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Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

226 points by whacim 4y ago

pepy 4y ago
https://archive.ph/dIOPw https://archive.ph/dIOPw
mjbeswick 4y ago
Rail companies are getting the blame here, but the real problem is that paid leave isn't a statutory employment right protected by law. Here in the UK full time employees are entitled to 28 day paid annual leave, although I have work for companies which offer more, while pay is seperate.
- kvandy 4y ago
  I live on the east coast of the US and have only been to the UK twice, but I was blown away at the efficiency and relative cleanliness of the London and surrounding area rail systems.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    Lots of things change when your country is an island the size of Mississippi.
    - thfuran 4y ago
      It gets more expensive to import the materials to make railways?
- forgetfreeman 4y ago
  And yet you'd have a really tough time finding a white collar gig where paid leave wasn't a bog-standard part of the package. So nah, rail companies are getting caught out because they are absolutely fucking around with this.
  - smileysteve 4y ago
    Glares in "startup" "untracked pto" where it's white collar and paid leave isn't guaranteed but for the power of the worker.
    - coffeebeqn 4y ago
      I take at least a month of unlimited. Many people just assume the world will end if they take a week off
    - forgetfreeman 4y ago
      laughs in SV dweebs chasing IPO payouts are a rounding error compared to the rest of the white collar environment Anyone silly enough to sign up for that treadmill is welcome to whatever comes their way, good or bad.
  - willyt 4y ago
    Yes but now they can't change because the first one to do this becomes uncompetitive, the only way to introduce this in a fair way that otherwise maintains market competition is to introduce a rule that applies to all the companies in the market that says you must offer paid sick leave. Edit: A more extreme example; there is a rule that says airlines mustn't make pilots work more than a certain number of hours without a rest period. This rule applies to all airlines. This rule was introduced to reduce the number of planes crashed by tired pilots.
    - LadyCailin 4y ago
      Apparently according to this article, it’s a monopoly, so no, they would t be less competitive.
    - forgetfreeman 4y ago
      Do they become uncompetitive or do they suddenly attract all the top talent in their industry because of their new compensation offerings?
    - FateOfNations 4y ago
- bestcoder69 4y ago
  Another possible causal factor is just that labor is weak in the US, and thus is unable to win sick days from their employers AND is unable to convince congress to pass universal sick days either. If that’s the case (I’m biased to say yes) these rail workers really need to strike. Voting for blues obviously isn’t cutting it.
  - mjbeswick 4y ago
    It's seem like such a far reaching issue that I'm surprised it hasn't triggered a general strike.
    - sillystuff 4y ago
      A general strike is illegal in the United States. The US government, under the control of wealthy capitalists, has ensured that capital's interests are protected in law to the detriment of the workers who actually create value. > Among the practices prohibited by the Taft–Hartley act are jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. The amendments also allowed states to enact right-to-work laws banning union shops. Labor in the US is weak by design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act
      - notch656a 4y ago
        I would support eliminating both the anti-general strike and anti-collusion laws. It seems unfair to ban collusion by capital but not by labor.
      - dpkirchner 4y ago
        > A general strike is illegal in the United States. What're they going to do, imprison the masses? Illegal doesn't mean much without realistic consequences.
        4y ago
- stephen_g 4y ago
  Yeah, coming from a country with strong labour laws, it's mind boggling that this is legal in the US. I think the realist view has to be that the market ain't ever going to fix it, companies are always going to try to get away with as much as they can, and the people have to force the Government to bring in minimum standards.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    There's no market for natural monopolies.
  - ALittleLight 4y ago
    The market is perfectly capable of fixing the problem. The employees should quit, strike, or slowdown work until their employers give them what they want.
    - retrac 4y ago
      > should quit, strike, or slowdown work I'm not sure how it goes down in the USA, but here in Canada, federal transport workers are de facto prohibited from striking or other job action. Every time they go on strike, the next day the government passes legislation declaring the strike illegal because they are essential workers and a disruption poses a threat to infrastructure of national interest, and a new binding labour contract is imposed on the workers. The only legal option is to quit. (But you can't even encourage your coworkers to quit, too. That amounts to illegal labour agitation.) Air traffic control, port workers, railway workers, etc. get this treatment. They have no right to strike, in practice. Edit: a quick Google search suggests it's same situation in the USA: > The House has passed a resolution 290-137 that would force unions to accept a tentative agreement reached earlier this year between railroad managers and their workers and make an imminent strike illegal. https://www.npr.org/2022/11/30/1139876084/congress-house-railroad-strike-bill https://www.npr.org/2022/11/30/1139876084/congress-house-rai...
      - ddingus 4y ago
        "illegal" Given the level of corruption we live with today, that term packs an increasingly weak punch as labor continues to see completely unacceptable work arrangements. What will eventually happen is they will strike anyway. It plays out in courts and a lot of people get harmed. That same corruption will be the source of blame placed on labor. It will eventually be on all of us to reject that proposition, stand up for these people and insist on reasonable and prudent labor arrangements. Yes, this means shit costs a bit more. So what? The clowns abusing their labor could always give a little margin back too. Think they will? Nope. Not willingly. Not one cent.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  The rail workers have 4? 5? weeks of paid leave already. The issue at hand is "sick days" i.e. days off on short or no notice.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    The right systems term for this is system slack. There isn't enough system slack built into the PSR models to account for real life needs.
  - thatfrenchguy 4y ago
    Yes, which are clearly important ones: you don’t want someone with an infectious disease to come to work because otherwise they couldn’t pay their mortgage.
  - orwin 4y ago
    They don't have weekends. They have 90 days off, while the average worker have 104, without paid leave.
- ransom1538 4y ago
  For context: UK software developers are paid 50% less than US developers. I would rather keep my money.
  - coffeebeqn 4y ago
    Software developers also get all those benefits. Whenever people talk about how terrible working in the US is- almost none of that applies to software. You get plenty of time off, sick days are a non issue, work remote if you don’t feel like going in, health care insurance is free/cheap and good, etc
    - notch656a 4y ago
      What? I had to work for a decade until I had anything close to the benefits offered by default in EU or UK, and even then I had to take a lower paying position to work for a company that offered decent work/life balance. Even still, I think I had 2 days off when my child was born before I ran out of paid "sick" days and had to go to work.
stuff4ben 4y ago
America needs to mimic Europe when it comes to mandatory vacation. Make it subsidized for small businesses. Minimum of 5 days would be a huge start even if it pales significantly in comparison to most of Europe. A more worker friendly nation would probably make us more productive in the long-term.
WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
“In order to get more milk off a cow with less food, you should feed it less and milk it more.”
chiefalchemist 4y ago
Given what we we've went though with Covid (i.e., "if you're the least bit sick, stay home...") this makes zero sense. Such double standards don't do well to mend confidence. That said, I won't be surprised if there are sick outs in the coming weeks. This negotiation might be over for now, but it's not over for good.
- jccalhoun 4y ago
  I heard a report on npr where the workers claimed they were supposed to come to work all throughout the pandemic because they were essential workers and of course they didn't have sick days.
- cool_dude85 4y ago
  Can't do a sick out if you don't have sick leave. I'm holding out hope for a wildcat strike the way this went down. Remember, union negotiators sent this sellout contract for a membership vote, and now it's being imposed by the party that at least pays lip service to labor. People are going to be pissed. Teachers won some solid victories over the past few years doing wildcat strikes against top brass' wishes, and these guys genuinely have the whole economy by the throat.
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago
    Can't? Nah. It might be a high bar, but it's not impossible to jump over it. I suspect there's enough disgust that one or three days here or there would be worth it to enough of those union members. Also, don't discount other unions - that were able to negotiate sick pay - joining forces. They'll recognize this is not a precedent that favors them and won't wait to push back (if they're wise). It's also going to be interesting how this plays out during the next election cycle.
- ThunderSizzle 4y ago
  Society (and the authorities/governments) were completely inconsistent with it. I still see people who freak out over COVID but don't care about any other contagion. People still talk about COVID testing as if it is a "Are You Contagious?" testing. Even medical facilities keep pushing COVID testing even though it doesn't change the diagnosis, treatment, or outcome; even if you test negative for COVID, you could (1) still have COVID, or (2) still have another contagious disease. If you test positive, you could (1) have COVID, (2) have something else similar enough to COVID, or (3) be a false positive. It's entirely inconsistent and useless. If your sick and you might be contagious, stay home. If your not sick (or sick but not contagious), then you do you.
over_bridge 4y ago
It's hugely in the public interest to not have sick rail workers infecting their passengers
- bell-cot 4y ago
  That applies to freight railroads how? Notice the names of the railroads involved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_labor_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_la...
  - tecleandor 4y ago
