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> For months, the BLET and other unions had pushed for fifteen paid sick days for rail workers. Currently, railroaders get none. In those final hours before the

by caned 4y ago

> For months, the BLET and other unions had pushed for fifteen paid sick days for rail workers. Currently, railroaders get none. In those final hours before their strike deadline on September 15, the union agreed instead to accept three unpaid sick days, with thirty days notice, to be taken on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. In other words, be sure to plan your sickness well in advance.

Tostino 4y ago
And that is just a pathetic amount of time to have off to begin with. Realistically, how much would it eat into profits to properly staff these companies?
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Half a day's worth of Warren Buffett's gains (roughly $321M, less than 2% of annual profits). A full day's worth gets 15 paid sick days. Rail companies spent $25.5B on stock buybacks and dividends in 2022. BNSF is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/dec/08/bernie-sanders/bernie-sanders-correct-railroads-net-billions-vast/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/dec/08/bernie-san...
  - wahern 4y ago
    The nominal cost in days off is not even close to real cost to rail roads bottom line. There reason why they push back so hard is because the rail roads 1) run extremely tight schedules, and 2) employ only barely enough employees to keep the network operating. In many cases there aren't enough employees to cover unscheduled absences, which can cause havoc with schedules. So the real cost is hiring more full-time employees; and you need a not insignificant number as they need to be scattered around the country. 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.
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      If you can’t survive as a business without causing punishing suffering to your workers, you don’t have a right to exist as a business. Subjectively, I’d like to see how far things need to be pushed until it breaks. Is it illegal strikes? Is it derailments? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ status quo is unsustainable considering demographics and labor supply shortages. 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).
      - HDThoreaun 4y ago
        > If you can’t survive as a business without causing punishing suffering to your workers, you don’t have a right to exist as a business. 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.
      - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
        > If you can’t survive as a business without causing punishing suffering to your workers, you don’t have a right to exist as a business. 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.
        duskwuff 4y ago
        > Typically if you cause punishing suffering to your workers, they'll quit. The problem is... 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.
  - humanlion87 4y ago
    And people keep praising Warren as if he is so well intentioned. He is just another billionaire who is intent on maximizing $$$ and has a great PR team.
    - legitster 4y ago
      I mean, he gave away half of his fortune. Twice.
      - sitkack 4y ago
        To a *path who is spending it to enrich himself.
- labcomputer 4y ago
  Probably more than you’d expect. 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.
vkou 4y ago
What's maddening is that the legislature was ready to force them back to work, because railroad workers are nationally-critical, but not so critical that they can't be treated like dirt.
- jethro_tell 4y ago
  We've seen this 'split the bill' trick too many times of late. Put all the concessions for business in the first bill and then bring up a second bill with concessions for workers. For some reason, the first is always bipartisan and the second is a bipartisan failure. 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.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    The issue with "get out of the way" is that railroads would shut down which would basically close the economy after a week or two. Power plants would be forced to shut down and there would be blackouts because they can't get their coal. Grocery stores would have empty shelves. Allowing that isn't a political reality, and the opposition party knows it, so there's no reason for them to give any concessions to the ruling party.
    - jethro_tell 4y ago
      So, either these people are important enough to pay or they aren't, so let the opposition party shut the country down? Its either a mandated compromise or left alone. 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.
wefarrell 4y ago
I’m amazed that 21 years after September 11th we are still taking our shoes off to get on airplanes. 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.
- laweijfmvo 4y ago
  nit pick, but this actually wasn't a direct result of 9-11, rather it occurred a few months later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid He failed to detonate his shoes and no one was killed/injured from this incident (unlike 9-11).
  - cosmotic 4y ago
    911 based measures enabled all the follow on nonsense like shoes and liquid limits.
  - ryathal 4y ago
    Fortunately, sanity prevailed after the underwear bombing failed.
- Mechanical9 4y ago
  The majority of US law / government process is pretty much off-limits to change due to political gridlock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlock_(politics)#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlock_(politics)#United_Sta...
- brianwawok 4y ago
  Can leave your shoes on if you do precheck. Takes you back to 2000 level security. No body scan or taking laptops out of bags either.
  - Cyberdog 4y ago
legitster 4y ago
Is there a particular reason they have to be so byzantine with sick time? Paid or not 30 days heads up seems useless. Is there that much of a logistical issue replacing missing operators?
- rtkwe 4y ago
  Railways like the airlines need people in particular places at given times to drive their trains. Having any slack requires having slack and fast transport to get on call replacements into position. That costs money so they run as tight as inhumanly possible to squeeze more profitable work out of their employees at their expense.
  - legitster 4y ago
    It doesn't seem that expensive to just always have an extra staffer scheduled on routes. Ocean shippers are just as profit-seeking as train companies and they don't mind keeping lots of extra crew around. Are there artificial barriers to hiring that train companies have to deal with?
    - rtkwe 4y ago
      The issue is you could need the spare people at a lot more locations that are far more geographically dispersed than a cargo ship and they're all better paid than your generic seaman, a lot of workers on ships are from much lower COL countries and get paid less accordingly.
    - mike50 4y ago
      That's because they can employ workers from various low income nations (especially if English speaking) for cheap. No pesky environmental regulations for the fuel quality and resulting pollution either. Compare the labor costs of shipping from one us port direct to another us port (requires a us crew) and a foreign port to a us port.
- shagie 4y ago
  As I understand it... they are the industry is trying to run as close to 100% workforce utilization as possible. 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.

