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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 decenc

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.

matthewmcg 4y ago
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.
- eecc 4y ago
  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.
  - nradov 4y ago
    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.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    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
  - crote 4y ago
    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!
- cratermoon 4y ago
  Except in Texas, of course. But then, one might argue that utilities in Texas aren't meaningfully regulated.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    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.
    - cratermoon 4y ago
      So you're saying that except for the laws the control what PUCT can regulate, regulation is working fine?
    - thehappypm 4y ago
      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.
      - tomrod 4y ago
        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.
- crote 4y ago
  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.
  - kmbfjr 4y ago
    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.
bestcoder69 4y ago
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.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  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.
  - bestcoder69 4y ago
    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.
  - caseysoftware 4y ago
    I think the rules are shocking because these are NOT low paying jobs. These are "good union jobs."
- francisofascii 4y ago
  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.
  - p0pcult 4y ago
    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.
danaris 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bombcar 4y ago
  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.
  - danaris 4y ago
    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.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      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.
      - danaris 4y ago
        Here's hopin'.
thathndude 4y ago
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.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  The bottom 50% can strike and request the share they need to survive the price hike too. All boats rise.
- laweijfmvo 4y ago
  It's not the railroad workers' fault that half of Americans can't afford food and basic necessities.
  - bumby 4y ago
    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.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      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.
      - bumby 4y ago
        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.
    - 4y ago
georgeplusplus 4y ago
>>>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.
- chii 4y ago
  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).
  - bumby 4y ago
    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.
    - naasking 4y ago
      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.
      - bumby 4y ago
        >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.
      - notch656a 4y ago
        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/ https://raillaborfacts.org/total-compensation/
avidphantasm 4y ago
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.
- bumby 4y ago
  >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.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    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.
    - bumby 4y ago
      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.
next_xibalba 4y ago
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.
- bumby 4y ago
  >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.
  - scottLobster 4y ago
    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-statistics/ 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.
    - bumby 4y ago
      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.
j1elo 4y ago
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)
adolph 4y ago
> 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 https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN11966
- isbjorn16 4y ago
  Oh, no, I guess they'll just have to do everything as slowly and by the book as possible. Darn.

matthewmcg 4y ago

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.

eecc 4y ago
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.
- nradov 4y ago
  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.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  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
- crote 4y ago
  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!
cratermoon 4y ago
Except in Texas, of course. But then, one might argue that utilities in Texas aren't meaningfully regulated.
- tomrod 4y ago
  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.
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    So you're saying that except for the laws the control what PUCT can regulate, regulation is working fine?
  - thehappypm 4y ago
    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.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      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.
crote 4y ago
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.
- kmbfjr 4y ago
  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.

bestcoder69 4y ago

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.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
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.
- bestcoder69 4y ago
  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.
- caseysoftware 4y ago
  I think the rules are shocking because these are NOT low paying jobs. These are "good union jobs."
francisofascii 4y ago
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.
- p0pcult 4y ago
  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.

danaris 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bombcar 4y ago
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.
- danaris 4y ago
  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.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    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.
    - danaris 4y ago
      Here's hopin'.

thathndude 4y ago

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.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
The bottom 50% can strike and request the share they need to survive the price hike too. All boats rise.
laweijfmvo 4y ago
It's not the railroad workers' fault that half of Americans can't afford food and basic necessities.
- bumby 4y ago
  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.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    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.
    - bumby 4y ago
      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.
  - 4y ago

georgeplusplus 4y ago

>>>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.

chii 4y ago
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).
- bumby 4y ago
  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.
  - naasking 4y ago
    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.
    - bumby 4y ago
      >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.
    - notch656a 4y ago
      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/ https://raillaborfacts.org/total-compensation/

avidphantasm 4y ago

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.

bumby 4y ago
>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.
- tomrod 4y ago
  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.
  - bumby 4y ago
    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.

next_xibalba 4y ago

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.

bumby 4y ago
>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.
- scottLobster 4y ago
  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-statistics/ 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.
  - bumby 4y ago
    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.

j1elo 4y ago

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)

adolph 4y ago

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

isbjorn16 4y ago
Oh, no, I guess they'll just have to do everything as slowly and by the book as possible. Darn.