Anyone talking about the railroad union possible strike? Only seeing bits and pieces about it
I’m following it pretty closely for professional reasons. I’m not expecting a good resolution. Either it’s going to be a strike which is going to be very messy in the short term, or the government is going to force the Unions to take the frankly insane work rules the railroads want. If the latter happens I honestly expect 20-40% of the workforce to quit over the next 6-12 months and that would be even messier than a strike.
What is the railroad wanting?
Welp, time to stock up on rice, beans and tp again.
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I live close to some tracks, so I’m hoping for a strike to give me a break from the noise.
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they basically want to demand all employees are eternally on call 24/7 outside of pre-scheduled vacation
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For the workers to be on call 24/7 except for 30 preplanned days per year. Railroad workers don’t have the usual workers rights.
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Are the workers currently on call 24/7 or are the railroad companies trying to significantly worsen working conditions during a m’fing labor shortage?
They’ve been living under these policies since the railroads unilaterally imposed them a couple of years back. The workers are massively burned out as a result and the majority of them are saying that they’ll quit at the next opportunity. There’s a huge bunch of them that are hitting pension eligibility over the next 6-12 months and a bunch more who are new enough that they could walk away.
The railroaders are claiming that 40% of them will quit if they don’t get scheduling relief out of this contract, but I don’t believe that tbh. But I believe 20% and know how disruptive that would be. Way more than disruptive enough to be a huge problem.
I’ll be honest I don’t think the railroads have a leg to stand on here. A big reason why this hasn’t been covered much in the news is that there’s no way to tell this story with any level of detail that doesn’t make it immediately obvious that the workers are 100% right. What the railroads expect from their workforce is objectively just madness.
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This is all Reuters has to say about the opposing sides
A union representing about 4,900 machinists, mechanics and maintenance personnel said on Wednesday its members voted to reject a tentative deal.
Railroads have offered significant pay increases. Three of 12 unions, representing about half of the 115,000 workers affected by the negotiations, are holding out for better working conditions.
Unions are enjoying a surge of public support and worker interest in the wake of the pandemic - when employees risked COVID-19 exposure to keep goods moving and employers reaped hefty profits, labor and corporate experts say.
Was wondering why I hadn’t heard about this story until like 2 days ago.
Feels like this should be a MUCH bigger story. Everything I’ve read says that the supply chain for a lot of things will be absolutely fucked if a strike lasts longer than a day or two.
I’ve been following this closely for a few weeks, but that’s because one of my formative experiences in logistics was having my everything rocked by a port strike. Now I keep my eyes on the consequential union negotiations around the industry because they’re big time market movers.
How fucked are things if this lasts over a week?
Probably should rename the surviving nuclear holocaust thread to the railroad strike thread.
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Any short term strike thing can fuck things up short term, but we’ll probably recover pretty fast once it’s over. One of the things about rail freight is that it is pretty much never time sensitive (because it’s incredibly slow transit time wise compared to trucks) which means it could backlog a week and things wouldn’t be that serious.
At 2+ weeks things start to get spicy and at 4+ weeks things will be breaking all over the place and people will be at least attempting to move rail freight by truck.
I could see coal deliveries becoming a problem pretty fast since those are basically continuous.
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Sounds like they have the country by the balls and the rail lines should give their workers whatever they want.
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Have the rails considered the flexibility of taking the one rainbow card even though it leaves them with fewer cards overall?
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Probably time for this story to get its own thread.
Maybe @Tilted can move everything starting with wirelessgrinder’s “bits and pieces” comment.
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That’s the thing I don’t get about the railroad companies. It’s not like being a doctor where the demand is highly variable and time sensitive. It’s literally the opposite. I don’t get how forcing them to be on call even makes sense