    Well, this sounds crazy, at least looking from Europe: In February 2022, BNSF Railway implemented a points attendance system named "Hi Viz" that a union president called, "the worst and most egregious attendance policy ever adopted by any rail carrier." In the system, each worker starts with 30 points and loses points for taking a day off. Workers can accrue 4 points by being on-call for 14 straight days, but any time off, even for illness or a family emergency, resets the clock. Unions representing about 17,000 workers threatened to strike over the points system, but BNSF Railway sued and won a restraining order to prevent the unions from striking.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      It doesn't say how many points are lost for taking a day.
    - FranchuFranchu 4y ago
      Here in Argentina, the right to strike is granted by our constitution. A restraining order preventing unions from striking would be seen like a restraining order preventing voters from voting.
      - thesuitonym 4y ago
        The right to strike is granted in the US as well, however laws mean nothing to the oligarchs.
GoToRO 4y ago
Because they can get away with it. That's it. It's a power struggle.
voisin 4y ago
Companies want employees rather than contractors in the sense that they want to have a locked in wage rather than negotiate new contract rates for each contract, but companies want contractors rather than employees because employees get benefits in exchange for their relatively slower growing incomes. Here, we see the tug of war and companies trying to have it both ways.
- tyingq 4y ago
  Contractors can also be laid off without any fuss with things like the WARN act.
  - paleotrope 4y ago
    I think most companies know how to get around WARN act or WARN act-like state rules pretty easily now. It's toothless imo.
- treis 4y ago
  This seems like a place for a union to do something actually economically useful. Take the burden of dealing with malingers and fakers while providing some rostering flexibility for sick workers.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    Unions already do something economically useful - increase wages. How would you have a consumer economy if no one had any disposable income?
    - treis 4y ago
      That's shifting where the pie goes. It's not making more pie.
      - nasmorn 4y ago
        It absolutely is. Workers getting paid more actually spend that money. If you pay more dividends to the Saudi wealth fund or even a local billionaire the economy doesn’t grow as much of that.
coliveira 4y ago
The "reason" is just to make more profits. All industries can adjust to paid leave, certainly railroads can make it too. It is important to remember that the railroad industry was THE original big money monopoly that made its money exploiting workers. It's just continuing its tradition in the hands of Warren Buffet and similar owners.
shapefrog 4y ago
Scheduling seems to be the most reasonable (non greed) defence. Surely now we have the tools to schedule and manage staffing in what is actually a quite complex set of constraints, with temporal and geographic inputs. Can probably also optimise things such that shifts and/or journeys start and end closer to home for workers, less nights on road more overtime / less overtime when people want it etc.
mynameishere 4y ago
Sickness is kind of a red herring in the discussion. Everyone uses sick days as surprise vacations and that is more disruptive for railroads than, say, my desk job.
- jxdxbx 4y ago
  Who cares? That's life. Railraods need to deal with human nature like every other industry.
- jccalhoun 4y ago
  If a business depends on no one ever taking a day off without warning maybe that business shucks.
- cr1895 4y ago
  I like how it’s done in the Netherlands. There are vacation days (guaranteed by law!). And then there is sick leave, and there is no fixed number of days. They’re totally separate. If you’re sick, you’re sick - if you’re sick long term it’s covered by insurance. If you’re sick on holiday you even can get your vacation days back. It’s so gross to me how this is handled in America. Certainly there are flaws in the Dutch approach, but it’s inhumane and precarious for so many people in America. Makes me never want to return to life in the US.
- thesuitonym 4y ago
  People who have enough vacation days don't use sick days that way.
cainxinth 4y ago
> ”The answer, in short, is “P.S.R.” — or precision-scheduled railroading. P.S.R. is an operational strategy that aims to minimize the ratio between railroads’ operating costs and their revenues through various cost-cutting and (ostensibly) efficiency-increasing measures. The basic idea is to transport more freight using fewer workers and railcars.” That’s a long-winded way of saying: ‘We’d rather make more money than care about the health of our employees.’
- mikewarot 4y ago
  My understanding of the FIRST big problem with PSR is that it creates trains longer than the system is designed to handle, thus all the sidings that used to allow trains to pass in single tracked areas are unavailable, which increases fragility of the system in general. This makes precision scheduling impossible... what this really is, is let's make all the workers wait (for free!) while we figure out how we can finally get the freight in monstrously long trains moving through a system that wasn't designed for it. The SECOND problem is that slashing the labor pool, and thus reducing the labor cost at the expense of reliability and system performance, appears to be the actual goal of PSR. I stand with the workers, no essential worker should be forced to work "on-call". Especially not people so important to safety and National Security.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I don't really have a problem with "on-call" workers (after all, everyone on a ship is perpetually "on-call" during the tour) but it needs to be compensated and handled correctly.
    - coffeebeqn 4y ago
      On-call is fine if you get paid for the on-call hours and you have agreed to them in your contract. Just making people work for 24h a day for free is unacceptable. Oh it’s not work you’re just waiting to get pages at a minutes notice - yeah that’s work
  - lazide 4y ago
rowls66 4y ago
This problem does not seem unique to railroads. Any business that depends on human labor to deliver a service would have this problem. Airlines, restaurants, theatre companies. The way to deal with this is to have excess labor available (slack in the system). Are railroad profit margins so small that paying for excess labor will bankrupt them? Maybe labor in the railroad industry is so highly regulated that labor flexibility very expensive to maintain. Railroad pensions are the only private pensions that I know of that are specifically called out in IRS tax forms. That has always seemed odd to me, and is probably some indication of how tightly regulated labor in the railroad business is.
- altairprime 4y ago
  No; railroad profit margins at unhealthy labor levels are so high that trying to pay for healthy levels of labor (i.e. staffing enough to offer sick leave) will lead to hostile takeovers by investors who want higher profit margins rather than healthy labor. > A decade ago, the activist investor Bill Ackman won a proxy battle at Canadian Pacific and proceeded to replace its management with a team led by Hunter Harrison, the railway executive who’d pioneered P.S.R. After imposing the gospel of “more with less” at Canadian Pacific, Harrison left to spread the good news to the freight giant CSX. At each firm, P.S.R. succeeded at generating higher returns. Pretty soon, major investors in other railroads started calling on their firms to imitate Harrison’s methods. Testifying to the government’s Surface Transportation Board about freight rail’s performance last spring, industry analyst Rick Paterson said, “Lurking in the background is the constant threat of shareholder activism if any of the railroads’ operating ratios become outliers on the high side.” It could be considered a key defect of American railroads that they are operated as for-profit corporations with public stock listings and shareholders. In such a scenario, so long as profits can be raised, they must be — or else hostile takeovers will be led to do so regardless. America’s government is poorly equipped to combat this with the usual hands-off approaches. They would need to either pass laws guaranteeing sick days, nationalize rail services to protect against hostile takeovers, regulate that rail networks must be operated by (for example) “B Corps”, or other similar steps taken that interfere with corporate sovereignty. Such interference is typically avoided by modern American labor politics, and so here we are.
mauvehaus 4y ago
Fuck the shareholders. Strike. Yes, I am absolutely willing to pay more in the short term for things so that people are treated with a little basic human decency. Moreover, I'm more than happy to pay a little more for things in the long term to ensure that there's enough slack in the system to absorb the shocks that periodically come around. We've just spent almost three years slowly killing everyone in healthcare because every "inefficiency" in the system has been trimmed to the bone. We've been asking people to shoulder crushing loads to make up for the lack of what is normally excess capacity. We shouldn't need a reminder that all that inefficiency is what adds resilience to the system so soon. Airlines claim to have learned this. They say they're reducing schedules to more realistically match their ability to absorb hiccups during the holiday travel season. Time will tell, but it seems nobody wants a repeat of last year. If you make flying awful enough, evidently people will find ways to not do it. Maybe part of the solution is to treat other industries like the banking and finance industries. Banks get periodic stress tests; perhaps it's time to do the same for all of the other systems that we rely on holding together but don't have to think about until they're falling apart under load.
- bestcoder69 4y ago
  Agreed on the strike. Hearing they have 0 sick days (plus penalties for missing) was unbelievable to me. Strike and make it so the rail company shareholders have to live with completely fucking the US economy over their profit margins. And if they do, we all have a duty to point the finger at them.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    FYI, many, many millions of people in America that work low paying jobs have zero paid sick days (or paid time off in general). As evidenced by the fact that there is no federal law about it, and only a handful of states required a small number of paid sick days.
    - bestcoder69 4y ago
      Very aware of that (I’m American), so I should have mentioned that it’s surprising to me given their critical & central role in keeping our whole-ass system functioning. ie even these workers get 0.
bestcoder69 4y ago
Seems like the shareholders FTA aren’t exactly pulling their weight. Why do we need them in the mix, exactly? Do other countries get by without their fingers in the pie?
steanne 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duffy%27s_Cut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duffy%27s_Cut
georgeplusplus 4y ago
