, but also because there's a collective action problem--any one railroad doing this immediately puts them at disadvantage to the others in terms of stock prices. But just as you say, any mandate is unlikely to result in significant real costs to customers.
Alternatively, maybe a Musk-like industrialist could swoop in with ideas on how to reduce fixed costs, shifting emphasis. But that seems unlikely. The whole industry seems to be completely geared toward extracting as much value as possible without investing capital.
For context, US railroads collectively employ ~150000 people, down from "peak railroad job" of ~2.2 million people in 1920: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES4348200001?amp%25253bdata...
We regulate bank reserve ratios. A burden imposed onto each org in order to keep the whole system humming along.
Labor should be treated the same way. Perhaps thru regulating utilization rates, by sector.
It has to do with pensions (which are very generous). Due to how pension benefits vest (by years worked, not hours), the railroad would rather have 0.5x workers working for 2x hours.
Railroads also save money if they can burn out workers (and have them leave voluntarily) before they fully vest.
There was a bill that required the rail to have enough staffing to give sick days (not 15 but real sick days non-the-less) and required that the workers keep at it.
Then the bill got split into, workers go back to work, and workers get real sick days.
Obviously, only one passed. The argument I guess is that they couldn't pass the first bill that included sick days for workers, so they should have stayed out of it.
Rail workers didn't actually need the legislature to give them sick days, just get out of their way and let them cost the business enough that it's worth paying them what they are worth.
Pretty fucked up.
The railroad doesn't negotiate in good faith because they always get bailed out by Congress.
Change that dynamic and you won't have this problem again. Doing the right thing is hard and this is no exception.
The fact is, you are too soft to stomach a minor inconvenience that we'd rather take it out of someone else's Christmas than be patient for two weeks and give everyone a better life.
And with that, we turn into Russia where everyone hates the ruling class but would rather play the game against each other because it's easier.
If you think a rail strike could end with anything other than a forced contract you're more naïve than a third grader.
What the fuck man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_la...
It has been interesting to learn about the history of why railroad workers have mostly separate but parallel labor laws.
But there may come a point where Labor can flip the narrative, if only briefly.
After decades of teachers being demonized, the mood in West Virginia, of all places, shifted enough for teachers to win historical gains, with broad public support.
We'll see how long that lasts. The revanchists controlling corporate media always regroups and retakes the initiative. But I respect those teachers for seizing the moment and scoring some wins.
The railroad union needs a cunning strategy. PR, lobbying, alliances, direct action, etc. It's hard to pull off. For all the reasons. Structural disadvantages, exhaustion, competing for limited attention, yadda yadda. Whereas capital never sleeps, has effectively infinite resources, and clarity of purpose.
Congress can hope they'll pay attention to some law they pass, but that sort of thing has failed in the past.
"The average employee receives 25-29 days of paid time off depending upon craft, with the most senior employees receiving 37-39 days of paid time off."
How is this treated like dirt?
The leave isn't really usable between needing 30 days notice, possibly still being on call anyway, more senior people having precedence, and point systems that effectively fire you if you take a few consecutive days off.
Meanwhile we still do not have federally mandated sick days despite having a recent pandemic with a death toll of several hundred more people.
I say this as the son of someone who almost died of Covid in march of 2020 because a coworker decided to keep coming into work when their spouse was in the hospital with a confirmed case.
He failed to detonate his shoes and no one was killed/injured from this incident (unlike 9-11).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlock_(politics)#United_Sta...
I mean, that's kind of how our system works anyway, but it's not supposed to be codified like that.
Now being asked by a border agent in a London why I was away from the US for 9 months was creepy.
There are about 115,000 people that are part of the freight rail unions.
Additionally, a number of these systems require a certain number of people to be able to go. It doesn't do much good to have one person show up to move stock around if the other people needed are out for some reason.
Picture the challenge of "ok, we want to go from 7 sick days a year to 14". That's 7 more days, which means that it needs to hire 4% more staff which amounts to hiring another 5000 people.
In today's labor market, this is hard.
Additionally, that's still running the 100% work utilization. Lets put some slack into that... now instead of 5000 more people you need, you need 15,000 more people.
Parts of this industry are licensed - you can't just go hire people off the street to fill those spots. They need between three months and year of on the job training and then some spots are under the licensure of the Federal Railroad Administration.
Would you be ok with having having people who haven't been licensed as pilots flying? Or only having one pilot flying ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33937973 )?
With a 'self driving' train that's a mile long... what happens when you have a train derailment that doesn't sever the cords and things go wrong? https://youtu.be/YQMZPB_rVJ0
There is positive train control ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control ) but that represents a significant investment in rails that are owned by companies... but it doesn't remove the responsibility of a human - it just reduces the spots where human error can cause problems.
