> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
Because if you've spent years working somewhere it might not be easy or even feasible to switch professions. When do you interview, assuming there are even other options where you live that will accept your experience?
While young, workers can endure more hardship. When older, they have a lot invested in their job and changing may be difficult or impossible. Companies do not make it easy for workers to change their job, especially if the worker is already working full-time + on-call. There are only so many hours in a day.
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?
“Increase in inefficiency” isn’t a useful metric. It’s not like Mr. Burns is going to have Smithers club a baby seal to death for each wasted dollar.
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.
It's precisely because fixed costs are so high why the railroads are so intransigent, especially considering they've been captured by activist investors. High fixed costs raises the stakes for swings in variable costs. And labor accounts for ~40% of variable costs (circa 2009 per https://www.ndsu.edu/fileadmin/challeyinstitute/Research_Bri...) (I can't find numbers for variable or fixed costs as percentage of total operating costs, but it seems fixed costs are definitely >50%, especially since deregulation.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shutting down the entire economy, including the electrical grid is not a minor inconvenience. It's a political nightmare that is not in the rail workers long term interests because next time they need to negotiate the railroads will be even more stingy.
If you think a rail strike could end with anything other than a forced contract you're more naïve than a third grader.
Sure. That's the historical disadvantage of Labor in the USA.
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.
"The average salary for Union Pacific Railroad employees is $93,401 per year."
"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."
The top-level pay looks nice until you factor in 60+ hour weeks and no regular weekends. There is also a chance you get a day off in another city away from your family in a city with little to nothing to do besides stay at a hotel. Even days you aren't scheduled are still often on call and you may still end up going in.
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.
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.
The qualifications for PreCheck are onerous and expensive. I'd argue that it might be unconstitutional as well since it basically allows you to pay your way into a lower level of harassment by government authorities.
I mean, that's kind of how our system works anyway, but it's not supposed to be codified like that.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Im surprised they haven't loosed restrictions or threatened the union with more AI driving implementations. I have no idea how it works but for a majority of the route I could imagine that theyre "self-driving" in some places.
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.
> 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.
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.
To look at this from a slightly different perspective:
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.
It absolutely is corporate greed rearing its head here (Railways are some of the most profitable industries in the US). Railways should carry more of the financial weight that will cut into the profits.
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.
The labor movement is in the most dire straits it has been since the 1920s. They have no support from anybody with power. Their longtime ally, the Democrats, are now solidly the party of management, of companies operating global supply chains, and of knowledge workers who want their Amazon packages delivered on time. As a result Biden will face no meaningful backlash from his party for knifing railroad workers in the back: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/01/joe-bi....
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.
I mean you’re right — that’s why Amazon and Starbucks aren’t fighting unionization drives that hard, or why US police departments have famously weak unions of their own, or why the Pinkertons still exist after over a century, or why reactionaries still make regular targets of schoolteachers, or why this very HN thread only exists because unionized rail workers pose such a threat to American money and security that the federal government writes laws prohibiting them from striking.
(the comment you were replying to was sarcastic, though they accidentally dropped the sarcastic negation of the examples they brought up halfway through the list)
Or to put it more generously: in the globalization era where capital can move more freely than labor, most labor is at a negotiation disadvantage when capital can just leave and invest in a friendlier locale instead (ie China).
Well perhaps Labor needs to exercise its power instead of caving. That's what management has been doing to essentially steal their productivity over the decades.
It's a class war, but the wealthy are the ones attacking.
and the national guard will do what? I'm serious, what will they do, run the rails in their place?
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.
I'd like to introduce you to what has happened historically when labor was met with the national guard. Whether or not this would happen in the modern era I cannot say.
I do think, in 2022, anything of this nature happening on US grounds would not go over well at all. See the counter example, such as the Kent State shootings[0] which lead to a massive public outcry. It would, from a PR perspective at a minimum, completely obliterate public support for the railroad companies & the government and immediately give it to the workers.
The reason the government has the authority to insert itself into railroad union negotiations is because the railroad unions used to have a habit of blowing up bridges when negotiations broke down. Maybe it's time to give that another go.
Indeed. And not just rail workers. Every week there is a post on HN asking why we don't have a shorter work week already. Folks seem to have forgotten how much dynamite was involved in getting it down to 40 hours.
> Fire the eugenicist in charge of the CDC, for a start.
Why is she a eugenicist? You had better have something better than the simply the poor choice of words earlier this year about COVID deaths - and words that were clearly twisted by an outrage crew.
He is pro union in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. He has done quite a bit for US automakers… tried to push a law that gave a better deal specifically to union automakers.
Swing state realpolitik is the best predictor of his actions toward unions. I don’t doubt he wants to help, but we all live in the real world. A rail strike would be political suicide as there just isn’t national solidarity for the disruption.