From what I gathered from the article the freight industry labor force is hyper optimized through PSR. So any time off creates major disruptions to the service and scheduling. There are also monopolistic forces driving control of certain tracks, routes, and stations that make deviating from this system hard. I would think breaking the rail industries monopoly would be a priority to giving the laborers what they want.
gz5 4y ago
>Four of those companies collectively control more than 83 percent of the freight market. And the vast majority of train stations in the U.S. are served by exactly one railroad. Monopoly behaving like a monopoly. The only real power the employees have in this situation is to leave, especially when the government's interests are also not aligned with employee interests. Numbers tell us there are 10M open jobs in the US. Obviously leaving the devil you know for the devil you don't is not an easy decision, but I wonder how possible it even is? Are the rail employees in a position in which those 10M open jobs are not viable alternatives for them and how 'real' is the 10M number?
- i_am_proteus 4y ago
  Maybe they don't want to give up good pay at the rail road to make minimum moolah flipping ham burgers at Mac Donald's.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    I doubt that's the only option.
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    These people are ultra-reliable, proven workers with a lot of skills. They could move to construction for similar or better pay. You don't make any serious coin with the railroad unless you are working overtime. They all work their lives away.
    - i_am_proteus 4y ago
      Reliability, proof, and skills aren't of much import if nobody's hiring for the particular version of those things that you have. This is exactly how you get certain sectors of labor getting rough treatment from the Establishment even though there's a national net labor shortage.
- datavirtue 4y ago
  They could all move to construction with minimal, if any, training and be happier for it. People outside of tech don't change jobs very often and are very weary of doing so. Changing jobs is a skill and experience they do not have. I would love to work for the same company for thirty years...just not feasible. My cousin is a tree guy who runs a crew. He has been with the company more than twenty years and just now started getting a fair cut. They didn't have a choice but to cave to his demands (which were quite modest) because they simply can't run their business without him. They also promised something in the deal that never came through (a $300k piece of equipment to make his job easier). I had been screaming at him for years that they had no viable business without him and that he should be getting a bigger cut. He just didn't have the business sense to believe it or leverage his power. He got fed up and had a much better offer from a startup and handed in his resignation. They panicked and started pitching better deals to him. Which he took.
danaris 4y ago
This "PSR" is just another name for lean staffing, which is one of the biggest cancers on our society right now. Aggressively cutting staffing levels to the bare minimum required to operate leads very directly to worse service, more disruptions, and more sick and injured workers. It leads less directly to lower wages, via higher unemployment, a catastrophic loss of institutional memory, as there's rarely anyone in your position when you're hired—you're just expected to figure it all out once you get there, rather than have anyone who can train you. Lean staffing is devastating the middle and working class, and it needs to die a thousand deaths.
KingOfCoders 4y ago
Stories from the US always sound like feudalism stories from long times past.
- cratermoon 4y ago
  I took a cross-country round trip on Amtrak once, because I had the time and I wanted to try it out. The entire time I was on the train felt like a time warp back to the 50s/60s. Even the food in the dining car was like something out of a Betty Crocker cookbook. Now this wasn't terrible, mind you, because I did get to disconnect and enjoy some quiet time in my private room. But it was obvious the whole thing was still run like it had been for decades.
- Kreutzer 4y ago
  I sincerely wish railway workers wildcat the economy into the ground.
- over_bridge 4y ago
  Its shocking to see the overall attitude to workers rights in the US. Profits over people, always? There's always some vocal sociopaths, I mean libertarians who won the career lottery coming out to defend this behavior on here too. Sad it's so internalised that workers should suffer for their employer.
ragingrobot 4y ago
Hey, something maybe for one here I can shed some light on, for those who want a little more than the article gives. ;) I am a supervisor on a commuter rail, and in this respect they operate in a similar fashion. Like any other business, profits are key. Someone figures out staffing. Pretty much cut and dry. For a line from terminal A to B, there is one train per hour in each direction, 48 trains in a day. We need for example a supervisor at each end, and one engineer and conductor per train. So, say that gives us 48 train crews, and 6 supervisors per day. So, we hire 6 supervisors, and 51 train crews - in case someone calls out sick. What happens if someone calls out sick? A supervisor? We keep costs down there by requiring the on duty supervisor to stay an additional shift. A crew member? We have that extra crew. If we have too many people call out sick, we force on duty crews to stay on overtime. We don't want to be doing that, now do we? That affects the bottom line. If no crew is available at all, then the train doesn't run. This is also bad, as it upsets the customer. Running with a "skeleton crew" ensures we are not spending more on labor than we have to. This is because in some markets, paying fewer workers overtime still comes in at less than having more people to whom benefits are paid. So, the employees are intimidated into coming to work every day. What the freight railroads are doing here is forcing the employees to use their vacation pay when they are sick to discourage them from calling out sick at all, in effect penalizing them for calling out sick. That vacation you had planned with the family? Either lose a day (which may require you to cancel altogether), or come to work sick. If they have paid sick leave, they'd use it when sick rather than showing up to work. My agency uses a different tactic, just as effective in the employer's view, but no less exploitative of the employee. When an employee calls out sick, a Special Inspector may be sent to their home to check if they are really sick and at home. If the employee doesn't answer the door (They're sleeping and don't hear the door? Doesn't matter), they're charged with falsely calling out sick, and face suspension or termination. Edit: This industry can be very time sensitive. It may not seem to you a big deal if say a train is late, but cargo is critical or a passenger gets to work late, that is not a good thing. The shipper may take some action if it happens enough. That passenger may start driving.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Wow. That's even worse.
JohnFen 4y ago
So the reason that railroads refuse to give workers paid leave turns out to be that they're sociopathic bastards who value profit over lives. What a surprise.
Eumenes 4y ago
We need self driving trains ASAP
- cratermoon 4y ago
  FYI the part of the railroad system involving sitting in the cab at the front of a train moving from point A to point B is a very small part of the job. Most of the work happens at the yards, where trains are made up, cars are dropped off and switched, and all the maintenance happens.
graycat 4y ago
The article mentions PSR -- precision scheduled railroading -- or some such as at the core of all this. Okay, it's a scheduling problem. It's an optimization problem. It's possibly to a significant extent an optimization under uncertainty problem. Oh, and it's an optimization over time problem. Did my Ph.D. dissertation in one of those, not for trains but for airplanes. Oh, for math majors in the audience, yes, did use Fubini's theorem (the core of the proof that the work really was in a very general sense actually optimal) and measurable selection. Such problems can be challenging in practice for business operations, for the math, and for the computing. And, right, the problem is no doubt, oh, I mean, even quite simplified versions of the problem, in NP-complete or if don't like that fact then can be challenging to get even approximately optimal solutions. But, however look at the complexity of the problem, I'd Guess: Including a 7 day paid sick leave should be possible to include in the problem. That is, just because are attacking a challenging optimization problem, there is likely no fundamental or even very important practical reason can't also include as a constraint, feature, property, requirement, whatever, something like 7 days of paid sick leave. Besides, we're talking about scheduling workers to run freight trains, maybe 100 cars long, with several big Diesel-electric engines, across major parts of the US. Uh, just the Diesel oil costs what? And in comparison for that trip the workers cost what? I'd guess a small fraction of even just the Diesel oil. Then there is the capital cost and maintenance cost of all that equipment. E.g., the track has to be in really good condition or ... don't want even to imagine what the costs could be, i.e., the term train wreck is used broadly as a really big disaster. And just a little maintenance on one of those Diesel-electric engines costs, how many hours of worker pay? My nose smells more politics than business, applied math, computing, technology, etc.
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  Except PSR isn't a scheduling system. It's a system designed to fuck up the usability of the rails in the US by running gargantuan trains that the system can't possibly handle. It even manages to fuckup traffic & public transport & small towns here in Texas. The at-grade crossings are blocked so long you get backups that stretch for 1/2 a mile or more in small towns.
  - 4y ago
punyearthling 4y ago
If railroads are this critical to the US's infrastructure, maybe it shouldn't be privately owned
fabian2k 4y ago
I still find it hard to grasp that the concept of "sick days" even exists in the US. Especially since you get so few vacation days in the US as well. There is no equivalent here in Germany, if you're sick you're sick and you do get paid (long-term illnesses are handled differently, but that's almost an entirely separate topic). This is really a subject that should be regulated from the top, and not something everyone has to fight for over and over again.
epakai 4y ago
This is the same industry that pooh-poohed 2-person crew minimums. There is nothing that would convince them to look out for their workers, or actually be above board on safety considerations. https://www.railwayage.com/news/fra-issues-crew-size-nprm-aar-calls-it-politics-over-sound-safety-policy/ https://www.railwayage.com/news/fra-issues-crew-size-nprm-aa...
l72 4y ago