> Efforts to require at least two-person crews, including via regulation, lack a safety justification; ignore the decades of safe and successful use of single-person crews at some U.S. freight railroads and in passenger and freight rail systems throughout the world; upend meaningful collective bargaining, and undermine the rail industry’s ability to compete against less climate-friendly forms of transportation.
> Freight Rail Policy Stance: The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) should not impose minimum crew size mandates on railroad operations. A mandate is unsupported by any clear safety justification.
> Existing FRA regulations do not mandate minimum crew staffing requirements. For Class I railroads, recent industry practice has been to have two-person crews (a certified locomotive engineer and a certified conductor) in the locomotive cab for most over-the-road mainline operations. However, some non-Class I railroads have long operated with just one person in the locomotive cab, and thousands of Amtrak and commuter passenger trains, carrying hundreds of thousands of passengers, operate every day with just one person in the locomotive cab. And as an Oliver Wyman study found, these railroads’ safety records are comparable to two-person operations.
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And the most recent proposal on the subject: https://railroads.dot.gov/newsroom/press-releases/fra-issues...
(there is a fair bit of material out there on the subject)
This is the part that I am really wondering about. Even for someone like BNSF I have to suspect that a 4% increase in a rather small labor cost is pretty palatable. It's literally not having workers to move trains that would be worse.
In order to avoid having to hire ~12% more workers, they are requiring all their workers to be on call effectively constantly, allowing zero paid sick days, and just generally treating the workers they have as if they are machines, to an extent that even the games industry would look at and say "man, that's cruel".
And these people who are massively overworked, constantly overtired, coming to work sick and injured, are the ones who are—sometimes alone—responsible for ensuring that thousands and thousands of tons of metal go speeding along rails that go through some of our biggest cities, sometimes carrying toxic chemicals or fuel oil.
The results of a policy very much like this were on full display nine years ago in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec [0], when half the downtown was destroyed in a terrifying massive fire caused by the derailment of a train carrying crude oil.
This is corporate greed, plain and simple, privatizing profits and socializing costs.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-Mégantic_rail_disaster
It should also be easier to hire people who want to work in these positions and staff beyond so that there is slack in the schedule and allow people to call in sick.
However note that in industry where there is slack and a relaxing of licensure, this represents an attack on the protectionism of jobs that is built into existing contracts to make it harder to fire people.
If you don't require licensure or as deep of training in spots, or have slack in the workforce, it becomes easier to fire people and that is something that is difficult for many union contracts to accept.
Getting rid of that incentive would be a reason to call in sick more often.
This is such an American thing to say. The question wouldn't even occur to most European folk.
You do get guaranteed holidays, but sick days explicitly do not count as holidays. If you quit, you get paid for unused holidays.
For reference, I can only be legally fired if I'm sick for more than 186 days in a 365 day period.
Although some jobs (especially those with a pension) that have a sick day allotment will give you a credit for unused sick days. Eg my dad retired one month early because he had unused vacation and sick days.
Some jobs also give you a lump of time off and say "this is paid time off, you can use it for sick time OR vacation". But that's only for short sicknesses, like if you need 1-2 days for a cold. If you're sick for more than 5 days you get paid by the government instead of your employer
In Australia your sick leave accumulates but you don’t get paid out when you leave, while your accumulated annual leave does get paid out.
At the same time, the GOP's support of its growing working class base is merely lip service. There's lots of fluff pieces about "the New Right" and moving beyond zombie Reaganism, but the fact is that the party is structurally incapable of achieving any policy wins for those voters. Indeed, the GOP elite would love nothing more than to ditch rail workers in Ohio and win back upscale suburbanites in Westchester or Arizona or Georgia.
"Unions are for losers" is the propaganda of the capitalist class. Unions are how we exercise and defend our rights.
It's a class war, but the wealthy are the ones attacking.
Let them. That won't last forever either. Someone's gonna bluff.
I think the biggest issue will be PR. Corporations have PR machines at the ready. Unions haven't always invested in smart PR for their causes. You'd need spectacular media management to ensure this doesn't get turned into a situation where workers get blamed for more rising prices and economic turmoil, even though they shouldn't be once you have a fairly straightforward understanding of why they're doing what they're doing. If you can manage public opinion effectively, it would probably work, honestly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
It's the other way around. That phrase could come straight from the 19th century.
If they all pulled together they could do something, but i don't think they will anymore.
What is interesting is that union popular support is growing and is back to the 60s levels: https://news.gallup.com/poll/398303/approval-labor-unions-hi...
If that trend holds some political coalition will take advantage.
With that said, is there any well documented, nonpartisan historical evidence to suggest that in broad strokes unions show corrupt and abusive behavior?
- Neutralizing independent oversight boards
- Inhibit ability to discipline problem officers
- Cops (largely) investigate themselves rather than independent investigators
And, while I couldn't find an article that averaged the US, this year alone there have been big increases in police salary and pensions[2], they're even offering bonuses in some areas[3][4]
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-police-rochester-take...
