Biden avoids rail strike but jeopardizes his union support

Alli said:
The problem is, the Republicans have proven again and again that they don’t care. And their base doesn’t care until it affects them directly.
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exactly trump was willing to let people die then benefit Biden if he supposed vaccinations. they could care less.
 
Rail workers have been getting overworked and shit upon since the days of Casey Jones. The whole industry simply needs to be seized and nationalized – imagine if the government controled the rails as a tightly-regulated GSE: the revenue could do a lot to offset the average American's tax load.
 
I think this issue is blown slightly out of proportion. Apparently the average union rail worker gets 3 weeks of paid vacation, 14 days of paid personal time off, and up to 28 weeks of short term disability that can kick in after 4 days w/70% pay. They also have 11 paid holidays or more days of personal leave depending on the job. If I’m not mistaken they also recently got an 24% retroactive wage increase.

Personal time off usually is understood to encompass sick days and problem is less about “paid sick time” but actually being able to use their available time off and without penalty.

I work for a hospital and I don’t really have designated “sick days”. All of the time off- vacation, sick days, personal days, etc are wrapped into one category of paid time off to be used as desired.

If it helps to have a “sick day” category, to prevent employers from penalizing employees, that’s fine, but to some degree this seems like an effort to get more paid time off than addressing the what I understand as the root problem. It should not be unreasonable for the employers to be prevented from penalizing employees for seeing their doctor and staying home one sick. Railroads seem like pretty dangerous places where mistakes can cause serious problems. You’d think these companies would want their staff on their a-game.

Rail companies have plenty of money. If they need to hire more people, that’s on them.

Mandate that employees cannot be punished for doctors appointments and legitimate sick leave. That seems reasonable to me. I would say the rail workers, like most unionized workers, have exceptionally good benefits. It’s fair for them to be upset they cannot be properly utilized.
 
AG_PhamD said:
I think this issue is blown slightly out of proportion. Apparently the average union rail worker gets 3 weeks of paid vacation, 14 days of paid personal time off, and up to 28 weeks of short term disability that can kick in after 4 days w/70% pay. They also have 11 paid holidays or more days of personal leave depending on the job. If I’m not mistaken they also recently got an 24% retroactive wage increase.

Personal time off usually is understood to encompass sick days and problem is less about “paid sick time” but actually being able to use their available time off and without penalty.

I work for a hospital and I don’t really have designated “sick days”. All of the time off- vacation, sick days, personal days, etc are wrapped into one category of paid time off to be used as desired.

If it helps to have a “sick day” category, to prevent employers from penalizing employees, that’s fine, but to some degree this seems like an effort to get more paid time off than addressing the what I understand as the root problem. It should not be unreasonable for the employers to be prevented from penalizing employees for seeing their doctor and staying home one sick. Railroads seem like pretty dangerous places where mistakes can cause serious problems. You’d think these companies would want their staff on their a-game.

Rail companies have plenty of money. If they need to hire more people, that’s on them.

Mandate that employees cannot be punished for doctors appointments and legitimate sick leave. That seems reasonable to me. I would say the rail workers, like most unionized workers, have exceptionally good benefits. It’s fair for them to be upset they cannot be properly utilized.
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Is this really the current situation? JFC man I should've read this in greater detail. Every company I've worked for over the last 10 years had everything categorized as Paid Time Off (PTO) which included sick days, personal, etc. and it was rarely more than 14 days. This was sold as they get no time off at all. :oops:

If this is indeed the case they're getting as much as I ever did in IT, I think I maxed out at 3 weeks after x amount of years at most. No way I could see justifying halting the economy during a recession to ask for more than that, you get why this had such wide bipartisan support.
 
AG_PhamD said:
Rail companies have plenty of money. If they need to hire more people, that’s on them.
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Yeah, well, they would rather not hire more people. Each employee comes with a certain amount of overhead: the fewer people you can use to get the job done, the lower your overhead. Just work the ones you have into the ground and only hire more to replace the ones that drop. Because, bottom line.
 
Chew Toy McCoy said:
And the Republicans torpedoing the economy over sick pay would affect them directly.
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The Rs' base would blame Biden, not union workers wanting to "get paid for not showing up to work."

