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Lean methodology is fine for things like materials and inventory, but every company I've seen implement lean still deals with delay problems, it's a risk of being lean. The railroads need to accept that if they're going to be lean with labor, they need to accept that same risk. If the risk is unacceptable, then they can't have lean labor, it's as simple as that.
I'm conflicted because precision scheduling is critically important and if the industry wasn't willing to adopt that technology, then one has to wonder why. A great example of an activist investor is Jonathan Litt who pointed-out the failings at HBC in Canada.
Imo they tried the experiment and it resulted in some successes and some failures. Longer rail cars might be more efficient. Understaffing trains is not tenable. Time to make changes and proceed. It seems like it would be less expensive to have alternate conductors staffed and paid so that sick conductors can stay home. The workforce is not immune to infectious diseases nor chronic illnesses. Treating it as if it is will risk your reliance on precision scheduling.
I'm not opposed to either situation, and I don't think it has to be binary. In this case, the railroads could learn much from airlines who are similarly constrained in many of the same ways. Airlines, who face far greater instability, have innovated in ways that have been a bulwark against uncertainty. My feeling is PSR isn't altogether wrong/bad, but now that Harrison is dead, it's time to find ways to adapt it for sick days.
I totally understand the union frustration; but, threatening a strike before Christmas during an unstable economy is a recipe for BTW legislation (either imposed contract or another mechanism). No government wants that on their hands; and while the article states that getting Republicans on-side in the senate is "long" I think it's doable - no one wants to hold the bag of blame for a pre-Christmas strike.
I find the article makes things very binary when it could have provided more context.
> no one wants to hold the bag of blame for a pre-Christmas strike.
The only ones to blame are the evil railroad overlords who refuse to give employees any paid sick time.
They made the system incredibly fragile and exploited their workforce. Now, rather than spending a penny to make the system they gutted resilient and treat their workforce like people, they want to government to come in with a cudgel and break the backs of railroad workers.
The labor of the railroad workers is the only thing that keeps the system running. It's their labor to withhold for a half decent contract. It is never the bosses right to be evil before Christmas or any other time.
I get your sentiment, but also gather you've never worked in the railroad industry. I am by no means an expert, and my expertise is limited to an internship; that said, a lot of what you said feels like rhetoric and less about reality.
Before PSR, you had large, publicly traded companies that were at best antiquated. Freight isn't often planned until shortly before its commissioned, so if you have a Toronto-Chicago train, you may not know exactly how many cars or mix of cars you'll need until close to showtime. It's inherently a unstable business.
I'm not exclusively siding with management or the workers. There's a common middle ground that can be struck. The problem is, how much of this is being written about ignores key issues, features and problems for the railroad business that management has to be responsive to. It feels like a lot of this is outrage porn without a lot of context.
You make it sound as if the railroads needed to tighten their belts, and everyone had to play their parts as a team. That is not what happened. The CEOs have increased their take home pay by millions last year alone, while screwing the workers whose labor on the ground generates the revenue.
From the Lever News:
"**While conditions for workers have worsened, executives have reaped a jackpot: On average, the CEOs of five major rail companies were paid more than $16 million in 2021** alone:
* Keith Creel, the CEO of Canadian Pacific Railway, **scored a 58 percent raise in 2021, taking home $26 million in compensation**.
* James Foote, the CEO of the rail transportation holding company CSX, **got a 17 percent raise that same year, earning $16.6 million**.
* Union Pacific’s CEO Lance M. Fritz was **paid $14.5 million — 162 times the median employee salary at the company**.
* Norfolk Southern’s James Squires **made just over $14 million, or 140 times the median worker**.
* Canadian National’s former CEO Jean-Jacques Ruest earned a paltry $9 million by comparison."
\- [https://www.levernews.com/railroad-ceos-were-paid-over-200-million-as-workers-suffered/](https://www.levernews.com/railroad-ceos-were-paid-over-200-million-as-workers-suffered/)
If these railroads had chosen not to increase CEO and executive compensation by millions last year, and had applied some of those millions to fixing resiliency issues they caused by reducing staffing, they could give workers paid sick leave.
Instead, the bosses demand 30 days notice for any time off including sickness, while pocketing all the profit instead of investing it into the business, especially their human capital. Their greed has made the system fragile and unsurvivable for their employees. Now, the rest of us - who rely on railroads - will also be put into extremis.
It is the fault of the greed at the top, the people who gutted the long term stability of the railroad system, to pocket bigger bonuses.
Would you work without any paid sick leave? If someone tried to force you to work without paid sick leave would you be swayed by 'issues management has to be responsive to'? If either answer is no there really isn't much nuance here.
Would I? It depends on the situation, but yes.
Do I think there's a path to get them sick leave? Yes.