It is time for the government to step in and do more than force a contract agreement. They need to threaten the Railroad companies and side with America workers. Some suggestions: - Take back the railroads that the public built and maintained. Then charge commercial rail for the use of them. This is a huge issue since it currently is a major limitation of passenger rail in the US, and once again, having these be public could help spur the necessary improvements for passenger rail. - Breaking up the railroad monopolies. We've broken up companies before, so there is precedent to do it again. - Nationalize the railroad companies. This is highly unlikely it will ever happen in the US, but it should be discussed. It could become something similar to the post office.
- nradov 4y ago
  Rail transport should be treated the same as other cargo transportation modes like trucking, airlines, and ships. Government should own the tracks and stations. Private companies should own the vehicles, and pay a fee for using the tracks.
- Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
  Which politicians will do that? The Democrats are over blue collar labor, have been since the 1970s when the New Left captured the party, and the GOP establishment hates that part of their base. A great deal of Trump's otherwise inexplicable popularity is that he's a 1970s NYC Democrat just like Reagan in the 1980s was a self-described FDR Democrat and he doesn't hate these people. Doesn't care or do much for them, but this is a palpable difference from the GOPe.
kylecordes 4y ago
As I understand, the problem here is that any railroad that behaves reasonably here, will be punished by the markets, and the management that made the decision will likely be replaced. The solution, as others have pointed out, is that this should be a regulatory requirement rather than negotiated business-by-business. There are not really any "losers" in such a fix: The workers get a more appealing and reasonable benefit package and life. Managers keep highly paid managing jobs. The businesses keep making large profits, perhaps a tiny sliver less. The stock remains very valuable, whatever variance this causes would likely not even be noticed among the daily swings of the market. Consumers never even notice their new widgets cost pennies more because of a tiny change in freight rates, etc. Congress did not see what the winning play was, and instead perpetuated the bad situation.
- standardUser 4y ago
  "The businesses keep making large profits, perhaps a tiny sliver less." Absolutely unacceptable (to them). They will fight tooth and nail to prevent any federal action that could harm their bottom line. It's one of the most predictable plays in American politics.
  - kylecordes 4y ago
    I don’t think that’s necessarily the driver here though, from reading the linked article and others. Rather the dynamic is that these railroads have incredibly dispersed ownership, almost entirely by purely financial owners. Management has very little stake. If any of them operates at a slightly less margin than the others, activist investors will pop up and easily get support to replace the management. But if they all operated at slightly less margin, this dynamic would not occur; and the vast bulk of investors are not going to flee from an otherwise stable and long-term profitable asset class because it becomes a tiny (perhaps not even noticed) increment less lucrative. The vast bulk of investors are not going to march with (financial) pitchforks to Washington about this. Think of the alternative: that no stockholder in any business would ever tolerate companies offering reasonable sick day policies. That is obviously not true; in most industries, at most companies, there is some kind of sick policy. So we should look at what is unique about this industry for the cause.
skizm 4y ago
In the very unlikely event that the US (or any country in a similar situation) were to nationalize the railroads, what would happen to the labor unions and workers' ability to collectively bargain? If the railway were nationalized and the government said "PSR is here to stay, no sick days, it is illegal to strike" or something like that, would this be any different than exactly what is happening now? Personally, I think nationalization is good for many reasons, but just wondering how government workers collectively bargain, if at all. How does this work with USPS for example?
- zdragnar 4y ago
  Federal government employees already form unions. If the government took ownership of the railroads, nothing would change in that regard.
- Georgelemental 4y ago
  In general public-sector unions are more powerful than private sector ones. For example in France where railroads are nationalized, the rail worker unions are ridiculously powerful and the workers have extremely good salaries and benefits—exactly the opposite situation as in the US
p0pcult 4y ago
When you design systems so "efficiently" that there is no slack, you increase their working efficiency, but also their fragility. We (in America) saw the costs of this "just in time" slackless logistics in the economic reboot as we rebounded from the first waves of COVID: logjams at the ports. Good system design allows for the absorption of interstitial disruptions. There's a reason tall buildings sway in the wind; if they were so rigid that they didn't sway, they'd risk breaking when there is strong wind.
- ChrisRR 4y ago
  I think covid and the silicon shortage has shown us how JIT manufacturing completely falls apart if there's a delay in just one of your components.
  - p0pcult 4y ago
    When I was in grad school in an analytics program a couple decades ago, JIT was all of the rage among the Ops Management professors. It was gratifying to see one of them actually apologize on social media for the problems wrought in this era by the dissemination of this kind of thinking.
  - EFreethought 4y ago
    I thought everybody learned that JIT is bad after 9/11. It seems like the More Bad Advice crowd wants to keep living in a fantasy world.
    - harvey9 4y ago
      The management consultant comes in, removes slack (increases fragility) and leaves with their fee before shtf.
    - p0pcult 4y ago
      Interesting; I had not heard that. What specifically about 9/11 do you allege led to the perception that JIT is bad? Looking back, I don't see an obvious connection to either logistics or manufacturing, but I am definitely curious.
fredgrott 4y ago
Something not highlighted: Trains got longer than the yards they are assembled in and that results in 10-12 extra hours. Now multiply that times the number of trains per Railroad. Result is the real reason why paid leave was not given. Not as a logic way to solve a problem but as a way to avoid solving the problem that would work as workers have the least amount of power in the economic equation.
WalterBright 4y ago
A business doesn't really care about an employee's takehome pay. It cares about the total cost of employing the person. That cost is the employee's salary plus benefits plus payroll taxes. This means that if benefits are increased, one way or another, that comes out of the employee's paycheck. Nothing comes for free. The so-called "employer's contribution" to Social Security is actually paid by the employee in the form of a reduced paycheck. The same for the "employer's paid sick leave benefit".
- cool_dude85 4y ago
  >This means that if benefits are increased, one way or another, that comes out of the employee's paycheck. Or maybe it comes out of stock buybacks.
- bumby 4y ago
  The article obliquely addresses this. They mention that the company could agree to a 24% pay raise (over time) because using they had already reduced employment by 30%. It's still a net positive. What they can't do is reduce staffing further if they're already operating with a skeleton crew, which is what additional time off would do. This appears to be one of those cases where efficiency and resilience in a system are at odds.
rizoma_dev 4y ago
I hope people get how big of a deal is that the government decided to side so blatantly against the workers
bannedbybros 4y ago
pbronez 4y ago
Just make sick days nationally mandatory. Set a baseline of human decency. You want to run a super-optimized rail schedule? Go for it - but humane working conditions are a constraint you MUST satisfy.
black_13 4y ago
MR4D 4y ago
This is a hack job of an article. From the first paragraph, “America’s latter-day robber barons can’t comprehend that workers sometimes get sick. ”. Really? So every person with the S&P 500 in their retirement account is a robber baron? And that was just the first paragraph. The use of similar terms were repeated further in the article. Read a better article - this one isn’t worth the electrons.
bichiliad 4y ago
If you're curious about learning more about PSR as it was intended to be implemented, I can't recommend Justin Roczniak's writing (and podcasting) around it. He wrote essentially the same article for the New York Times not too long ago[0], and his longer-form podcast discussion is even better if you have the time[1]. In his telling (and I'm paraphrasing heavily here), PSR — as it was originally designed — was meant to get everything on precise scheduling (surprise), thereby allowing you to better predict when and where you'd need workers well in advance. That would let you better optimize not just your trains but also your workforce. If you have a schedule, you can make optimizations that keep train cars from sitting around, and your workers reap the benefits of a fixed schedule (time off, less on-call time, things like that). In practice, getting things to run on a schedule often meant capital costs that a of these companies balked at, like upgrades to rail yards and track maintenance to keep things running on schedule. The only real part of P.S.R. that ended up getting adopted, as this article points out, is the optimization part. But without the capital investments, you don't get a precise schedule, nor do you get any of its implied benefits. Optimizations ended up meaning things like pulling more cars with fewer trains. I don't think the article mentions this in explicit terms, but these longer trains are often a few miles long. This length means the trains don't fit in rail yards, nor do they fit in the sidings that allow Amtrak trains to pass them (which in turn keeps Amtrak trains from running on time). Since trains don't fit in the yards, they have to leave as soon as possible, and since there's no fixed scheduling, "as soon as possible" ends up meaning any time at all with little notice, meaning engineers are on call almost all the time. Plus, when you have a train that's almost 3 miles long, they're more likely to derail on curves, and staff have to walk literal miles to fix problems along the train. There's a whole lot more to this than I can repeat off-hand on a Friday afternoon, but this issue isn't going to go away. The rail industry is untenable, and given how scared everyone is of a rail strike, it also isn't going away any time soon. [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/opinion/business-economics/freight-train-mismanagement.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/opinion/business-economic... [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69A_UCdikE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69A_UCdikE8