When the Republicans bother to focus on policy they are about protecting anti-union "right to work" laws, decrying minimum wage increases as a dire threat to small businesses, and talking a good game about other perks for small business owners (as long as it sounds like a tax cut or a way to make a buck off small biz loans).

That does not translate to a desire to see people whose jobs are unionized getting paid to "not work." In fact Republican policymakers tend to think of stuff like paid sick leave as part and parcel of "union featherbedding" even if some of their base would disagree.

Chew Toy McCoy said:
Some people blame Biden. I wouldn’t even say a majority of the right believes that. A recent Fox poll showed that. I believe it was just barely over half…and that’s people who take Fox polls…and half the country isn’t Republican (or Democrat). People need to seriously flush the "half the country" narrative the media preaches down the toilet.

Again, make the point of what this is really about…billionaires refusing paid sick leave. It’s really not that complicated to understand or tell. Again, ask the owners why they are willing to torpedo the economy just so they don’t have to give their workers sick leave.

I can’t think of a more blatant example of Democrats being weak and not fighting for workers.
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The Democrats are actually pretty weak. The USA is polarized but not split right down the middle. We have become a center right country moving a bit further to the right over each of the past 40 years. I'd like to think 2022 was a turning point but that's not clear yet.

By that I mean It's not like Democrats won the midterm elections. We just didn't lose by the expected landslide in the House, and that was thanks largely not to pocketbook issues but to genuine alarm over the rise of the far right in this country.

So we got lucky. 2024 is still going to be brutal. The Dems have to defend 23 of the 33 seats up in the Senate. Add to that the fact that six or eight of the Dems haven't decided if they'll try for re-election. An open seat is doubly tough to keep from flipping. Add to that an aged President, a VP who is a woman, a person of color and already a frequent target of aspersions cast in "warmup mode" by the far right. Add to that the discontent of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party about failure to get more done on climate change mitigation, roll back deregulation, put money where legislation has passed but appropriations not so much...

To that Biden should have added insistence on paid sick leave for railroad union workers when most American workers today don't have sick leave either? I dunno. Biden is a pretty savvy politician. The key legislation that he passed is going to create a lot of jobs, good ones. The Dems will have a decent economy going for them in 2024, barring the Fed being stupid enough not to tone down the remaining rate hikes. And they need that economic advantage for sure. It's going to be a tough enough haul anyway in 2024.

The separate bill for paid sick leave for the railroad workers was political, yeah. It flashed a yellow light for the Rs in 2024 is what it did. The Rs didn't help push it over the finish line of 60 votes, and that will get served up in some D campaign ads. Whether it will help Dems, who knows. The Rs are so notorious for obstructionism that it hardly registers any more.

The Rs who did vote for it did it just to taunt the Ds for inability to get it done "despite their help" and also as a free pass in their own state for any of the voters working in unionized industries in those states. If McConnell's pre-vote head count had shown that actual support might be close, he would have deployed party line discipline to make damn sure there were not enough votes to clear 60.
 
Eric said:
Is this really the current situation? JFC man I should've read this in greater detail. Every company I've worked for over the last 10 years had everything categorized as Paid Time Off (PTO) which included sick days, personal, etc. and it was rarely more than 14 days. This was sold as they get no time off at all. :oops:

If this is indeed the case they're getting as much as I ever did in IT, I think I maxed out at 3 weeks after x amount of years at most. No way I could see justifying halting the economy during a recession to ask for more than that, you get why this had such wide bipartisan support.
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The "current situation" is far more complicated than that. It's mostly from an intentional shortfall of employees (as much as 30% fewer than six years ago, although freight shipping au contraire has boomed during that time) and the use of what the railroads call Precision Scheduled Railroading, which requires employees to schedule paid time off well in advance and otherwise penalizes them, eventually to point of firing them even if absence was a medical emergency.

Workers Say Railroads’ Efficiency Push Became Too Much (NYT, 9/15/22, paywall removed)


Unlike many workers, the conductors and engineers who operate trains don’t get weekends or other consistent days off.

Instead, said Mr. Pierce, the president of the locomotive engineers union, workers go to the bottom of a list of available crews when they return home from a trip that can last days. The fewer the workers, the shorter the list, and the less time it takes for them to be summoned into action again.

