> ”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.’
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.
Yup. Worse yet, it is doomed to fail — just like deferred maintenance.
Instead of single random days off to get healthcare taken care of, they'll have random worker unavailability of weeks, months, or forever [0]. But, it's postponed so their numbers this quarter look good, but the system is rotting.
Any forking idiot can make numbers look good for a while by rotting the underlying system. This seems to be the trained remit of MBAs. Outside of managing the already-earned profits in the accounts, MBAs really are toxic to the long-term health of any business and especially its workers.
[0]from the article:
>>Last June, one middle-aged union engineer postponed a doctor’s visit for work then died of a heart attack on the job weeks later. A conductor who spoke with the Times began feeling rundown last year but declined to see a doctor for fear of being disciplined for taking an unplanned day off. Instead, he waited months for the next doctor’s appointment that aligned with a scheduled day off. He then learned he’d been suffering from an infection that could have been treated with medication weeks earlier but would now require surgery.
Such a surface level explanation. The real answer of course is politics. The railroads know the government won't let them shut down for even one day, so there's no reason for them to negotiate in good faith. So they negotiate in bad faith. Why would they give into labor demands when labor can't strike and their customers being big businesses won't substitute away in the face of political controversy?
Every large company would rather make more money than spend more on labor. Railroads are in the unique position of having the government break their workers strikes.
> minimize the ratio between railroads’ operating costs and their revenues through various cost-cutting and (ostensibly) efficiency-increasing measures.
Maybe this is better than the old way, but I still don’t see it as optimal.
If their target is to profit 10 cents on every $1 in cost, does that mean they wouldn’t take a job that profits 9 cents off a $1 in cost?
As a shareholder, I just care about total profit. If a railroad grew its revenue 3x but halves it’s margin, I’d be as happy as can be, profits just went up 50%. But it’s PSR would look awful.
PSR is far more then that, but this author doesn't care to go into that since it detracts from his or her argument.
From wikipedia:
Precision railroading or precision scheduled railroading (PSR) is a concept in freight railroad operations pioneered by E. Hunter Harrison in 1993, and adopted by nearly every North American Class I railroad. It shifts the focus from older practices, such as unit trains, hub and spoke operations and individual car switching at hump yards, to emphasize point-to-point freight car movements on simplified routing networks. Under PSR, freight trains operate on fixed schedules, much like passenger trains, instead of being dispatched whenever a sufficient number of loaded cars are available. In the past, intermodal trains and general merchandise trains operated separately; under PSR they are combined as needed, typically with distributed power. Inventories of freight cars and locomotives are reduced and fewer workers are employed for a given level of traffic. The result is often substantial improvement in railroad operating ratios, and other financial and operating metrics; at the cost of less-reliable service, particularly to smaller customers, long-term capacity issues, increased derailments and other safety risks associated with longer trains, and crew fatigue.
PSR is the reason why half of the US rail fleet is in storage, they are no longer needed. this has significant positive and negative benefits. On the positive side, this includes the environmental impact, on the negative side, it makes US rail systems totally unusable for anyone other then the freight railroads.
Freight railroads (and rail in general) remains one of the most regulated business out there, but the rail companies are aggressively pushing back on new regulations that would address significant problems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
>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?
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.
Difficulty: railroad pensions are some of the only half-decent ones left in the whole country, and a lot of these workers will take a big hit on their retirement for leaving early (years of delay in when the pay-outs start, much smaller amount than if they'd finished at the RR, et c.)
This lock-in give the companies more leeway to abuse the workers if the unions are prevented from functioning to protect them. Which is what's happened thanks to Congress throwing the workers under the bus.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
[+] [-] cainxinth|3 years ago|reply
That’s a long-winded way of saying: ‘We’d rather make more money than care about the health of our employees.’
[+] [-] mikewarot|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] toss1|3 years ago|reply
Instead of single random days off to get healthcare taken care of, they'll have random worker unavailability of weeks, months, or forever [0]. But, it's postponed so their numbers this quarter look good, but the system is rotting.
