I could see the railroad workers doing what the ATCs did, and perhaps winning.
The jobs are nowhere near as cushy as ATCs, and could cause same disruption.
If I was Biden, I’d probably be doing the same thing, because a rail strike is disasterous politically, and the most important job in America is keeping Republicans from being able to install fascism nationally. I’d sacrifice folks in order to prevent this from happening.
Why not write the legislation to force the companies to offer sick days?
“immediately”, “without delay”
Would get filibustered , or might not even get 50 in the Senate.
Biden should force this to an arbitrator, if that’s within his powers (it might not be, apparently we didn’t have this option)
Hmm. I really wonder at this because the Rail workers Union predates America, more or less. They don’t pay Social Security, for instance. They’ve been around so long they negotiated that shit and WON.
So, no idea what’s popping here, but any story with rail involved, it’s like Dan Brown was onto something except it’s real, down to the roots.
Mostly monopoly power and union busting I guess.
The problem is, Biden actually appointed a commission under the relevant federal laws several months ago and the Biden appointed commission did NOT include sick leave in its recommended proposal, labelling the sick leave issue a “local matter”. I still don’t understand why that happened. Was Biden’s commission captured by industry influence? Was Biden was just incompetent in his picks or too centrist?
I support Biden overall but I feel that based on the info we’ve seen so far, his admin has not handled this situation well. It’s unfortunate.
I have a friend who has worked his way up lower management and he saw this coming. Workers have never received sick leave on a job that, while it pays well is done outdoors in all kinds of weather and under some time sensitive conditions.
He has also told me that his company is having trouble hiring now.
Can anyone provide a succinct explanation of the issues here? My understanding is that workers want paid sick leave, the railroads say that workers already have the option of using their vacation as paid sick leave, and they get lots of vacation. The articles I’ve read say something about “penalizing” workers when they take vacation leave for sick time, but no further detail beyond that.
Honestly I don’t get the importance of sick leave if there is other paid time off that can be used as sick leave – I had a bank of “personal days” at my last job that were sick leave and vacation leave combined and it seemed to work fine for me (as a relatively healthy person). Is there another benefit related to days being labeled sick leave? Or are the vacation benefits much less generous than sick leave for some reason?
I still haven’t seen any kind of explanation why a request for sick leave, 4 days of sick leave per year mind you, is somehow so crazy unreasonable that it cannot be negotiated. I have many years of experience as an attorney in workers’ comp and employment law and I’ve seen all kinds of arguments about “business necessity” but I cannot imagine what the business necessity for this stance by the companies is. If the issue is scheduling, there are many many ways to work around that. Or if the issue is money, that can be dealt with. 4 days out of 250 working days in a year is 1.5% so make a counteroffer of “you get the sick leave but future wage increases are reduced by 1.5%” (or whatever, over a reasonable amount of time.) But as far as I have heard reported, the company response on the sick leave issue is “talk to the hand.” So I just don’t get why this is such a problem.
I also don’t get why Biden’s commission ignored this issue. Unless there is some business reality of this industry that I just don’t know about, both the company position and the position of Biden’s commission seem completely wrongheaded to me.
Hmm @Aleck I had not heard that detail about the vacation time conversion. One of the many problems with this situation is that the reporting has been crap. Basic questions are unanswered.
Is Judd’s take correct? Biden’s statement calls for encoding the “Tentative Agreement between the workers and operators”. That seems to imply the workers are in agreement.
My company provides one pot of leave for both vacation and sick time, and is moderately generous with leave. So I can see that being the problem here.
The tentative agreement between the union and management exempts “time off for certain medical events from carrier attendance policies”. The existing policy is points-based.
(bold mine) Railroads' workplace attendance policies at the heart of labor dispute : NPR
I feel like the information we are getting is incomplete and contradictory. For example, how does the points based attendance system interact with the allegedly generous vacation system?
Answer: (after I read the linked article):
railroad conductors and engineers were essentially on call most of the time, outside of paid vacation and personal leave days (which they do accrue in amounts determined by seniority).
The points-based attendance system penalizes anyone who tries to circumvent the system by simply calling in sick on a day that they had requested off but were denied.
Ok so that’s different than the way the unions are framing it. I had formed the impression that the railroads were not allowing any time off and driving the workers like slaves. But the railroads so allow people to take time off if scheduled ahead. However, because workers often want the same time off as others, the exact scheduling of time off becomes very competitive and folks get denied. The workers then worked around this by using “sick time” and then the railroads cracked down on that with the points system.
The railroads may still be the bad guys here (the devil is in the details) but that’s quite a bit more nuanced and complicated than the shitty reporting presented.
The article doesn’t say this but I can imagine the business necessity for being strict on the scheduling of time off (as opposed to getting time off more generally) is that the trains, you know, have to run on time. Compounded of course by cutting staff to the bone and the pressures of the pandemic.
So, to some degree, this is a scheduling issue. There’s also a sick leave issue involved as its probably true that some of the time the workers do actually need sick time.
In an ideal world, I would prefer an incentive system rather than this punitive system. If it’s absolutely critical to the railroads to be fully staffed on high-demand days, then they need to pay bonus time for that.
I now need EVEN MORE information to evaluate this. For example, the workers are saying this is effecting health and families and so on. So, what’s the evidence? The companies are also saying that the workers abuse sick leave to take time off that they requested and were denied. So, what’s the evidence on that?
Bottom line, this is much murkier than it first appeared.
Running the trains has been optimized for so few people, that they just can’t tolerate ANY unexpected absences without their whole schedule falling apart.
Which is a problem. The whole “just in time” economy doesn’t take into account both brittleness and cumulative wear and tear on the system IMO. Or maybe the real issue isn’t the core concept of “just in time” but rather the rapacious implementation of it we’ve seen in recent years.
Bottom line, I think I’m still more on the union side than the railroad side in this issue but it’s definitely more complicated than the simplistic framing of most reporting.
When you look at how train tracks are used scheduling and staying on schedule is vital. Much more than for the airlines. Not only do that train companies trains depend on scheduling but so do Amtrak which runs on the same lines, plus the connections with other carriers.
Can’t they like, hire some more people? Maybe have a bit of redundancy in case someone gets sick? We could have a major health crisis someday.
Also, the railroads want to reduce staffing from 2 per train to 1.
I’m way way way waaaaay over here on the union’s side. And reasonably sure you’re overthinking it.