Ohio catastrophe is ‘wake-up call’ to dangers of deadly train derailments
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This is the most obvious outcome of the US government stepping in to break the railroad worker's strike, it was just a matter of when - not if. We're lucky it didn't happen in downtown Pittsburgh.
The worst part is that the costs of these entirely foreseeable and preventable catastrophes will be nationalized. Meanwhile the railroads will forgo necessary maintenance and infrastructure investments, continue to blame individual employees for the events, and reap record profits year over year. Mission accomplished.
If Northern Southern were to feel this incident in their pocket book, they might stop lobbying to gut safety regulations... However, it's very clear that neither legislative, judicial, executive or media positions give a flying fuck to stop this; in fact, they'll go to extreme lengths such as breaking strikes and media coordination to keep the status quo.
So it will happen again, and again, until one day it actually does fuck up a major city - and even then, the people responsible will probably be insulated from consequences.
https://apnews.com/article/rail-accidents-evacuations-ohio-h...
https://www.fastcompany.com/90848025/ohio-train-derailment-t...
Livestock is dying and getting sick in the area[1], including fish in rivers[2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_chloride
[1] https://nypost.com/2023/02/10/animals-sick-dying-near-east-p...
[2] https://www.wkbn.com/news/local-news/east-palestine-train-de...
In this instance, the risks to be worried about is far more than just cancer. And it isn't exactly comparable to a career in a vinyl chloride factory because factories don't typically have these production chemicals ablaze and mixed with whatever else was in the train wreckage, seeping into the surrounding earth, water and air. Before even speculating on the undetermined adverse health effects of this event in the long term, the immediate impact of this environmental disaster should warrant a mandatory evacuation and corporate accountability.
Not rare in Ohio, anymore.
So immediately following the crash the area was dangerous, but it is already mostly safe again by now.
That amount of vinyl chloride can cause a lot of problems to the surrounding populace in several days.
Also, it doesn't break down just into HCl. It also breaks down into formaldehyde. Which is both acutely toxic and also a carcinogen, and is quite a bit more stable in the environment.
The amount that came from ten cars, spread into the atmosphere, is virtually nothing.
Erm, on what basis do you make that claim?
Ten train cars of dioxin spread over a square mile is a lot. Spread over 100 square miles? Probably still a lot, like the place in missouri that dumped it on all their roads to keep the dust down. That's probably that same order of "10 cars over 10x10 square miles", of a sufficiently nasty thing.
10 cars = safe is a number that needs context and validation and it will depend on the particular chemical.
Maybe 10 train cars of formaldehyde is fine, maybe not, but, this is something that should be assessed and not dismissed out of hand, even during discourse. Random internet commentators probably don't really know if it's fine. And despite the people on-site saying measurements are fine... animals are getting sick, which is the classic warning sign with chemical spills that things are not fine.
Although there is indeed dioxin formed during the combustion apparently. Bear in mind too that this isn't a controlled incinerator, there could be various things produced at different temps etc.
When left to break down in the environment, after several days vinyl chloride will break down into a combination of formaldehyde and hydrochloric acid. The latter of which won't be harmful, but the former will be.
It will also be destroyed in the soil by any number of mechanisms, with a half-life of about 14 days. [2]
[1] https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxfaqs/tfacts111.pdf
[2] https://webwiser.nlm.nih.gov/substance?substanceId=1&identif...
Let's say that two train cars worth sank into the ground before breaking down. Now there's two train cars worth of formaldehyde in the groundwater in a localized area.
It's not obvious to me that this is a safe situation. There are plenty of plausible scenarios that could be reality, that would be a very unsafe situation for local residents.
Thus is should be treated as though it is that worst-case bad scenario unless shown otherwise, rather than wand-waving "oh it's probably fine". These are people's lives that are at stake.
...is the fact that nothing will change, and it is just a matter of time before this happens again, and again, and again.
Our media barely report, and then under report the seriousness. It may as well not exist, except for all the harm that will continue for decades.