“It can go on indefinitely, till they interrupt the cycle by taking paid time off, which the companies routinely reject,” Mr. Pierce said.
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This year, for example, BNSF Railway introduced a new point system for some employees, according to a February memo obtained by The New York Times. Under the policy, workers were awarded 30 points to start with and would lose points — from two to 10 — for scheduling a day off for a variety of reasons, including a family emergency, sickness or fatigue. They lose even more points for being unavailable at the last minute.

When workers run out of points, they face escalating penalties, starting with a 10-day suspension, followed by a 20-day suspension and ending with possible firing. Workers can earn back points by being available for two weeks straight.
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So I dunno about you, but that's not how my use of whatever built-in paid time off I had on my jobs got managed.
 
And the bottom line, from the same 9/15/22 NYT piece that was cited above

While the labor agreement announced on Thursday may avert a strike, it is unlikely to resolve the deeper issues that have put unions and rail carriers on a collision course. Even if carriers wanted to turn back the clock on efforts to increase efficiency, they would have shareholders to answer to.

After Bill Ackman, the activist investor, won a proxy battle over the freight carrier Canadian Pacific a decade ago, the company hired Hunter Harrison, who pioneered P.S.R., as its chief executive. Mr. Harrison imposed the system there and then at CSX after joining that company in 2017, prompting investors to pressure other carriers to follow suit to eke out similar efficiencies.

“Lurking in the background is the constant threat of shareholder activism if any of the railroads’ operating ratios become outliers on the high side,” Mr. Paterson said in testimony to the Surface Transportation Board this spring.
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So anyone with investments in a pension plan, a 401k or IRA, and running mouth about what a shame it is that rail workers don't have or can't access their paid sick leave... our investments can be part of the problem. This is because those investments tend to value profit over people every time out the box, unless we can believe the "Environment, Social and Governance" criteria that have become a feature of corporate assertions, or unless we make a point of objecting to inhumane and ultimately unsustainable treatment of workers.
 
lizkat said:
The "current situation" is far more complicated than that. It's mostly from an intentional shortfall of employees (as much as 30% fewer than six years ago, although freight shipping au contraire has boomed during that time) and the use of what the railroads call Precision Scheduled Railroading, which requires employees to schedule paid time off well in advance and otherwise penalizes them, eventually to point of firing them even if absence was a medical emergency.

Workers Say Railroads’ Efficiency Push Became Too Much (NYT, 9/15/22, paywall removed)







So I dunno about you, but that's not how my use of whatever built-in paid time off I had on my jobs got managed.
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It’s also not apples-to-apples comparing time off for railroad workers and office workers. I saw a few stats about the rail workers’ contracts above. Here is a very detailed summary of worker and railroad positions on various aspects of the contract. It is the recommendation of an emergency board from August.

One clarification from an above claim: a 24% wage increase was mentioned above. That is over 5 years… and considering the SS COLA increase was 9% in this year, seems like it’s just keeping pace with inflation.

 
SuperMatt said:
One clarification from an above claim: a 24% wage increase was mentioned above. That is over 5 years… and considering the SS COLA increase was 9% in this year, seems like it’s just keeping pace with inflation.
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Yep, and that is retroactive, including the past two years of no increases when the last contract expired in 2020. During a fucking pandemic. And the bonus will be paid out over 60 days. I expect a ton of retirements once the bonus is paid out and still think wildcat strikes may happen. Biden is going to get blamed. If it does happen, he'll get blamed and the rail workers will remember come the next election no matter what.
 
www.levernews.com

“Our Life Only Functions Around The Railroad”

After Congress imposed a labor agreement on railroad workers, a longtime BNSF conductor explains why he feels betrayed — and how his job has gotten worse.
www.levernews.com www.levernews.com

The lack of paid sick time afforded to workers was at the center of the high-stakes labor dispute between unions and giant railroad companies that came to a head last week. Through more than three years of contract negotiations, the railroads flatly refused to budge and give workers any paid sick days. The companies knew they didn’t really have to negotiate, because politicians in Washington wouldn’t risk allowing rail workers to strike and slow shipments — especially now during the holiday season — at an estimated cost to the economy of $2 billion per day.
 
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