226 points by whacim 4y ago

pepy 4y ago

https://archive.ph/dIOPw https://archive.ph/dIOPw

Rail companies are getting the blame here, but the real problem is that paid leave isn't a statutory employment right protected by law. Here in the UK full time employees are entitled to 28 day paid annual leave, although I have work for companies which offer more, while pay is seperate.

kvandy 4y ago
I live on the east coast of the US and have only been to the UK twice, but I was blown away at the efficiency and relative cleanliness of the London and surrounding area rail systems.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  Lots of things change when your country is an island the size of Mississippi.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    It gets more expensive to import the materials to make railways?
forgetfreeman 4y ago
And yet you'd have a really tough time finding a white collar gig where paid leave wasn't a bog-standard part of the package. So nah, rail companies are getting caught out because they are absolutely fucking around with this.
- smileysteve 4y ago
  Glares in "startup" "untracked pto" where it's white collar and paid leave isn't guaranteed but for the power of the worker.
  - coffeebeqn 4y ago
    I take at least a month of unlimited. Many people just assume the world will end if they take a week off
  - forgetfreeman 4y ago
    laughs in SV dweebs chasing IPO payouts are a rounding error compared to the rest of the white collar environment Anyone silly enough to sign up for that treadmill is welcome to whatever comes their way, good or bad.
- willyt 4y ago
  Yes but now they can't change because the first one to do this becomes uncompetitive, the only way to introduce this in a fair way that otherwise maintains market competition is to introduce a rule that applies to all the companies in the market that says you must offer paid sick leave. Edit: A more extreme example; there is a rule that says airlines mustn't make pilots work more than a certain number of hours without a rest period. This rule applies to all airlines. This rule was introduced to reduce the number of planes crashed by tired pilots.
  - LadyCailin 4y ago
    Apparently according to this article, it’s a monopoly, so no, they would t be less competitive.
  - forgetfreeman 4y ago
    Do they become uncompetitive or do they suddenly attract all the top talent in their industry because of their new compensation offerings?
  - FateOfNations 4y ago
bestcoder69 4y ago
Another possible causal factor is just that labor is weak in the US, and thus is unable to win sick days from their employers AND is unable to convince congress to pass universal sick days either. If that’s the case (I’m biased to say yes) these rail workers really need to strike. Voting for blues obviously isn’t cutting it.
- mjbeswick 4y ago
  It's seem like such a far reaching issue that I'm surprised it hasn't triggered a general strike.
  - sillystuff 4y ago
    A general strike is illegal in the United States. The US government, under the control of wealthy capitalists, has ensured that capital's interests are protected in law to the detriment of the workers who actually create value. > Among the practices prohibited by the Taft–Hartley act are jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. The amendments also allowed states to enact right-to-work laws banning union shops. Labor in the US is weak by design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act
    - notch656a 4y ago
      I would support eliminating both the anti-general strike and anti-collusion laws. It seems unfair to ban collusion by capital but not by labor.
    - dpkirchner 4y ago
      > A general strike is illegal in the United States. What're they going to do, imprison the masses? Illegal doesn't mean much without realistic consequences.
      - 4y ago
stephen_g 4y ago
Yeah, coming from a country with strong labour laws, it's mind boggling that this is legal in the US. I think the realist view has to be that the market ain't ever going to fix it, companies are always going to try to get away with as much as they can, and the people have to force the Government to bring in minimum standards.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  There's no market for natural monopolies.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  The market is perfectly capable of fixing the problem. The employees should quit, strike, or slowdown work until their employers give them what they want.
  - retrac 4y ago
    > should quit, strike, or slowdown work I'm not sure how it goes down in the USA, but here in Canada, federal transport workers are de facto prohibited from striking or other job action. Every time they go on strike, the next day the government passes legislation declaring the strike illegal because they are essential workers and a disruption poses a threat to infrastructure of national interest, and a new binding labour contract is imposed on the workers. The only legal option is to quit. (But you can't even encourage your coworkers to quit, too. That amounts to illegal labour agitation.) Air traffic control, port workers, railway workers, etc. get this treatment. They have no right to strike, in practice. Edit: a quick Google search suggests it's same situation in the USA: > The House has passed a resolution 290-137 that would force unions to accept a tentative agreement reached earlier this year between railroad managers and their workers and make an imminent strike illegal. https://www.npr.org/2022/11/30/1139876084/congress-house-railroad-strike-bill https://www.npr.org/2022/11/30/1139876084/congress-house-rai...
    - ddingus 4y ago
      "illegal" Given the level of corruption we live with today, that term packs an increasingly weak punch as labor continues to see completely unacceptable work arrangements. What will eventually happen is they will strike anyway. It plays out in courts and a lot of people get harmed. That same corruption will be the source of blame placed on labor. It will eventually be on all of us to reject that proposition, stand up for these people and insist on reasonable and prudent labor arrangements. Yes, this means shit costs a bit more. So what? The clowns abusing their labor could always give a little margin back too. Think they will? Nope. Not willingly. Not one cent.
Workaccount2 4y ago
The rail workers have 4? 5? weeks of paid leave already. The issue at hand is "sick days" i.e. days off on short or no notice.
- tomrod 4y ago
  The right systems term for this is system slack. There isn't enough system slack built into the PSR models to account for real life needs.
- thatfrenchguy 4y ago
  Yes, which are clearly important ones: you don’t want someone with an infectious disease to come to work because otherwise they couldn’t pay their mortgage.
- orwin 4y ago
  They don't have weekends. They have 90 days off, while the average worker have 104, without paid leave.
ransom1538 4y ago
For context: UK software developers are paid 50% less than US developers. I would rather keep my money.
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  Software developers also get all those benefits. Whenever people talk about how terrible working in the US is- almost none of that applies to software. You get plenty of time off, sick days are a non issue, work remote if you don’t feel like going in, health care insurance is free/cheap and good, etc
  - notch656a 4y ago
    What? I had to work for a decade until I had anything close to the benefits offered by default in EU or UK, and even then I had to take a lower paying position to work for a company that offered decent work/life balance. Even still, I think I had 2 days off when my child was born before I ran out of paid "sick" days and had to go to work.

stuff4ben 4y ago

America needs to mimic Europe when it comes to mandatory vacation. Make it subsidized for small businesses. Minimum of 5 days would be a huge start even if it pales significantly in comparison to most of Europe. A more worker friendly nation would probably make us more productive in the long-term.

WesolyKubeczek 4y ago

“In order to get more milk off a cow with less food, you should feed it less and milk it more.”

chiefalchemist 4y ago

Given what we we've went though with Covid (i.e., "if you're the least bit sick, stay home...") this makes zero sense. Such double standards don't do well to mend confidence. That said, I won't be surprised if there are sick outs in the coming weeks. This negotiation might be over for now, but it's not over for good.

jccalhoun 4y ago
I heard a report on npr where the workers claimed they were supposed to come to work all throughout the pandemic because they were essential workers and of course they didn't have sick days.
cool_dude85 4y ago
Can't do a sick out if you don't have sick leave. I'm holding out hope for a wildcat strike the way this went down. Remember, union negotiators sent this sellout contract for a membership vote, and now it's being imposed by the party that at least pays lip service to labor. People are going to be pissed. Teachers won some solid victories over the past few years doing wildcat strikes against top brass' wishes, and these guys genuinely have the whole economy by the throat.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  Can't? Nah. It might be a high bar, but it's not impossible to jump over it. I suspect there's enough disgust that one or three days here or there would be worth it to enough of those union members. Also, don't discount other unions - that were able to negotiate sick pay - joining forces. They'll recognize this is not a precedent that favors them and won't wait to push back (if they're wise). It's also going to be interesting how this plays out during the next election cycle.
ThunderSizzle 4y ago
Society (and the authorities/governments) were completely inconsistent with it. I still see people who freak out over COVID but don't care about any other contagion. People still talk about COVID testing as if it is a "Are You Contagious?" testing. Even medical facilities keep pushing COVID testing even though it doesn't change the diagnosis, treatment, or outcome; even if you test negative for COVID, you could (1) still have COVID, or (2) still have another contagious disease. If you test positive, you could (1) have COVID, (2) have something else similar enough to COVID, or (3) be a false positive. It's entirely inconsistent and useless. If your sick and you might be contagious, stay home. If your not sick (or sick but not contagious), then you do you.

over_bridge 4y ago

It's hugely in the public interest to not have sick rail workers infecting their passengers

bell-cot 4y ago
That applies to freight railroads how? Notice the names of the railroads involved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_labor_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_la...
- tecleandor 4y ago
  Well, this sounds crazy, at least looking from Europe: In February 2022, BNSF Railway implemented a points attendance system named "Hi Viz" that a union president called, "the worst and most egregious attendance policy ever adopted by any rail carrier." In the system, each worker starts with 30 points and loses points for taking a day off. Workers can accrue 4 points by being on-call for 14 straight days, but any time off, even for illness or a family emergency, resets the clock. Unions representing about 17,000 workers threatened to strike over the points system, but BNSF Railway sued and won a restraining order to prevent the unions from striking.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    It doesn't say how many points are lost for taking a day.
  - FranchuFranchu 4y ago
    Here in Argentina, the right to strike is granted by our constitution. A restraining order preventing unions from striking would be seen like a restraining order preventing voters from voting.
    - thesuitonym 4y ago
      The right to strike is granted in the US as well, however laws mean nothing to the oligarchs.