But the executives and shareholders have record profits, so everything is fantastic, absolutely no reason to change.
It requires attention to detail combined with political will to improve safety.
The national media isn't very good at representing issues outside of major cities. Events like this are largely unimportant to people living in the places they sell their stories to. In a way, you're not asking the media to change, you're asking Americans to care about those areas at all.
The media chases clicks and attention.
News reading Americans rather read about “Is it China or aliens?”, the war in Ukraine, earthquake in Middle East and the Super Bowl than small-town Ohio.
In this instance, the simplest explanation really does seem to be financial conflict of interest.
1. ”China conducts surveillance on US” gets plenty of clicks/attention. Just look at tiktok, and before that huawei/ZTE.
2. In this case specifically it's not just "China conducts surveillance on US", it's also arguably violating the territorial integrity of the US. For americans that's strikes much closer to home than shadowy hackers hacking from china.
Does it? As far as I can tell, the “TikTok spies on people” stories have all been met with “yeah, so does Facebook”. This is across pretty much the entire political spectrum. It seems to me that only the political/media class actually find it significant.
While it’s obviously too early to have non-anecdotal data on this, my instincts tell me very few people actually care or find it surprising that China “violated the territorial integrity of the U.S.” as if we’re not constantly flying drones over other world powers. It’s just standard operating procedure at this point.
Do we know that? We mainly just know they weren’t shot down over one.
The lead story has been balloons and aliens since before the derailment.
It doesn’t help that there’s still a war in Ukraine, a earthquake in the Middle East and the Super Bowl just happened.
It’s for these reasons that a “small-town Ohio issue” is further down on the media list of priorities.
Apparently the rail operator lobbied against safety measures that could have mitigated the impact of this disaster. They probably have a decent PR budget... https://www.levernews.com/rail-companies-blocked-safety-rule...
The natural state of human affairs is crony corruption, plain and simple; currently we allow multiple corrupt states (local, county, state, each corporation's internal affairs, etc...). We should just admit our natural corruption and observe that only one can be king, and that king already exists: our federal government. The Federal government ought to make it their primary mission, as the ruling top dog in our corrupt society, do destroy all other corrupt operations stealing from them.
We are an immature, petty civilization. Let's admit our immaturity, and perhaps mature a bit as a result.
"Norfolk Southern, the railway company responsible for an apocalyptic plume of gas rose over East Palestine, Ohio, has offered a $25,000 donation to assist the area’s nearly 5,000 residents who were ordered to evacuate their homes, or face death"
Serious financial implications are the only thing that will cause behavior shift in large organizations.
[1] https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1624749208174567424
I read this as $25,000 in total not per person.
Yet that's what they did.
I have an idea how to pay for cleanup.
They should still absolutely pay for everything, using a very liberal assessment of a model used to predict any plausible expenses for the next 1000 years converted to 2023 dollars.
Today. Because it has to stop being the next person's problem.
The employees are reported to have received a 14% raise recently. The record profits were 7% higher than 2021 with inflation for the same period at 6.5%. All of this is in the linked article.
I am not defending the actions. I have noted a problem with the term "record profits" and engage where possible to limit what I see as a problem with that language.
I'm not arguing any of your points outside of the use of the term record profits without any hard numbers. The reasoning being that record profits is the goal and normal as far as I'm concerned. A 0.5% increases should be clearly labeled due to the loaded nature of the term( In my opinion.)
These are relatively recent changes, not something that's been this way for a long time. It's part of the changeover to "precision scheduled railroad" as the rail lines like to call it.
Rail workers being overworked is just another aspect of the this change. The rail companies don't want to maintain FTEs and have cut that to the point where people can't even get unpaid days off scheduled, and are being asked to run schedules without concern to sleep etc. And that has led to some other accidents already.
But the core of the issue is this change to precision-scheduled-railroad, and the longer trains / reduced staffing that go along with it.
Yup.