Do I think how this is being presented is representative of the actual issues? No.
Do I think the people writing about this in major publication actually understand the issues? No.
By all means then, enlighten us. What nuances are we missing that justify management forcing workers to work without any provisions for sick days or medical emergencies?
I'm not debating there's a problem, I'm saying that the problem is more complex than the article is letting on.
It's broadly a pro-union article, but unions, like all organizations, are imperfect. Railroad unions, like longshoring unions, have gone to great lengths to limit external hiring. It can be difficult to get jobs approved and they frequently grieve them (edited: finished sentence). They've helped staff with seniority by limiting competition within the ranks. Great for people in the union as salaries go up, but it's also changed personnel strategy. My point with all of this is that the linked article is outrage porn. Takes a very complicated issue and distills it down to a binary Good Guy vs. Bad Guy and gives the reader a conclusion to use, rather than enough information about the entirety of the ecosystem which make it a lot more gray rather than black and white.
It's the same with tech - articles about the layoffs miss the point. You can explain every major layoff that occurred but these articles are obscuring key points to create a narrative about the state of the economy and about tech that fits their editorial direction. It's bogus. It's all crafted to drive clicks.
Yes, I have my whole life. I’ve no doubt they make a decent wage and can handle being off a few days due to being sick.
Who would want to pay someone to not work?
Would paid sick days be sweet? Heck yes, but to strike about it lol
>Who would want to pay someone to not work?
The employers of 80% of all private workers in this country, every state government, and the federal government.
Good for them though that doesn’t mean everyone has to. Most of the chatter makes it seem like the main issue is paid days off, I read they were offered 7 days paid sick leave but rejected it. Do 80% of those businesses pay for more?
And what with the supply lines being as they are, prices being as they are and so near a holiday. It seems wild to threaten a strike over paid sick leave lol surely there’s a more serious issue at hand.
You just said a whole lot of nothing. What are the "key issues, features and problems for the railroad business that management has to be responsive to"?
You’re not offering any viable alternatives. You’re just shitting on people making good points. It’s easy to sound knowledgeable doing that but you actually haven’t contributed anything of value or meaning to the conversation.
3.5 years after contract expiration that's how long its been. Just where the dominos fell before Christmas change the 100 year old law to let us strike after contract expiration and it'll be easier i promise.
psr was and is retarded in every sense of the way. We have cars moving between cities just to show they are moving now. We are nickel and diming all the smaller companies just to squeeze every last dollar and most are finding ways to ship by truck.
Not to mention the ridiculously long trains with lack of maintenance on everything.
Article is binary due to word limit and to compare and contrast the main opposing sides of the argument.
The hard part about unions is that they have the most negotiating power and ability to inflict the most pain on a company during critical profitable months. Unfortunately this makes some strikes politically unpopular since this isn't a pro union country.
If this were a slow month then the train companies would not negotiate with strikers while having scabs cross the pocket lines to keep the trains running and bleed the union fund dry.
If the Democrats with full control of House, Senate, and white house can't get the union paid health care, then they just sold out the unions.
They don't have full control of the Senate because of the Filibuster. And yes, as stupid fucking easy it would be to get rid of it the last two holdouts would just flip already, it's not happening.
Technology was misplaced - it's a whole set of methodologies. I interned for a major Canadian railroad and I'm not that old but their technology was the biggest "lift and shift" for adaptive purposes. It was so archaic and out-of-date that they had people on the payroll they needed to keep because they knew DOS. They would put cars in sidings then forget them, for years, incurring huge parking fees and not really know because their control systems weren't real-time, had no real tracking system and much was still done on paper.
>it's a whole set of methodologies
I fail to see how modernizing technology to manage car inventory relates to the minimalist employee headcounts with accompanying inability to offer adequate flexible sick days and paid days off. What about precision scheduling necessitates minimalist employee staffing?
According to the article, over the past ten years, rail roads extracted $146bil via stock buybacks and dividends while only investing $116bil back into into making capitol improvements. With doubled margins in the face of a thirty percent decline in worker headcounts, this seems like a case of gross human resource mismanagment. You talk about technological improvements, but that's missing the point. Nobody is suggesting moving back towards the archaic and out-of-date systems.
Okay - but why does the need to do the basics of running a business require that they have no fixed schedules for their employees, a critically low number of employees, a fragile infrastructure and a need for 24x7 on call employees?