Any forking idiot can make numbers look good for a while by rotting the underlying system. This seems to be the trained remit of MBAs. Outside of managing the already-earned profits in the accounts, MBAs really are toxic to the long-term health of any business and especially its workers.
[0]from the article: >>Last June, one middle-aged union engineer postponed a doctor’s visit for work then died of a heart attack on the job weeks later. A conductor who spoke with the Times began feeling rundown last year but declined to see a doctor for fear of being disciplined for taking an unplanned day off. Instead, he waited months for the next doctor’s appointment that aligned with a scheduled day off. He then learned he’d been suffering from an infection that could have been treated with medication weeks earlier but would now require surgery.
[+] [-] HDThoreaun|3 years ago|reply
Every large company would rather make more money than spend more on labor. Railroads are in the unique position of having the government break their workers strikes.
[+] [-] Scoundreller|3 years ago|reply
Maybe this is better than the old way, but I still don’t see it as optimal.
If their target is to profit 10 cents on every $1 in cost, does that mean they wouldn’t take a job that profits 9 cents off a $1 in cost?
As a shareholder, I just care about total profit. If a railroad grew its revenue 3x but halves it’s margin, I’d be as happy as can be, profits just went up 50%. But it’s PSR would look awful.
[+] [-] thatfrenchguy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NuSkooler|3 years ago|reply
I wanted to come here to say the same thing, so I'll quote you instead. Greed over all other things, how swell.
[+] [-] shinyamagami|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InTheArena|3 years ago|reply
From wikipedia:
Precision railroading or precision scheduled railroading (PSR) is a concept in freight railroad operations pioneered by E. Hunter Harrison in 1993, and adopted by nearly every North American Class I railroad. It shifts the focus from older practices, such as unit trains, hub and spoke operations and individual car switching at hump yards, to emphasize point-to-point freight car movements on simplified routing networks. Under PSR, freight trains operate on fixed schedules, much like passenger trains, instead of being dispatched whenever a sufficient number of loaded cars are available. In the past, intermodal trains and general merchandise trains operated separately; under PSR they are combined as needed, typically with distributed power. Inventories of freight cars and locomotives are reduced and fewer workers are employed for a given level of traffic. The result is often substantial improvement in railroad operating ratios, and other financial and operating metrics; at the cost of less-reliable service, particularly to smaller customers, long-term capacity issues, increased derailments and other safety risks associated with longer trains, and crew fatigue.
PSR is the reason why half of the US rail fleet is in storage, they are no longer needed. this has significant positive and negative benefits. On the positive side, this includes the environmental impact, on the negative side, it makes US rail systems totally unusable for anyone other then the freight railroads.
Freight railroads (and rail in general) remains one of the most regulated business out there, but the rail companies are aggressively pushing back on new regulations that would address significant problems.
[+] [-] mjbeswick|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephen_g|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bestcoder69|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgetfreeman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kvandy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ransom1538|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Workaccount2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p0pcult|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ragingrobot|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] voisin|3 years ago|reply
Here, we see the tug of war and companies trying to have it both ways.
[+] [-] treis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] datavirtue|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kylecordes|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gz5|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] datavirtue|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yamtaddle|3 years ago|reply
This lock-in give the companies more leeway to abuse the workers if the unions are prevented from functioning to protect them. Which is what's happened thanks to Congress throwing the workers under the bus.
[+] [-] i_am_proteus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mauvehaus|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] KingOfCoders|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cratermoon|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] over_bridge|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
Or maybe it comes out of stock buybacks.
[+] [-] bumby|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danaris|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] coliveira|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] georgeplusplus|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cool_dude85|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jccalhoun|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThunderSizzle|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] punyearthling|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l72|3 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] graycat|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GoToRO|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fabian2k|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bestcoder69|3 years ago|reply