by caned 4y ago

Tostino 4y ago

And that is just a pathetic amount of time to have off to begin with. Realistically, how much would it eat into profits to properly staff these companies?

toomuchtodo 4y ago
Half a day's worth of Warren Buffett's gains (roughly $321M, less than 2% of annual profits). A full day's worth gets 15 paid sick days. Rail companies spent $25.5B on stock buybacks and dividends in 2022. BNSF is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/dec/08/bernie-sanders/bernie-sanders-correct-railroads-net-billions-vast/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/dec/08/bernie-san...
- wahern 4y ago
  The nominal cost in days off is not even close to real cost to rail roads bottom line. There reason why they push back so hard is because the rail roads 1) run extremely tight schedules, and 2) employ only barely enough employees to keep the network operating. In many cases there aren't enough employees to cover unscheduled absences, which can cause havoc with schedules. So the real cost is hiring more full-time employees; and you need a not insignificant number as they need to be scattered around the country. 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.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    If you can’t survive as a business without causing punishing suffering to your workers, you don’t have a right to exist as a business. Subjectively, I’d like to see how far things need to be pushed until it breaks. Is it illegal strikes? Is it derailments? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ status quo is unsustainable considering demographics and labor supply shortages. 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).
    - HDThoreaun 4y ago
      > If you can’t survive as a business without causing punishing suffering to your workers, you don’t have a right to exist as a business. 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.
    - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
      > If you can’t survive as a business without causing punishing suffering to your workers, you don’t have a right to exist as a business. 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.
      - duskwuff 4y ago
        > Typically if you cause punishing suffering to your workers, they'll quit. The problem is... 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.
- humanlion87 4y ago
  And people keep praising Warren as if he is so well intentioned. He is just another billionaire who is intent on maximizing $$$ and has a great PR team.
  - legitster 4y ago
    I mean, he gave away half of his fortune. Twice.
    - sitkack 4y ago
      To a *path who is spending it to enrich himself.
labcomputer 4y ago
Probably more than you’d expect. 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.

vkou 4y ago

What's maddening is that the legislature was ready to force them back to work, because railroad workers are nationally-critical, but not so critical that they can't be treated like dirt.

jethro_tell 4y ago
We've seen this 'split the bill' trick too many times of late. Put all the concessions for business in the first bill and then bring up a second bill with concessions for workers. For some reason, the first is always bipartisan and the second is a bipartisan failure. 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.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  The issue with "get out of the way" is that railroads would shut down which would basically close the economy after a week or two. Power plants would be forced to shut down and there would be blackouts because they can't get their coal. Grocery stores would have empty shelves. Allowing that isn't a political reality, and the opposition party knows it, so there's no reason for them to give any concessions to the ruling party.
  - jethro_tell 4y ago
    So, either these people are important enough to pay or they aren't, so let the opposition party shut the country down? Its either a mandated compromise or left alone. 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.

wefarrell 4y ago

I’m amazed that 21 years after September 11th we are still taking our shoes off to get on airplanes. 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.

laweijfmvo 4y ago
nit pick, but this actually wasn't a direct result of 9-11, rather it occurred a few months later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid He failed to detonate his shoes and no one was killed/injured from this incident (unlike 9-11).
- cosmotic 4y ago
  911 based measures enabled all the follow on nonsense like shoes and liquid limits.
- ryathal 4y ago
  Fortunately, sanity prevailed after the underwear bombing failed.
Mechanical9 4y ago
The majority of US law / government process is pretty much off-limits to change due to political gridlock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlock_(politics)#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlock_(politics)#United_Sta...
brianwawok 4y ago
Can leave your shoes on if you do precheck. Takes you back to 2000 level security. No body scan or taking laptops out of bags either.
- Cyberdog 4y ago

legitster 4y ago

Is there a particular reason they have to be so byzantine with sick time? Paid or not 30 days heads up seems useless. Is there that much of a logistical issue replacing missing operators?

rtkwe 4y ago
Railways like the airlines need people in particular places at given times to drive their trains. Having any slack requires having slack and fast transport to get on call replacements into position. That costs money so they run as tight as inhumanly possible to squeeze more profitable work out of their employees at their expense.
- legitster 4y ago
  It doesn't seem that expensive to just always have an extra staffer scheduled on routes. Ocean shippers are just as profit-seeking as train companies and they don't mind keeping lots of extra crew around. Are there artificial barriers to hiring that train companies have to deal with?
  - rtkwe 4y ago
    The issue is you could need the spare people at a lot more locations that are far more geographically dispersed than a cargo ship and they're all better paid than your generic seaman, a lot of workers on ships are from much lower COL countries and get paid less accordingly.
  - mike50 4y ago
    That's because they can employ workers from various low income nations (especially if English speaking) for cheap. No pesky environmental regulations for the fuel quality and resulting pollution either. Compare the labor costs of shipping from one us port direct to another us port (requires a us crew) and a foreign port to a us port.
shagie 4y ago
As I understand it... they are the industry is trying to run as close to 100% workforce utilization as possible. 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.