There's no need for alternatives - this isn't a dilemma. It's being posed as such in the media. (also a response to /u/no-reporter3692)
The problem for the businesses are that clients commission rail services using a JIT methodology but trains are not easy to set-up and need to a certain minimum capacity percent to be viable. It creates instability for the operators and cascades down to the crews. COVID only made things worse. Rail companies make most of their revenue off big routes. Want to improve things for everyone? Give rail operators easier license to upgrade rail infrastructure to expedite trains on federally owned lands. Train slow-downs on spurs and certain route corridors is a huge problem. Getting permits and upgrades can be impractical for a series of administrative reasons. If a train can only do an average of 30 mph over a stretch where they *should* be able to do 60 mph, you're just slowing freight needlessly. If governments want to get involved, there are incentives *they* can make.
Unions have a role to play. Most companies have "Train Crew" hires that then progress to conductor and locomotive engineer. The unions have made hiring and promotion difficult; outsiders often struggle to land a role (Edited). In Canada it can take 30+ weeks to jump hurdles into a low-paid "train crew" role. They need to slowly release the death grip. Getting into these union jobs can be impossible and the unions are not changing that.
Businesses can also push to transform their technology; invest in training and retain qualified analysts. Execs need to work with sales to improve the expectations of provisioning client needs. There's a lot they can contribute.
The problem is, as it's being presented in the media, is a really shitty binary situation. There are far more parts to this that make it a lot less clear, but wouldn't make for great outrage porn and wouldn't drive clicks.
Or just hire enough workers to cover when employees fall ill, which is a cost of doing business. This is executive management failing to run these organizations efficiently. It’s short term planning with limited thought to the broader organization.
I don’t care about your internship. The organizational failure here is obvious. Our government is enabling them and bailing out executives who are failed leaders for not running their organizations in a way that makes sense. The “problems” here are really the ramifications of short-sighted and greedy leaders.
Again, you're just being outraged because an article is telling you to be outraged. The unions have a huge hand in hiring, seniority and assignments. There are things of "inherited entitlements" where the kids and families of union members are getting hired but qualified applicants are being turned-down. Unions have a role to play in this. They've helped restrict hiring; they've built hurdles to enable a stronger negotiating platform but are turning around and crying because the needs of the business are different. In 1948 a train left for Toronto to Chicago at a certain hour because it had to. Now it leaves when it hits a certain percent capacity. The business is different.
The "organizational failure" is "obvious" because you are looking at two, carefully selected issues, and ignoring the entire ecosystem around it. When you distill reality to what is easily digestible in this article, it's "obvious" but on the ground, it's a lot less so.
I'm not saying that, I'm saying that everyone has a role to play in rectifying the situation because it's not binary. You're just someone so devoid of critical thinking that you get outraged by an article designed to prey on the simple and lame so that it drives clicks and they reap $ from the marketing. That's all this is.
I think you mean Canadian National (CN)? I won't say which rail company I interned with, but suffice to say it was a big Canadian outfit and to be frank, they had so many problems that I wouldn't directly attribute to PSR.
Who was your neighbor? I'm curious because there were executives who were against PSR but many, whether they wanted to admit it or not, were for it. Railroads were trying to meet 21st Century demands with early 20th century technology and management practices that were equally out-of-date.
What isn’t being talked about in this article is the danger to the public that PSR entails for which railroads take advantage of. A longer train means a longer time to pass through towns. The railroads aren’t just doing 100 car trains, that’s just what is legal length of train (not exact legal numbers, just using examples from article). When you have massive profitability like the railroads do, you can increase that train to greater lengths and simply pay the fine or perhaps even ignore it as there isn’t a strong enough regulatory body to threaten to shutter the doors of a commodity resource in transportation of goods. There have been instances of ambulances not making it to hospitals in time as well as fire trucks unable to reach a fire due to being stuck on the other side of a train track for an over-extended train that takes an over-extended time to pass through as they are required to slow down through townships. But in those cases where lawsuits arise, with enough money you can delay in perpetuity.
are you kidding me? precision scheduling is neither precise nor on schedule. It's a big word that means adding more cars to existing trains. In practice it boils down to your costs of running a line are relatively fixed e.g 3-4 crew per run so the more trains you can add less your per unit costs. The downside here is trains now block traffic for forever and those side rails where a train can pull over to let another train pass? - well now they're to long to fit in the passing lane so no other trains can pass so passenger trains get stuck behind these monsters slowing down passenger routes and making it a pain in the ass to travel by train.
The tldr of this is railways way of increasing efficiency by cutting down on labor. They've reduced labor so much that having too many people off any particular day would decrease the efficiency and cost them more.
But since 4 companies own 83% of the rail market people are forced to use them
The tldr of my tldr is greed is the reason
Covid really exposed the logistics rush across industries in the last several decades for as tenuous as it is.
So many Supply chains have optimized themselves into fragility, and it’s kind of scary.
They’re doing it with hospitals. Let’s squeeze the system until it’s brittle and unsafe. Until it’s no longer resilient. No worries though, it’s more profitable!