GoToRO 4y ago

Because they can get away with it. That's it. It's a power struggle.

voisin 4y ago

Companies want employees rather than contractors in the sense that they want to have a locked in wage rather than negotiate new contract rates for each contract, but companies want contractors rather than employees because employees get benefits in exchange for their relatively slower growing incomes. Here, we see the tug of war and companies trying to have it both ways.

tyingq 4y ago
Contractors can also be laid off without any fuss with things like the WARN act.
- paleotrope 4y ago
  I think most companies know how to get around WARN act or WARN act-like state rules pretty easily now. It's toothless imo.
treis 4y ago
This seems like a place for a union to do something actually economically useful. Take the burden of dealing with malingers and fakers while providing some rostering flexibility for sick workers.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Unions already do something economically useful - increase wages. How would you have a consumer economy if no one had any disposable income?
  - treis 4y ago
    That's shifting where the pie goes. It's not making more pie.
    - nasmorn 4y ago
      It absolutely is. Workers getting paid more actually spend that money. If you pay more dividends to the Saudi wealth fund or even a local billionaire the economy doesn’t grow as much of that.

coliveira 4y ago

The "reason" is just to make more profits. All industries can adjust to paid leave, certainly railroads can make it too. It is important to remember that the railroad industry was THE original big money monopoly that made its money exploiting workers. It's just continuing its tradition in the hands of Warren Buffet and similar owners.

shapefrog 4y ago

Scheduling seems to be the most reasonable (non greed) defence. Surely now we have the tools to schedule and manage staffing in what is actually a quite complex set of constraints, with temporal and geographic inputs. Can probably also optimise things such that shifts and/or journeys start and end closer to home for workers, less nights on road more overtime / less overtime when people want it etc.

mynameishere 4y ago

Sickness is kind of a red herring in the discussion. Everyone uses sick days as surprise vacations and that is more disruptive for railroads than, say, my desk job.

jxdxbx 4y ago
Who cares? That's life. Railraods need to deal with human nature like every other industry.
jccalhoun 4y ago
If a business depends on no one ever taking a day off without warning maybe that business shucks.
cr1895 4y ago
I like how it’s done in the Netherlands. There are vacation days (guaranteed by law!). And then there is sick leave, and there is no fixed number of days. They’re totally separate. If you’re sick, you’re sick - if you’re sick long term it’s covered by insurance. If you’re sick on holiday you even can get your vacation days back. It’s so gross to me how this is handled in America. Certainly there are flaws in the Dutch approach, but it’s inhumane and precarious for so many people in America. Makes me never want to return to life in the US.
thesuitonym 4y ago
People who have enough vacation days don't use sick days that way.

cainxinth 4y ago

> ”The answer, in short, is “P.S.R.” — or precision-scheduled railroading. P.S.R. is an operational strategy that aims to minimize the ratio between railroads’ operating costs and their revenues through various cost-cutting and (ostensibly) efficiency-increasing measures. The basic idea is to transport more freight using fewer workers and railcars.” That’s a long-winded way of saying: ‘We’d rather make more money than care about the health of our employees.’

mikewarot 4y ago
My understanding of the FIRST big problem with PSR is that it creates trains longer than the system is designed to handle, thus all the sidings that used to allow trains to pass in single tracked areas are unavailable, which increases fragility of the system in general. This makes precision scheduling impossible... what this really is, is let's make all the workers wait (for free!) while we figure out how we can finally get the freight in monstrously long trains moving through a system that wasn't designed for it. The SECOND problem is that slashing the labor pool, and thus reducing the labor cost at the expense of reliability and system performance, appears to be the actual goal of PSR. I stand with the workers, no essential worker should be forced to work "on-call". Especially not people so important to safety and National Security.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I don't really have a problem with "on-call" workers (after all, everyone on a ship is perpetually "on-call" during the tour) but it needs to be compensated and handled correctly.
  - coffeebeqn 4y ago
    On-call is fine if you get paid for the on-call hours and you have agreed to them in your contract. Just making people work for 24h a day for free is unacceptable. Oh it’s not work you’re just waiting to get pages at a minutes notice - yeah that’s work
- lazide 4y ago

rowls66 4y ago

This problem does not seem unique to railroads. Any business that depends on human labor to deliver a service would have this problem. Airlines, restaurants, theatre companies. The way to deal with this is to have excess labor available (slack in the system). Are railroad profit margins so small that paying for excess labor will bankrupt them? Maybe labor in the railroad industry is so highly regulated that labor flexibility very expensive to maintain. Railroad pensions are the only private pensions that I know of that are specifically called out in IRS tax forms. That has always seemed odd to me, and is probably some indication of how tightly regulated labor in the railroad business is.

altairprime 4y ago
No; railroad profit margins at unhealthy labor levels are so high that trying to pay for healthy levels of labor (i.e. staffing enough to offer sick leave) will lead to hostile takeovers by investors who want higher profit margins rather than healthy labor. > A decade ago, the activist investor Bill Ackman won a proxy battle at Canadian Pacific and proceeded to replace its management with a team led by Hunter Harrison, the railway executive who’d pioneered P.S.R. After imposing the gospel of “more with less” at Canadian Pacific, Harrison left to spread the good news to the freight giant CSX. At each firm, P.S.R. succeeded at generating higher returns. Pretty soon, major investors in other railroads started calling on their firms to imitate Harrison’s methods. Testifying to the government’s Surface Transportation Board about freight rail’s performance last spring, industry analyst Rick Paterson said, “Lurking in the background is the constant threat of shareholder activism if any of the railroads’ operating ratios become outliers on the high side.” It could be considered a key defect of American railroads that they are operated as for-profit corporations with public stock listings and shareholders. In such a scenario, so long as profits can be raised, they must be — or else hostile takeovers will be led to do so regardless. America’s government is poorly equipped to combat this with the usual hands-off approaches. They would need to either pass laws guaranteeing sick days, nationalize rail services to protect against hostile takeovers, regulate that rail networks must be operated by (for example) “B Corps”, or other similar steps taken that interfere with corporate sovereignty. Such interference is typically avoided by modern American labor politics, and so here we are.

mauvehaus 4y ago

Fuck the shareholders. Strike. Yes, I am absolutely willing to pay more in the short term for things so that people are treated with a little basic human decency. Moreover, I'm more than happy to pay a little more for things in the long term to ensure that there's enough slack in the system to absorb the shocks that periodically come around. We've just spent almost three years slowly killing everyone in healthcare because every "inefficiency" in the system has been trimmed to the bone. We've been asking people to shoulder crushing loads to make up for the lack of what is normally excess capacity. We shouldn't need a reminder that all that inefficiency is what adds resilience to the system so soon. Airlines claim to have learned this. They say they're reducing schedules to more realistically match their ability to absorb hiccups during the holiday travel season. Time will tell, but it seems nobody wants a repeat of last year. If you make flying awful enough, evidently people will find ways to not do it. Maybe part of the solution is to treat other industries like the banking and finance industries. Banks get periodic stress tests; perhaps it's time to do the same for all of the other systems that we rely on holding together but don't have to think about until they're falling apart under load.

bestcoder69 4y ago
Agreed on the strike. Hearing they have 0 sick days (plus penalties for missing) was unbelievable to me. Strike and make it so the rail company shareholders have to live with completely fucking the US economy over their profit margins. And if they do, we all have a duty to point the finger at them.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  FYI, many, many millions of people in America that work low paying jobs have zero paid sick days (or paid time off in general). As evidenced by the fact that there is no federal law about it, and only a handful of states required a small number of paid sick days.
  - bestcoder69 4y ago
    Very aware of that (I’m American), so I should have mentioned that it’s surprising to me given their critical & central role in keeping our whole-ass system functioning. ie even these workers get 0.

bestcoder69 4y ago

Seems like the shareholders FTA aren’t exactly pulling their weight. Why do we need them in the mix, exactly? Do other countries get by without their fingers in the pie?