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-po...
[2]: https://detroitmi.gov/news/mayor-announces-landmark-agreemen...
[3]: https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2022/02/portland-police-con...
[4]: https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/15-largest-cities-me...
Everyone is just a temporarily embarrassed millionaire
http://www.temporarilyembarrassedmillionaires.org/
It's truly disheartening when promoting labor organization always incites rejoinders who repeat the same anti-social anarcho-capitalist lines that amount to: "Not my problem", "You know the USSR went bankrupt", "Work harder", "Screw you, got mine" etc... lines.
The religion of the efficient market hypothesis, as the path to freedom and happiness, is one of the most destructive myths promulgated.
True freedom is mutually supportive communities
Be outraged as much as you want, and claim that this is so anti-labor and immoral / unfair, but it is a truth you can see play out in many similar spheres. You keep accepting conditions, and there is no incentive to change. And trying to put in rules to prevent it artificially is simply protecting some workers from what the market will bear.
It went the other way for workers because of mass shifts in unwillingness to work under certain conditions -- see the wage rises during Covid and up to today. Things do change if people are unwilling to take the jobs.
We unfortunately have too many people willing to take these jobs at the pay and benefits / conditions offered. Until that changes, you're fighting a fight against market forces. Unions, for all the good they done at times in the past, are trying to escape competitive market forces. As are we all, I admit.
I do think such laws have a very good and important role to play where people don't fully know what they've agreed to. If someone wants to get a job by offering their labor for less than his next competitor and is going into it with full information, I don't think we should act like we're doing him a favor by stopping him from doing so. Stopping someone from taking a less than minimum wage job has not alleviated their situation.
Again, just dispassionate observation -- mandating whatever number of sick days per year may be a humane gesture, but it doesn't change the underlying fact that there is a surplus of willing labor in this country willing to take jobs at these pay rates that even don't have any such benefits.
Efforts by unions to say that their political power and striking/etc led to change in our standard of living are conveniently mixed up with the rising general demand for labor and wages because we were a growing country willing to pay for relatively scarce labor at the time. Those conditions are not the same now.
If the employment conditions are transparent and not unsafe physically (which is related to having full information about what you're signing up for), why is sick days something that shouldn't be open to negotiation or a person willing to agree to have more or fewer of them?
Suppose that a person is young and healthy and believes he/she doesn't need a lot of sick days. Why is it unreasonable for him/her to agree to a job that doesn't offer extra sick days? What's the logic / principle there?
Is it because sickness is unpredictable and an employee shouldn't have to suffer from something unexpected? Is it an information asymmetry argument?
IOW, it's rarely about _taking_ the job and more about not wanting to take a significant step backward when you decide you're fed up with it.
Our economic system demands that most people must work some kind of job in order to have shelter and food. Some people are working 2 or 3 terrible jobs because that's what is needed to make rent. They can't hold out for a job that provides a humane level of pay and working conditions.
Furthermore, capitalist economies rely on a certain percentage of workers (roughly 5%) are unemployed at any given time. This creates an environment where workers are generally desperate and bosses have power.
It's barbaric that a certain number of people are guaranteed to be unemployed when employment is required to have shelter, food, and healthcare.
The COVID pandemic did a lot of weird things that moved some power to workers. There were stronger unemployment protections and eviction moratoriums, so more workers could actually afford to hold out for better offers as unemployment was not awful. And the unemployment rate dropped as workers took early retirement or, frankly, died.
Now pandemic protections are ending and inflation is eating into those wage gains. The way workers gain any lasting power is to gain stronger bargaining power. That means unions.
Every time i see US house members sleeping in their offices because they get paid so little for so much power, i shake my head at the utter obvious expectedness of the causal corruption that happens in Washington.
What's your definition of "modern"? It seems like most unions these days are doing a much better job than, say, Jimmy Hoffa's time.
Unions seeking out parallel power structures separate from the dominant government is a direct consequence of the government actively siding against labor at every turn.
Should have realized Labour was spelled incorrectly :-)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Lynch_(trade_unionist)
His direct involvement is the most anti union action in three decades.
You don't have to love it to understand it.
So this is not surprising at all. There's a lot of low level organizing and shaking up at each of the rail unions, but they've got a lot of work ahead.
We learned in the 80’s when all the air traffic control union members were fired that transportation unions have no power.
Fire them all.
This would not be a job where it's easy to replace people. It's really, really boring and you can't be check your phone while driving a train.
Rail industry has been cutting the workforce and trying extract as much profit as they can knowing that it's in an unsustainable death spiral. And it's not just engineers, but also maintenance, loaders, shipping, etc. All of this has been in terrible shape over the past decade, but it's been timely in that industry can wrap it all up in "COVID caused supply chain issues leading to inflation". It's not that at all, its a purposeful gutting of a vital industry.