5 Likes
Doesnāt congress have the ability to block or delay the strike? Will they?
Yeah, railroads are absolutely in the wrong here but they are reading the tea leaves on thie negotiation correctly. Massive strike right before midterms is untenable, especially after the inflation numbers earlier this week. Cant imagine Congress doesnt impose a settlement before a long strike ensues and its gonna favor the railroads because they need 60 votes.
Congress stomping on a union is an incredibly bad look, but so is another big supply chain disruption. Some sort of federal bailout for the railroads would make the most sense but youāre probably right that zero Republicans go for that. Shitty spot.
Seems like Dark Brandon needs to bring the heads of the railroads in to the White House and be very persuasive about worker conditions.
1 Like
Isnt amtrak majority passenger based and not goods based?
What percent of our goods flows through rail?
A fucking lot.
1 Like
https://twitter.com/katewillett/status/1570115584024629249
Again, this is maybe, maybe the kind of stuff youād force on a high skilled doctor where there was no other person who could possibly do the job. Whatās the rationality behind this at all?
Isnt engineering a train a pretty highly specialized field?
Iām not sure. I canāt imagine itād be so different from aerospace engineers or pilots and they get sick days. I can understand as far as emergencies go, but this seems to extend to day to day operations.
This is pretty transparently just the railroads wanting to operate on the minimum legal staffing level at all times and being more than happy to squeeze their workforce until it fits that mold. I suspect this is almost all happening because of railroad employees not being subject to the same labor laws as normal people. Iām not an expert in this area of labor law so I could have it totally wrong.
Pretty much. There have been arcane rules surrounding railroad labor for a long time (not always benefiting management so much), but more recently the industry has become a hellscape of minimizing operating ratios obsessively, consequences be damned.
A lot of it can be traced back to this guy:
He advocated dramatically longer trains, staffed at lower levels that had previously been the norm.
Wall Street loved him, and basically shareholders and owners demanded that every single railroad be reshaped in his image over about the last 10 years.
So, yeah. Here we are.
2 Likes
Canada#1
How exactly would that work?
Private employer: Work for us under these shitty conditions.
Employees: No.
Government: You have to.
Even if it plays out like that under the threat of jail time or something like that, itās not like every worker is going to go in and give it 100%. It wonāt even be half or even tenth-assed.
Reagan just fired all the air traffic controllers, and I donāt think any of them ever got rehired.
1 Like
Arenāt those federal employees though?
And these arenāt?
(I may have either or both wrong)
I just got told by my company that I would not be able to use my āflexibleā time off for a month of sick leave, nor would I be able to use my accrued several weeks of PTO. itās against the law, almost certainly, but itās a freeroll for them and even when busted doesnt cost them much. for me, I just had to take the entire thing unpaid or be fired. Iām salaried too, I coulda just done zero work during that period and likely no one notices.
I do think the ATC were federal employees, thereās probably some nifty trick where they ānationalizeā the railroads (but not really), or declare a public emergency or something.
This is also exactly what would happen to most workers without significant leverage if the GOP deregulated labor laws.
Iāve only worked like 5 or 6 places in my life but blue collar or white collar or any kind of collar, thatās how itās always been for me.
Like, we have these on call shifts that used to be guaranteed 90 hour week, but lots of it was just backfilling tech debt that accrued from running a skeleton staff