steanne 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duffy%27s_Cut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duffy%27s_Cut

georgeplusplus 4y ago

From what I gathered from the article the freight industry labor force is hyper optimized through PSR. So any time off creates major disruptions to the service and scheduling. There are also monopolistic forces driving control of certain tracks, routes, and stations that make deviating from this system hard. I would think breaking the rail industries monopoly would be a priority to giving the laborers what they want.

gz5 4y ago

>Four of those companies collectively control more than 83 percent of the freight market. And the vast majority of train stations in the U.S. are served by exactly one railroad. Monopoly behaving like a monopoly. The only real power the employees have in this situation is to leave, especially when the government's interests are also not aligned with employee interests. Numbers tell us there are 10M open jobs in the US. Obviously leaving the devil you know for the devil you don't is not an easy decision, but I wonder how possible it even is? Are the rail employees in a position in which those 10M open jobs are not viable alternatives for them and how 'real' is the 10M number?

i_am_proteus 4y ago
Maybe they don't want to give up good pay at the rail road to make minimum moolah flipping ham burgers at Mac Donald's.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I doubt that's the only option.
- datavirtue 4y ago
  These people are ultra-reliable, proven workers with a lot of skills. They could move to construction for similar or better pay. You don't make any serious coin with the railroad unless you are working overtime. They all work their lives away.
  - i_am_proteus 4y ago
    Reliability, proof, and skills aren't of much import if nobody's hiring for the particular version of those things that you have. This is exactly how you get certain sectors of labor getting rough treatment from the Establishment even though there's a national net labor shortage.
datavirtue 4y ago
They could all move to construction with minimal, if any, training and be happier for it. People outside of tech don't change jobs very often and are very weary of doing so. Changing jobs is a skill and experience they do not have. I would love to work for the same company for thirty years...just not feasible. My cousin is a tree guy who runs a crew. He has been with the company more than twenty years and just now started getting a fair cut. They didn't have a choice but to cave to his demands (which were quite modest) because they simply can't run their business without him. They also promised something in the deal that never came through (a $300k piece of equipment to make his job easier). I had been screaming at him for years that they had no viable business without him and that he should be getting a bigger cut. He just didn't have the business sense to believe it or leverage his power. He got fed up and had a much better offer from a startup and handed in his resignation. They panicked and started pitching better deals to him. Which he took.

danaris 4y ago

This "PSR" is just another name for lean staffing, which is one of the biggest cancers on our society right now. Aggressively cutting staffing levels to the bare minimum required to operate leads very directly to worse service, more disruptions, and more sick and injured workers. It leads less directly to lower wages, via higher unemployment, a catastrophic loss of institutional memory, as there's rarely anyone in your position when you're hired—you're just expected to figure it all out once you get there, rather than have anyone who can train you. Lean staffing is devastating the middle and working class, and it needs to die a thousand deaths.

KingOfCoders 4y ago

Stories from the US always sound like feudalism stories from long times past.

cratermoon 4y ago
I took a cross-country round trip on Amtrak once, because I had the time and I wanted to try it out. The entire time I was on the train felt like a time warp back to the 50s/60s. Even the food in the dining car was like something out of a Betty Crocker cookbook. Now this wasn't terrible, mind you, because I did get to disconnect and enjoy some quiet time in my private room. But it was obvious the whole thing was still run like it had been for decades.
Kreutzer 4y ago
I sincerely wish railway workers wildcat the economy into the ground.
over_bridge 4y ago
Its shocking to see the overall attitude to workers rights in the US. Profits over people, always? There's always some vocal sociopaths, I mean libertarians who won the career lottery coming out to defend this behavior on here too. Sad it's so internalised that workers should suffer for their employer.

ragingrobot 4y ago

Hey, something maybe for one here I can shed some light on, for those who want a little more than the article gives. ;) I am a supervisor on a commuter rail, and in this respect they operate in a similar fashion. Like any other business, profits are key. Someone figures out staffing. Pretty much cut and dry. For a line from terminal A to B, there is one train per hour in each direction, 48 trains in a day. We need for example a supervisor at each end, and one engineer and conductor per train. So, say that gives us 48 train crews, and 6 supervisors per day. So, we hire 6 supervisors, and 51 train crews - in case someone calls out sick. What happens if someone calls out sick? A supervisor? We keep costs down there by requiring the on duty supervisor to stay an additional shift. A crew member? We have that extra crew. If we have too many people call out sick, we force on duty crews to stay on overtime. We don't want to be doing that, now do we? That affects the bottom line. If no crew is available at all, then the train doesn't run. This is also bad, as it upsets the customer. Running with a "skeleton crew" ensures we are not spending more on labor than we have to. This is because in some markets, paying fewer workers overtime still comes in at less than having more people to whom benefits are paid. So, the employees are intimidated into coming to work every day. What the freight railroads are doing here is forcing the employees to use their vacation pay when they are sick to discourage them from calling out sick at all, in effect penalizing them for calling out sick. That vacation you had planned with the family? Either lose a day (which may require you to cancel altogether), or come to work sick. If they have paid sick leave, they'd use it when sick rather than showing up to work. My agency uses a different tactic, just as effective in the employer's view, but no less exploitative of the employee. When an employee calls out sick, a Special Inspector may be sent to their home to check if they are really sick and at home. If the employee doesn't answer the door (They're sleeping and don't hear the door? Doesn't matter), they're charged with falsely calling out sick, and face suspension or termination. Edit: This industry can be very time sensitive. It may not seem to you a big deal if say a train is late, but cargo is critical or a passenger gets to work late, that is not a good thing. The shipper may take some action if it happens enough. That passenger may start driving.

JohnFen 4y ago
Wow. That's even worse.

JohnFen 4y ago

So the reason that railroads refuse to give workers paid leave turns out to be that they're sociopathic bastards who value profit over lives. What a surprise.

Eumenes 4y ago

We need self driving trains ASAP

cratermoon 4y ago
FYI the part of the railroad system involving sitting in the cab at the front of a train moving from point A to point B is a very small part of the job. Most of the work happens at the yards, where trains are made up, cars are dropped off and switched, and all the maintenance happens.

graycat 4y ago

The article mentions PSR -- precision scheduled railroading -- or some such as at the core of all this. Okay, it's a scheduling problem. It's an optimization problem. It's possibly to a significant extent an optimization under uncertainty problem. Oh, and it's an optimization over time problem. Did my Ph.D. dissertation in one of those, not for trains but for airplanes. Oh, for math majors in the audience, yes, did use Fubini's theorem (the core of the proof that the work really was in a very general sense actually optimal) and measurable selection. Such problems can be challenging in practice for business operations, for the math, and for the computing. And, right, the problem is no doubt, oh, I mean, even quite simplified versions of the problem, in NP-complete or if don't like that fact then can be challenging to get even approximately optimal solutions. But, however look at the complexity of the problem, I'd Guess: Including a 7 day paid sick leave should be possible to include in the problem. That is, just because are attacking a challenging optimization problem, there is likely no fundamental or even very important practical reason can't also include as a constraint, feature, property, requirement, whatever, something like 7 days of paid sick leave. Besides, we're talking about scheduling workers to run freight trains, maybe 100 cars long, with several big Diesel-electric engines, across major parts of the US. Uh, just the Diesel oil costs what? And in comparison for that trip the workers cost what? I'd guess a small fraction of even just the Diesel oil. Then there is the capital cost and maintenance cost of all that equipment. E.g., the track has to be in really good condition or ... don't want even to imagine what the costs could be, i.e., the term train wreck is used broadly as a really big disaster. And just a little maintenance on one of those Diesel-electric engines costs, how many hours of worker pay? My nose smells more politics than business, applied math, computing, technology, etc.

sidewndr46 4y ago
Except PSR isn't a scheduling system. It's a system designed to fuck up the usability of the rails in the US by running gargantuan trains that the system can't possibly handle. It even manages to fuckup traffic & public transport & small towns here in Texas. The at-grade crossings are blocked so long you get backups that stretch for 1/2 a mile or more in small towns.
- 4y ago

punyearthling 4y ago

If railroads are this critical to the US's infrastructure, maybe it shouldn't be privately owned

fabian2k 4y ago

I still find it hard to grasp that the concept of "sick days" even exists in the US. Especially since you get so few vacation days in the US as well. There is no equivalent here in Germany, if you're sick you're sick and you do get paid (long-term illnesses are handled differently, but that's almost an entirely separate topic). This is really a subject that should be regulated from the top, and not something everyone has to fight for over and over again.

epakai 4y ago

This is the same industry that pooh-poohed 2-person crew minimums. There is nothing that would convince them to look out for their workers, or actually be above board on safety considerations. https://www.railwayage.com/news/fra-issues-crew-size-nprm-aar-calls-it-politics-over-sound-safety-policy/ https://www.railwayage.com/news/fra-issues-crew-size-nprm-aa...