What is worse is that, from what I've read, this could have been prevented by simply observing the train earlier in its journey. The cause is initially thought to be a problem with one of the wheelsets, and there was apparently a video of it going through a town 20 miles earlier shedding a shower of sparks. Simply rigging up a series of cameras on the train for the engineer/driver to observe, and they could have stopped in time to drop the failing car for repair.
Instead, they drove on blindly, straight to the inevitable wreck.
Of course, what will then happen is that rail crews will be pressured to ignore "minor" problems seen on the videos, and then get blamed when the inevitable happens.
Like yeah you could pull the lever every time you see a potentially hot axle but that would send the trolley headed straight into norfolk southern's profit margin. It's really unforeseeable and there's definitely not a union that has been screaming about safety issues and was just slapped down a few months ago in bipartisan fashion, nothing that can be done about this says only nation where this happens regularly. Thoughts and prayers. /s
Like, the people of ohio have made it real clear that being open for business is what they want politically. They definitely don't want the unions to score a win, even if it might increase the risk of their kids dying it's obviously worth it because people keep voting this way. There is a firm 50% of congress that is a guaranteed "fuck unions and fuck anything that threatens industry, we want jobs and we want em now" and the rest of the legislature is divided anyway. What do you do if you're democrats? Deathmatch SCOTUS over people who don't even want you to, and get your regulatory authority taken away entirely because the founders never said anything about trains in the constitution?
Like, just name a single ohio republican who wouldn't have leapt on the "biden favors unions over america and christmas" two months ago. Complete loser of an issue politically, people want their amazon packages and any hint of a return to the supply-chain chaos of 2020 is gonna make people lose their shit. This is how people actually vote, dead kids sounds bad but threaten my amazon packages and people will line the fuck up to get you out of office. They aren't actually motivated by the dead kids in the same way, it's more of an abstract, purely theoretical motivation, like loving your neighbor, or caring for the least among us. "Revealed preference" is the economic term for it.
Anyway, we have to get back to ongoing coverage of the war on LGBT, that's what plays with the voters in Ohio. Sorry about your kids, thoughts and prayers.
(and fyi if anything as of a couple days ago biden/buttigieg (omg its MAYOR PETE FROM WEST BEND INDIANA!!!) were looking at further loosening of safety regulations and brake requirements... as is every single republican.)
In the US, there is no pro-workers, pro-union, fight against big corporations party in the US. There is no trustbusting party, there is no worker collectives party, there is no 35 hour workweek party. So maybe republicans can shut the fuck up about "Demoncrats are socialism" for like a minute.
But that won't happen because these are the same people who blame Biden for a 10 cent increase in gas prices that he had no control over, as made obvious when it dropped immediately after the election despite Biden still being the president. Also, if gas going up by 10 cents is enough for you to throw away any principle, or friendliness, or anything just to vote for the same guys you've always voted for, maybe consider that you are not doing very well in the world and the people you've been voting for this whole time and are largely the ones who have held power over the past fifty years have MAYBE been fucking you over?
Imagine what would have happened with a rail strike during midterms. Like just imagine. That slight-republican-lean in the house would have been more like 60-70% and who knows about keeping the senate. And they certainly aren't busting norfolk southern's balls on safety regulations either.
Again, like, people just want their fucking amazon packages to show up, and any sort of a sense that we're backsliding into further supply chain issues is going to turn people out like crazy, and up until it affected them personally nobody really cared about this issue as an abstract point, not enough to vote on.
(and what if a rail strike does cause that supply chain whiplash to resume, while inflation is already high etc?)
Now, of course, diving into further loosening of brakes/safety requirements is incredibly tone-deaf at this moment, and I think perhaps that was a case of Biden/Buttigieg not understanding that the ground shifted out from underneath them... but they were gonna!
Biden is a very keen politician in many ways, and rule #1 is don't create drama where none exists. People want deregulation, people want rail jobs, people don't like the unions, they don't want transportation disruptions to resume. Biden read that room correctly. The revealed preference of the american public is that reliable amazon packages are more important than dead kids.
And it could very well all still blow over too. America shrugs its shoulders about dead kids all the time, we run on dunkin and dead kids here. It's not the first time that moral quandary has come up, and it won't be the last.