- President Biden fired the anti-worker National Labor Relations Board general counsel and installed a pro-worker majority on the board.
- Union member Marty Walsh (LIUNA) was appointed to serve as secretary of labor.
- The Biden–Harris administration created the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment.
- President Biden used his bully pulpit to advance the causes of the labor movement, including calling for passage of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, supporting workers’ right to organize at Amazon and calling out Kellogg’s corporate greed during an active strike.
</QUOTE>
(Oh, and don't forget that the Senate has taken it upon itself to require 60 votes to pass most legislation, a.k.a. the filibuster rule.)
> Who can trust union leadership at this point? Leadership betrayed the rail workers.
I can't find detailed statistics in a quick search (and am uninterested in spending more time), but it appears that overall the majority of rail union workers voted to approve the contract, and IIRC 8 out of 12 unions voted to ratify. [0]
>> the Senate has taken it upon itself to require 60 votes to pass most legislation
> Of course the Democrats always need an excuse to avoid doing things while they have power.
I suppose Biden should have just broken out his Green Lantern power ring and willed ten or so recalcitrant Senate Republicans to support more pro-labor legislation in defiance of wealthy business-PAC donors and the MAGA base, which has never primaried a Republican officeholder who strayed from the party line by exercising independent judgment — oh, wait ....
> it appears that overall the majority of rail union workers voted to approve the contract
Yes, this was actually discussed in the article:
"In the BLET, the second-largest union involved in negotiations, members ratified a deal, but many members were unhappy with the outcome. In an interview, Hall said his election spoke to rank-and-file frustrations that leadership failed to listen to the membership throughout the negotiations."
> I suppose Biden should have just broken out his Green Lantern power ring and willed ten or so recalcitrant Senate Republicans to support more pro-labor legislation
This completely missed my point, which is that the filibuster can be abolished at any time. It's a self-imposed constraint.
The ultimate irony is that the filibuster can be abolished with a simple majority vote. It's just a stupid senate rule.
Biden, the longtime Senator, doesn't want to abolish the filibuster. He's never said he wanted to abolish the filibuster. He only suggested carving out a few small exceptions to the filibuster, such as for abortion.
I'll go back to your earlier comment: "Rome wasn't built in a day." The current situation is the result of actions over many decades. The Democratic party is an incumbent protection service. Before the election they sneer "Vote blue no matter who!" (because they know their candidates are crappy, otherwise they wouldn't need to say it) then immediately after the election turn around and cry "But we can't do anything because Machin and Sinema!" They always have an excuse. Remember how the Democratic leadership dragged anti-abortion Henry Cuellar across the finish line against his pro-choice primary opponent? Democrats hate primary challenges. The reason that Republicans have much more ideological conformance than Democrats is that Republicans are much less afraid to primary their incumbents. Many Republican incumbents fear a primary challenge from the right more than they fear a "moderate" Democratic opponent.
So again: What would you have Biden and Schumer and Pelosi (soon, Jeffries) do? Berating meteorologists because you don't like the weather in your locale is not exactly a hallmark of effective advocacy.
I'm not here in the HN comments for "advocacy" or to offer future advice to Democratic leaders who aren't even reading the HN comments. I'm simply denying the claim that Biden's past actions indicate strong support for unions.
Anyway, "What would you have them do?" is the wrong question. I don't believe that Democratic leaders have the same values and goals as I do. So as a start, what I would have them do is... fundamentally change who they are. ;-) Or maybe easier than that, resign from office.
Labor parties are traditionally pro union, anti-immigration, free trade skeptical, mildly xenophobic, anti-elite, pro working class benefits (free tuition, healthcare), pro state investments in manufacturing, and less interested in programs that seem like condescending handouts. Which US party does this describe?
Right, neither. You’ve got the party that regards your average rail worker as a “deplorable” and then you’ve got the one that regards them as chumps they can use to get into a position to pass another corporate tax cut.
I know this is a commonly accepted narrative, and I won't dispute that it, in many instances, it did happen
With that said, is there any well documented, nonpartisan historical evidence to suggest that in broad strokes unions show corrupt and abusive behavior?
Its even more lopsided. The Police unions hold vast amounts of power and broker what I'd consider very aggressive contracts and bipartisan support comes out in droves. They include things such as[0][1]:
- 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]
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.
First thing I thought when I read the title was that Mick Lynch [1] got replaced in the UK RMT workers union, who are currently fighting the railway companies (along with, it seems, almost every other union on the island).
Should have realized Labour was spelled incorrectly :-)
I'm all for sick days but not if you can save them up. The cops in my town used to retire with a career's worth of sick days saved which they get paid out in cash (at their final salary). Now I think they get paid annually instead. https://www.nj.com/news/local/2009/12/parsippany_officers_re...
That's weird; why should workers get paid for sick days? I get the idea of being paid out for unused vacation days, but sick days? Makes no sense to me.