l72 4y ago

It is time for the government to step in and do more than force a contract agreement. They need to threaten the Railroad companies and side with America workers. Some suggestions: - Take back the railroads that the public built and maintained. Then charge commercial rail for the use of them. This is a huge issue since it currently is a major limitation of passenger rail in the US, and once again, having these be public could help spur the necessary improvements for passenger rail. - Breaking up the railroad monopolies. We've broken up companies before, so there is precedent to do it again. - Nationalize the railroad companies. This is highly unlikely it will ever happen in the US, but it should be discussed. It could become something similar to the post office.

nradov 4y ago
Rail transport should be treated the same as other cargo transportation modes like trucking, airlines, and ships. Government should own the tracks and stations. Private companies should own the vehicles, and pay a fee for using the tracks.
Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
Which politicians will do that? The Democrats are over blue collar labor, have been since the 1970s when the New Left captured the party, and the GOP establishment hates that part of their base. A great deal of Trump's otherwise inexplicable popularity is that he's a 1970s NYC Democrat just like Reagan in the 1980s was a self-described FDR Democrat and he doesn't hate these people. Doesn't care or do much for them, but this is a palpable difference from the GOPe.

kylecordes 4y ago

As I understand, the problem here is that any railroad that behaves reasonably here, will be punished by the markets, and the management that made the decision will likely be replaced. The solution, as others have pointed out, is that this should be a regulatory requirement rather than negotiated business-by-business. There are not really any "losers" in such a fix: The workers get a more appealing and reasonable benefit package and life. Managers keep highly paid managing jobs. The businesses keep making large profits, perhaps a tiny sliver less. The stock remains very valuable, whatever variance this causes would likely not even be noticed among the daily swings of the market. Consumers never even notice their new widgets cost pennies more because of a tiny change in freight rates, etc. Congress did not see what the winning play was, and instead perpetuated the bad situation.

standardUser 4y ago
"The businesses keep making large profits, perhaps a tiny sliver less." Absolutely unacceptable (to them). They will fight tooth and nail to prevent any federal action that could harm their bottom line. It's one of the most predictable plays in American politics.
- kylecordes 4y ago
  I don’t think that’s necessarily the driver here though, from reading the linked article and others. Rather the dynamic is that these railroads have incredibly dispersed ownership, almost entirely by purely financial owners. Management has very little stake. If any of them operates at a slightly less margin than the others, activist investors will pop up and easily get support to replace the management. But if they all operated at slightly less margin, this dynamic would not occur; and the vast bulk of investors are not going to flee from an otherwise stable and long-term profitable asset class because it becomes a tiny (perhaps not even noticed) increment less lucrative. The vast bulk of investors are not going to march with (financial) pitchforks to Washington about this. Think of the alternative: that no stockholder in any business would ever tolerate companies offering reasonable sick day policies. That is obviously not true; in most industries, at most companies, there is some kind of sick policy. So we should look at what is unique about this industry for the cause.

skizm 4y ago

In the very unlikely event that the US (or any country in a similar situation) were to nationalize the railroads, what would happen to the labor unions and workers' ability to collectively bargain? If the railway were nationalized and the government said "PSR is here to stay, no sick days, it is illegal to strike" or something like that, would this be any different than exactly what is happening now? Personally, I think nationalization is good for many reasons, but just wondering how government workers collectively bargain, if at all. How does this work with USPS for example?

zdragnar 4y ago
Federal government employees already form unions. If the government took ownership of the railroads, nothing would change in that regard.
Georgelemental 4y ago
In general public-sector unions are more powerful than private sector ones. For example in France where railroads are nationalized, the rail worker unions are ridiculously powerful and the workers have extremely good salaries and benefits—exactly the opposite situation as in the US

p0pcult 4y ago

When you design systems so "efficiently" that there is no slack, you increase their working efficiency, but also their fragility. We (in America) saw the costs of this "just in time" slackless logistics in the economic reboot as we rebounded from the first waves of COVID: logjams at the ports. Good system design allows for the absorption of interstitial disruptions. There's a reason tall buildings sway in the wind; if they were so rigid that they didn't sway, they'd risk breaking when there is strong wind.

ChrisRR 4y ago
I think covid and the silicon shortage has shown us how JIT manufacturing completely falls apart if there's a delay in just one of your components.
- p0pcult 4y ago
  When I was in grad school in an analytics program a couple decades ago, JIT was all of the rage among the Ops Management professors. It was gratifying to see one of them actually apologize on social media for the problems wrought in this era by the dissemination of this kind of thinking.
- EFreethought 4y ago
  I thought everybody learned that JIT is bad after 9/11. It seems like the More Bad Advice crowd wants to keep living in a fantasy world.
  - harvey9 4y ago
    The management consultant comes in, removes slack (increases fragility) and leaves with their fee before shtf.
  - p0pcult 4y ago
    Interesting; I had not heard that. What specifically about 9/11 do you allege led to the perception that JIT is bad? Looking back, I don't see an obvious connection to either logistics or manufacturing, but I am definitely curious.

fredgrott 4y ago

Something not highlighted: Trains got longer than the yards they are assembled in and that results in 10-12 extra hours. Now multiply that times the number of trains per Railroad. Result is the real reason why paid leave was not given. Not as a logic way to solve a problem but as a way to avoid solving the problem that would work as workers have the least amount of power in the economic equation.

WalterBright 4y ago

A business doesn't really care about an employee's takehome pay. It cares about the total cost of employing the person. That cost is the employee's salary plus benefits plus payroll taxes. This means that if benefits are increased, one way or another, that comes out of the employee's paycheck. Nothing comes for free. The so-called "employer's contribution" to Social Security is actually paid by the employee in the form of a reduced paycheck. The same for the "employer's paid sick leave benefit".

cool_dude85 4y ago
>This means that if benefits are increased, one way or another, that comes out of the employee's paycheck. Or maybe it comes out of stock buybacks.
bumby 4y ago
The article obliquely addresses this. They mention that the company could agree to a 24% pay raise (over time) because using they had already reduced employment by 30%. It's still a net positive. What they can't do is reduce staffing further if they're already operating with a skeleton crew, which is what additional time off would do. This appears to be one of those cases where efficiency and resilience in a system are at odds.

rizoma_dev 4y ago

I hope people get how big of a deal is that the government decided to side so blatantly against the workers

bannedbybros 4y ago

pbronez 4y ago

Just make sick days nationally mandatory. Set a baseline of human decency. You want to run a super-optimized rail schedule? Go for it - but humane working conditions are a constraint you MUST satisfy.

black_13 4y ago

MR4D 4y ago

This is a hack job of an article. From the first paragraph, “America’s latter-day robber barons can’t comprehend that workers sometimes get sick. ”. Really? So every person with the S&P 500 in their retirement account is a robber baron? And that was just the first paragraph. The use of similar terms were repeated further in the article. Read a better article - this one isn’t worth the electrons.

bichiliad 4y ago

If you're curious about learning more about PSR as it was intended to be implemented, I can't recommend Justin Roczniak's writing (and podcasting) around it. He wrote essentially the same article for the New York Times not too long ago[0], and his longer-form podcast discussion is even better if you have the time[1]. In his telling (and I'm paraphrasing heavily here), PSR — as it was originally designed — was meant to get everything on precise scheduling (surprise), thereby allowing you to better predict when and where you'd need workers well in advance. That would let you better optimize not just your trains but also your workforce. If you have a schedule, you can make optimizations that keep train cars from sitting around, and your workers reap the benefits of a fixed schedule (time off, less on-call time, things like that). In practice, getting things to run on a schedule often meant capital costs that a of these companies balked at, like upgrades to rail yards and track maintenance to keep things running on schedule. The only real part of P.S.R. that ended up getting adopted, as this article points out, is the optimization part. But without the capital investments, you don't get a precise schedule, nor do you get any of its implied benefits. Optimizations ended up meaning things like pulling more cars with fewer trains. I don't think the article mentions this in explicit terms, but these longer trains are often a few miles long. This length means the trains don't fit in rail yards, nor do they fit in the sidings that allow Amtrak trains to pass them (which in turn keeps Amtrak trains from running on time). Since trains don't fit in the yards, they have to leave as soon as possible, and since there's no fixed scheduling, "as soon as possible" ends up meaning any time at all with little notice, meaning engineers are on call almost all the time. Plus, when you have a train that's almost 3 miles long, they're more likely to derail on curves, and staff have to walk literal miles to fix problems along the train. There's a whole lot more to this than I can repeat off-hand on a Friday afternoon, but this issue isn't going to go away. The rail industry is untenable, and given how scared everyone is of a rail strike, it also isn't going away any time soon. [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/opinion/business-economics/freight-train-mismanagement.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/opinion/business-economic... [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69A_UCdikE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69A_UCdikE8