But there's just not enough political capital to have a knock-down drag-out deathmatch over every single Right Thing To Do for people who don't even want him to do it. Every single thing Biden does goes to SCOTUS and every time it's a question of whether the court is just going to nuke that regulatory power entirely. Like the EPA. Two months ago was this the fight that the american voter in ohio thought was worth having? If anything two months ago they would have been behind him busting the union's balls on this - go back and look at some polling and I bet they are.
This is what people keep voting for, they can say whatever they want but this is the revealed preference, fighting the War On LGBT is just a lot more important to the heartland than some dead kids you don't even know. You can't drag people kicking and screaming on every single issue. Biden's got things he needs to do too. America wants the trains to run on time so they get their fucking amazon packages.
The fact that someone could say this was unforeseen with a straight face should immediately put them in the nominees for whatever acting award show of your choice.
Yes...? A wake up call is for people who don't realize something is a big deal. In quite literally every wake up call situation, someone thinks it's obvious. "Wake up" meaning "it's been in front of you this whole time, and you can't see it". The article is not targeting railroad workers, its for lawmakers, constituents, or anyone who will listen and Isn't thinking about it
It is all too clear to those who were paying attention during the strike how hard the Biden admin tried to suppress any public understanding about the actual concerns of the rail workers.
No, the rail company is perfectly healthy and thriving. The workers aren't, but as long as the trains move, the workers could be ground under the wheels for all that Wall St cares.
Several metro lines are fully automated and driverless--Paris Metro Line 1 has been fully automated for 11 years now.
For example, if one of the locomotive engines stops working and the train must stop, you need to keep the brake lines pressurized. For some archaic reason they fail open instead of closed, so you have to keep the engines running at all times. Otherwise, you need to send a guy out to manually apply the emergency brakes. This was part of the cause of the Lac-Mégantic disaster.
So it's not impossible, but there's zero chance that NS or CSX would ever invest $MM to upgrade the brakes on all their trains to let them run automated. But the real crux of it is that they'd be responsible for any disaster, and their go-to strategy is to just blame whoever happened to be in the cab that night.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...
This sounds incredibly stupid. Do you happen to know the archaic reason?
However, without full grade separation, this is extremely risky because humans are stupid. It's also very expensive, especially if retrofitting on existing track without interrupting traffic.
Edit: nvm it’s still there. Must have mistyped it earlier.
I'm by no means defending anything that occurred, quite the opposite. I just wish we could start using values that are adjusted for actual inflation for the relevant industry, with a percentage in brackets, such as: Record profits(0.5% above inflation)
It's like the food companies in Canada that defend their price gouging by claiming their profit margins haven't changed. It's true, but if revenue is 2x what it was last year, the rich families that own those businesses are getting 2x the profit while trying to blame higher costs for the increased prices the average person is seeing.
Metro profits are up ~12% but so is food. If the profit margins don't change, those numbers indicate the exact opposite of what you are claiming.
Loblaws profits are not up 100% either. The gross profit of Loblaws in 2021 is at ~4.86b where 2022 is at 5.27b. Is that not 8.4%?
Where do you get 2x factor?
So if their costs go up 20%, they increase prices by 20% to compensate, and they maintain the same margin, the profits are higher.
LNG burns well, but isn't awfully bad for the environment. It's far better than the vinyl chloride that happened in Ohio last week.
Simple safety precautions could be used to avoid accidents with LNG - for example auto-igniter devices to ensure that any LNG leak turns into a fire not an explosion would massively limit damage.
I'm all for stopping the use of fossil fuels, but the dangers involved in shipping them is only a tiny proportion of my reason.
Sources:
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/04/1126562195/the-nord-stream-pi...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1261318/cattle-methane-e...
Worse than CO2? Yes. Worse than pretty much any kind of refrigerant? No, not even close. The lower bound on those is probably 100x worse and increasing from there.