To be clear they are referring to the "being paid for sick days not actually taken" not the general concept of "still being paid while you are sick". It's a reasonable question IMO, you should be incentivised to use your sick days not try to bank them for a cash out at the end. They are as much for your fellow workers as you.
Are you allowed to cash out your sick days in Europe? It seems actually anti-worker in a way, giving people a financial incentive to go into work anyways when they're sick.
Oh that's interesting. That's how a lot of jobs here work too (more common with white collar ones).
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
I work for a state institution. We bank our sick time up to a year. So once I retire I should have enough sick time to cover one years salary, and I'll still be technically employed.
Why not just fire all the train operators and hire non-union labor? The job is easily trainable and you can offer salaries that would get 500k smart guys lived up to earn.
We learned in the 80’s when all the air traffic control union members were fired that transportation unions have no power.
The job is boring, the hours are terrible, they spend a lot of time away from family and they get no sick days. They are well paid if they are based in a cheap COL area, but it's a chore to work your way up to a good route.
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.
You should look up what's happening with the situation first before spouting nonsense.
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.
The principal-agent problem is literally the most counter-intuitive problem to have. I suspect, ironically, it would be best to overpay leaders and combine that with term limits. If you're set for life after working for a group for 5-10 years, you have little reason not to do your job well.
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.
Interestingly, the intermingling of organized crime and organized labor was a pretty symbiotic relationship. Crime Syndicates need an above-the-board way of targeting people and companies that step out of line, which the unions provided by stopping work. The unions need an under-the-table way of dealing with scabs, strikebreakers, and uncooperative management, which the mob provided with violence.
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.
This seems pretty drastic given how close the White House was to using an executive action to force the union to work. It's not clear how a more aggressive union president could have done better.
It’s amazing how Bidens work on this is just excused and rationalized. In His career he has always modeled himself as the representative for the working class and pro union.
His direct involvement is the most anti union action in three decades.
It seems like a particularly unique situation though. Regardless of your stance on unions, a national railroad strike would be an egregiously unacceptable outcome. Nearly every other person in America would be negatively impacted by quite a severe degree.
Except that is an easy out. The truth is the emperor has no clothes here. The current DNC is pro corporate pro elitist and just grand stands using some “corporate safe” identity political issues to market themselves as “progressive”
The emperor never had any clothes. The Democratic Party is progressive in some ways relative to Republicans but, yes, everyone knows the United States has no true left in power. Even AOC voted against labor. It's disgraceful but not surprising.
By the exact same powers that they used to force the union to accept the railroad companies' demands, they could have forced the railway companies' to accept the unions demands. Failure to do so is a failure of policy, of character, and of basic conviction.
Since the government action here enforces a specific deal to be "made", it could've prevented the strike and followed some of the demands and added sickdays though?
Indeed. They could've voted to enforce the pro-union deal. They didn't. They specifically voted to prevent a strike and not provide the sick day benefits.
The response to being told you can't strike is to strike anyway. The beauty of a strike is that it doesn't need to be legal to be effective. Unions themselves were very illegal when they started out, but through organization and willingness to flaunt the law, they secured themselves a seat at the legitimate negotiation table. Apparently Capital and their government lackies have forgotten why such concessions were granted in the first place.
I hesitate to speak an unpopular (in many senses of the word) position, but there is a stark truth if you are a scientific/economic/objective observer that as long as people are willing to sign up for jobs under these conditions, you cannot greatly escape the truth the employers will continue to offer those conditions.
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.
You can't always excuse bad things with "market forces". We have prohibited child labor. Otherwise "market forces" would also motivate poor children to work in coal mines. We could mandate reasonable sick day and vacation policies. We shouldn't accept exploitation of people who are willing to take a job.
Again, at the risk of sounding coldly analytical about it, while I'm grateful child labor laws were put in place, I don't think they actually did much to alleviate the underlying reasons and experiences of why children were put to work (by their parents or exploiters or themselves) in those days. Suddenly outlawing children from working didn't miraculously make their lives better or lift them out of poverty. Stopping people from taking those jobs merely stopped them from making their desperation visible (and of course obviously yes, from dying in horrible conditions they probably had no idea they were signing up for). It was other efforts and initiatives improving the standard of living that made the difference.
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.
What you are saying sounds a little like victim blaming. We need regulations so companies can’t compete on cutting costs through not providing things like sick days or safe working conditions. There are always people desperate enough to take exploitative/unsafe jobs. These jobs should not exist and all companies should compete under the same rules.
I think we're talking on orthogonal lines. It's not companies who are competing, but workers who are competing with each other for jobs and being willing to take those jobs.
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?
counterpoint - most jobs require a certain amount of training, and once you have started a "career" in that job, you often cannot switch to any job with equivalent salary, despite the fact that such jobs exist.