The amount of emotion and just ignorance surrounding this incident on social media, and especially reddit, just leaves me in contempt reaching the level of contempt I have for politicians that enabled the rail companies. Even disgusting takes of schadenfreude, that it's Ohio, that they deserved it.
Yeah, it's bad. No, it's not that bad. You have people silencing others for explaining the chemical processes involved. A bunch of partisan bickering, total ignorance, and hysterical comparisons to Chernobyl or Love Canal.
No, the deregulation was bi-partisan. Yeah, maybe the media doesn't focus on it as much because most are poor there, and in the surrounding area. Yes, coverage and response would probably be different if a train derailed outside of "flyover country." If only we had a semblance of journalism that could make the case, and the connections, to the recent use of legal force by the feds to prevent the rail strike with pitiful concessions, and deregulation over the last six years, and the rail companies, a shared blame.
It's a bad situation, but unless there's some really nasty stuff I haven't heard about in the tankers outside of the VC, which they burned off, we're talking about acid rain. Which isn't exactly new for the area and surrounding, let's be honest. The half-life in contact with water is negligible. And after that degradation, we're talking about something with less acidity than vinegar. It's not Chernobyl. Even still, change and consequences would be nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...
We need to ramp up efforts to make all modes of transport safer. It isn't just trains. Trains are probably the most safe out of all options.
Curious to see what were the actual causes.
Source: I used to work there.
every. single. day.
there are hundreds of Automated Obstacle Detection Vehicle that go out from every station, and computer imaging detects any faults or debris on the tracks.
https://international-railway-safety-council.com/wp-content/...
I hope we can communicate without downvoting??
The people who are responsible for having made these decisions are going to have nothing happen to them, and continue to push for things like this while more and more innocent people suffer.
I am as capitalist and libertarian as they come, but it seems like no one anywhe is being held accountable.
Yes the current administration squashed the rail workers strike, but governments only act in a way they feel will get them the most votes. The US public, with their moronic obsession with communism, are to blame for anything their politicians do. They voted them in.
You should also note that one party in government voted to give the workers what they wanted, which would have removed the need for a strike in the first place, only to be blocked by the other party. Not all are equally to blame here.
I've never seen a libertarian on the internet support a regulation.
Or, how about, what regulation would prevent it, while still allowing critical goods to flow?
My point is NOT that there's nothing to be done, it's that these sorts of accidents require attention to detail to prevent. There's no blanket easy political fix.
Personal liability for the beneficial owners would go a long way. Don't let the people making the poor decisions hide behind corporate liability shields. Make them risk their personal wealth.
Alternatively, levy massive fines that wipe out profits when a company cuts corners to the point of negligence. Make it unprofitable to be reckless. For example, I think Norfolk makes something like $3 billion per year, so fine them at least $3 billion for a preventable incident like this.
Hot bearings / axles can happen even with proper car maintenance and there are usually wayside sensors to detect such incidents before they cause a derailment. It will become clearer what went wrong on this patch of rail when the NTSB report comes out, though perhaps it's time the FRA mandated hotbox detectors at dense intervals closer to towns. A surveillance camera saw the hot axle fire 20 miles out of the derailment: https://www.wsj.com/articles/miles-before-ohio-derailment-tr...
So, safest and least expensive 2 options are out due to government doing the bidding of special interests like unions.
https://www.levernews.com/rail-companies-blocked-safety-rule...
“The mission of the FRA is safety and not focusing on what is convenient or inexpensive or provides the most cost savings for the rail industry,” said Sarah Feinberg, the FRA administrator at the time, about the new rule. “When I focus on safety, I land on ECP. It’s a very black-and-white issue for me.”
Soon after the rule’s enactment, the railroad industry took the matter to Congress and found allies in Senate Republicans, after an election cycle that saw rail industry donors dump $6 million into GOP campaign coffers.
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) — the Senate’s third largest recipient of rail industry campaign cash — pushed to repeal the electronic braking rule outright, before settling for a measure requiring additional research and a new cost-benefit analysis of the technology. Under former President Donald Trump, the braking upgrades quickly became another casualty of his administration’s slash-and-burn approach to regulatory policy.
While the Obama administration had estimated that the rule could save more than $1 billion by averting accidents, the Trump administration rolled out new figures that cut the estimated benefits by a third.
The AAR lobbying group concurred that “the costs of the ECP rule substantially outweigh its benefits,” and claimed the mandate would cost them about $3 billion — or roughly 2 weeks of their operating revenue in a typical year. The FRA estimated the brake requirement would cost about half a billion.
Trump’s Transportation Department ultimately rescinded the brake rule in late 2017.
Thune praised the decision in a statement arguing that “sound science and careful study” had won the day.
But a 2018 investigation from the Associated Press revealed that the Trump Transportation Department had flubbed its calculations. By excluding the most common type of train derailments, the government’s analysis omitted at least $117 million in estimated future damages when it revised the rule’s potential benefits to justify its repeal.
The agency acknowledged the error and issued a technical correction to its analysis, but said that the expense was still too great to reinstate the ECP brake rule.
Rail workers wanted to strike. There's a law allowing Congress to prevent that to avoid a catastrophic disruption to the economy - and it would be catastrophic. They voted to prevent a strike and Biden signed it. This was IMO a smart move, deliberately tanking the economy would have been good for nobody.
There was a separate vote to force the companies to agree to some of the workers' safety and working conditions demands, which Republicans blocked.
Place blame where it belongs.
There are certain functions that are so critical that people who work there are not allowed to strike and disrupt the economy. Railroads are one of them. Democrats tried to get them the best deal possible while also preventing an enormous economic recession which would have been the inevitable result of a freight shutdown.
I personally think those critical functions should be nationalized under government control, rather than having private companies reap the benefits of their special control, but that's a conversation for another time.
So far the working conditions haven't got that bad for enough to be noticeable, but at some point you'll have no new employees and the old ones will quit or die off.
I also think Democrats are happy to let them be the bad guys, while they make a lot of noise and token efforts to make things better, but never enough to hurt profits.
Except that's exactly the point of a strike. And I think catastrophic is an overestimation if we were to shut down the rails for a week, maybe it would've instead gone towards equalizing the disconnect of wealth.
I don't really think it's supposed to be "good for anyone". It's not supposed to be comfortable and civilized and concessionary. It's not supposed to preserve the status quo because the position of the striker is that the status quo is bad and un-preservable.
It's supposed to hurt. That's the only lever workers have in these systems.
Unfortunately, a rail strike would have put something like an estimated 3 million people out of work immediately, and would have cut off food and water supplies to millions of people. That's why there's a law preventing strikes that extend beyond the industry to have negative effects on the whole nation.
But your logic would suggest to me that what instead would be needed is a law or set of laws preventing the situation from getting so bad that it would come to such a thing.
If it hurts so much for the system to break, then why is it allowed to rot? A strike isn't supposed to hurt "the company", it's supposed to hurt so that people with power are forced to take action to make it stop hurting.
All I'm suggesting is that a class analysis of this situation has a lot more explanatory power than an aesthetic party alignment one. Because if it can never hurt, then it is purely aesthetics.
Ah yes, both sides are to blame because the difference is only aesthetic, despite one voting to give workers what they wanted, being blocked by the other party.
Seriously, Democrats basically went to the table with "you can't strike because that will ruin the economy but we will give you the vast majority of what you want", the labor unions agreed, and then Republicans prevented it. And your takeaway is that the Democrats are equally culpable?
California homelessness crisis.
Then Reddit is that way. ---->
Everyone weighs the value of information differently and has vastly different information to use in making decisions. Additionally there are various weights applied based on impact to individuals, community, and society as a whole. Pretending you are right, or that I am right, isn't valid. Everyone gets their opinion and everyone believes they are right.
Republicans come to you and say: either we pass this bill without safety provisions, or we will gleefully destroy the entire economy and the public will blame you for it.
What do you do?
If the American people still decide to blame you and elect one of the saboteurs instead, well, they get what they deserve.