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.
If we want to give the companies a carte blanche to abuse their employees, then worker retaliation should be back on the table. After all, the government is only artificially fighting against the natural forces of tar and feathering.
"We unfortunately have too many people willing to take these jobs at the pay and benefits / conditions offered."
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.
One of the big issues was that in this multi year negotiation process, union leaders were banking on Biden to support them favorably and so did not pursue any other backup plans or offers. They could have had a Plan B in place to strike or at least secure a shorter term deal with sick days in place, with the rank and file ready to walk out, but the union leadership didn't want to. When Biden admin basically walked away, the union leadership were left with zero other options. Gross negligence from the leadership.
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.
The consensus within the progressive arm of the unions is that there should have been a walkout date for a shorter term agreement to keep negotiations going. The leadership only had one card to play and they burned it with terrible strategy. It's why this particular union president was replaced.
168 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadIn 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.
---
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33991186#33992777
"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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
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.
Why is she a eugenicist? You had better have something better than the simply the poor choice of words earlier this year about COVID deaths - and words that were clearly twisted by an outrage crew.
Lip service. What has he done for unions?
Saying things isn't support. It's a substitute for support.
Helping union automakers isn't the same as helping unions. Just as we've seen here, helping union railroads isn't the same as helping unions.
But I do.
Also, I live in a swing state.
The AFL-CIO had a laudatory summary of Biden's first year: https://aflcio.org/2022/1/21/working-people-respond-presiden... Excerpt:
<QUOTE>
- President Biden fired the anti-worker National Labor Relations Board general counsel and installed a pro-worker majority on the board.
- Union member Marty Walsh (LIUNA) was appointed to serve as secretary of labor.
- The Biden–Harris administration created the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment.
- President Biden used his bully pulpit to advance the causes of the labor movement, including calling for passage of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, supporting workers’ right to organize at Amazon and calling out Kellogg’s corporate greed during an active strike.
</QUOTE>
(Oh, and don't forget that the Senate has taken it upon itself to require 60 votes to pass most legislation, a.k.a. the filibuster rule.)
Who can trust union leadership at this point? Leadership betrayed the rail workers.
> supporting workers’ right to organize at Amazon
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/26/bernie-pressures-bi...
> the Senate has taken it upon itself to require 60 votes to pass most legislation
Of course the Democrats always need an excuse to avoid doing things while they have power.
I can't find detailed statistics in a quick search (and am uninterested in spending more time), but it appears that overall the majority of rail union workers voted to approve the contract, and IIRC 8 out of 12 unions voted to ratify. [0]
>> the Senate has taken it upon itself to require 60 votes to pass most legislation
> Of course the Democrats always need an excuse to avoid doing things while they have power.
I suppose Biden should have just broken out his Green Lantern power ring and willed ten or so recalcitrant Senate Republicans to support more pro-labor legislation in defiance of wealthy business-PAC donors and the MAGA base, which has never primaried a Republican officeholder who strayed from the party line by exercising independent judgment — oh, wait ....
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/11/21/rail-unio...
Yes, this was actually discussed in the article:
"In the BLET, the second-largest union involved in negotiations, members ratified a deal, but many members were unhappy with the outcome. In an interview, Hall said his election spoke to rank-and-file frustrations that leadership failed to listen to the membership throughout the negotiations."
> I suppose Biden should have just broken out his Green Lantern power ring and willed ten or so recalcitrant Senate Republicans to support more pro-labor legislation
This completely missed my point, which is that the filibuster can be abolished at any time. It's a self-imposed constraint.
The ultimate irony is that the filibuster can be abolished with a simple majority vote. It's just a stupid senate rule.
I'll go back to your earlier comment: "Rome wasn't built in a day." The current situation is the result of actions over many decades. The Democratic party is an incumbent protection service. Before the election they sneer "Vote blue no matter who!" (because they know their candidates are crappy, otherwise they wouldn't need to say it) then immediately after the election turn around and cry "But we can't do anything because Machin and Sinema!" They always have an excuse. Remember how the Democratic leadership dragged anti-abortion Henry Cuellar across the finish line against his pro-choice primary opponent? Democrats hate primary challenges. The reason that Republicans have much more ideological conformance than Democrats is that Republicans are much less afraid to primary their incumbents. Many Republican incumbents fear a primary challenge from the right more than they fear a "moderate" Democratic opponent.
Anyway, "What would you have them do?" is the wrong question. I don't believe that Democratic leaders have the same values and goals as I do. So as a start, what I would have them do is... fundamentally change who they are. ;-) Or maybe easier than that, resign from office.
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
Should have realized Labour was spelled incorrectly :-)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Lynch_(trade_unionist)
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.
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.
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.
His direct involvement is the most anti union action in three decades.
You don't have to love it to understand it.
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.
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.