...I have learned that I have an above average capacity for spite, though.
Have you been paying attention since 2010? That is exactly what is happening. Republicans break government, say government is broken, then win elections with votes from people who are harmed by government disfunction.
Besides which, I can't say we aren't getting what we deserve.
Section J, paragraph 2 indicates "blah foo bar".
The people seeking to pass this bill are trying to "bar" your "blah foo", and I don't believe "bar" should be "blah foo'd". "Bar" should be "bazzed", and I'm doing everything I can to 'baz' 'bars' whenever possible.
I realize that sometimes legislative language is dense or difficult, but that shouldn't be a reason to gloss over it.
I got hung up on the Clinton Health Care act in the early 90s. Right wing radio folks got me hung up on it - I was convinced it was evil. I bought a copy to review in detail. It was complex, but I found that many of the radio talking points I'd eaten up were, in fact, misrepresentations or distortions. But... I had to read the text myself to get to that point - it took a while to digest.
Half the country will see "Democrats are the reason the nation is on fire right now" and believe it without an uncritical thought, and go back to facebook to repost memes about furry kids using litter boxes at school, or LBGTQ people trying to groom your kids to be child porn stars, and also uncritically believe that as well.
Half of the country reads below a high school level. You really think they will accurately be able to understand a legalese filled and often purposely confusing, 10 page document that usually has dense references to other legalese filled documents?
Refuse to play their bullshit game and do the right thing instead.
Repubicans do not play fair and they do not care about anything but their own power. You have two options: play their game, which means they win, or refuse to play their game and call them out on their bullshit, which means they might win, but if they do then it will be because the public has been shown the truth and just doesn't care.
Obama made the mistake of playing their game a lot in his first term: assuming that republicans actually give a shit about the country and pre-emptively offering reasonable compromise. The republicans, of course, refused to compromise at all and still claimed he was a socialist tyrant.
What I'm saying is, do not negotiate with terrorists.
But let's not pretend these are two different teams, all of congress is in the same business of screwing the little guy.
BTW same reason I believe the SWE "unions" people advocate here are going to be a laughing stock.
I wish the workers had gotten a better deal, but I'm damn happy the strike didn't happen, because the damage would have been enormous.
Every single employee who gains a little power to use in negotiations with their employer should be fought for, by all of us. Fucking solidarity.
One could imagine an alternate universe where the "end of the line" outcome of The Railway Labor Act was the government immediately nationalizing the railroad company in question due to it's failing to provide a crucial service to the national infrastructure. We can argue the effectiveness/realism of the outcome all day long, but as a thought experiment you cannot deny that the collective bargaining process would go entirely differently.
While that's true, why don't the employers and/or state meet the workers' demands to prevent this catastrophy? A strike is usually only done as a reaction, that is, when negotiations failed and demands aren't being met.
Whose fault is that? Are the rail workers being unreasonable with their demands?
Imagine a truck driver complains about being worked too hard, then a week later he falls asleep at the wheel and crashes his truck. Is there a connection??? Gee, I wonder.
But yeah, in that example - totally the driver's fault. He's willing to break company property just to try to get himself some more sleep every week, without even considering the shareholders who've already taken out margin loans against their stock. Can you imagine how crappy it will be for them if next quarter comes in below analyst estimates?
Yeah John, I don't notice anything either, on account of me being forced to work and having no autonomy in this industry. Would be a shame if something bad happened as a result.
If Bill were to have put the train into emergency, checked everything, let it cool off, and then resumed travel, there would have been no disaster but Bill would likely have been yelled at at best or written up at worst for delaying a train, causing disruption throughout the system.
The rail workers requested safety improvements among other things. The management ignored and then proceeded to do stock buyback while firing people.
Trains derail all the time.
From the link below [1]:
From 1990, the first year the BTS began tracking derailments and injuries on a yearly basis, to 2021, there have been 54,539 accidents in which a train derailed. That’s an average of 1,704 derailments per year.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/3539221-how-often-do-trains-der...