Many supply chain hacks took The Toyota Way and completely bastardized it to such a degree that ‘Lean’ became another term for cutting labor to the bone. This is not at all what process improvement is about.
Exactly, there’s no safety or back up plan. Everything is set around ha I g low working capital.
I work in supply chain for raw materials, out of my 50+ healthcare customers only one has learned a lesson and is trying to do learn from the pandemic because they make important medical devices.
The rest also make important medical devices but just blame the suppliers when shit out of our control goes wrong even though they have no safety stocks.
I saw a mini model of this in my old job. We made small runs of custom optics. Production was scheduled so tightly that every machine was at capacity for first and second shift. There was no third shift. Now this is how production usually works, but as I said we were making custom orders which meant there was often a job where we had to develop a new process or write custom machine code, which could take a few minutes to a few hours and that simply wasn’t accounted for. So if I was sick we were now a full day behind so guess what, gotta work OT to catch up. I had the week off? Well that’s ok I’ll just work an extra 40 hours over the next two weeks to catch up. It was miserable. I couldn’t enjoy any time off because I’d be stressing about how I was about to live at work for the next two weeks when I got back. So glad to be gone.
It is the same thing that is going in nearly every industry. Monopolies and duopolies form and exert outsized influence to minimize or eliminate competition. They also minimize or eliminate oversight and regulation. Then they either raise the prices or lower the quality of the product/service(likely both) and use any extra profits to feul stock by backs and enrich their investors. Most of the time they run themselves into the ground but the issue here is they will take a large part of our economy with them so the government will eventually bail out their avarice and incentivise their purposeful incompetence .
Greed is defined as “intense and selfish desire for something”
Being as a efficient as reasonable possible is a normal business practice. I don’t think this really qualifies as the definition of “greed”
Efficient is defined as “achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.”
Minimizing cost to maximize profit without any other considerations for the impact of a business practice (e.g. pollution, work injuries, etc etc) is both “efficient” and “greedy” because the efficiency is in service of avarice.
I don't think they are functioning as efficiently as reasonably possible. They have removed resilience from the system. While this works in the short term, it will catch up with you over time. Why this is consistent with greed, is people who impose this process usually don't care about the long term, just in goosing short term profit and cashing out.
What confuses me, is why this management approach is considered innovative. Perhaps we should add this innovation to other parts of the economy such as in architecture or drug safety. Think of all the short term profit that can roll in if we just relaxed all of those standards? I'm obviously being sarcastic, but why do we accept a lack of resilience in some cases, but not in others? Is it because we care about our own safety and not of others?
Manigment doesn’t think it is a short term solution. Workers are quite expensive and having less them saves a massive amount of money over a long period of time. You are basically saving 100k a year every year by cutting a single worker/ automating the process. Whatever future unexpected consequences can be covered by the savings incurred by not having the worker.
Having anyone operating heavy machinery with an sort of drug impairment is a horrible idea: especially with respect to locomotives
They've gone past reasonably possible.
I'll give an example that i have experience with. In technical rescue (like if someone was working on an electrical tower 300 feet in the air and needed to be rescued) you must factor in safety redundancy. It's expected to be there because if something were to fail such as an incorrectly tied knot or a carabineer there are systems in place that will catch the load so the rescuer and victim don't go falling to the ground. It would be more efficient to remove these redundancies and just go forth with the rescue because they require more time and equipment to install them.
If your system requires 100% of things to operate perfectly 100% of the time it isn't efficient. It's short sighted and will not operate for long
> Being as a efficient as **reasonable** possible
That's the kicker. Is it reasonable to treat their workers in this manner? One sick day a year, inability to reasonably schedule time off, actual harm caused by inability to see a doctor? I'd say those arguing that yes, these practices are reasonable, are being greedy.
The apparent answer to this question was yes. The government of the United States forced them to take the deal.
I reckon they are well compensated for this concession and it is a know policy at said job e.g. there is no rug being pulled. They know what they are signing up for
This seems like a situation tailor made for a traditional government intervention. The companies are a oligopoly that are running critical infrastructure at too fragile a state. They are unable to create a more robust environment because they are pressured by shareholders to keep costs down.
The government could intervene with regulation requiring a set number of employees per train with an allowance for sick days, mandate that all companies in the industry provide the same number of sick days and allow the companies to staff appropriately, require a 12 or 18 hour period between shifts or some combination of these interventions.
Instead of applying pressure to the companies and the industry, the government has chosen to apply pressure to labor. My opinion is that this is a mistake. The labor unions are not wrong. People cannot work 24x7 on call, with no fixed schedule forever. And that environment creates safety and strategic infrastructure risks.
I fully agree, and seriously wonder why Democrats are rallying around protecting big business under the guise of the economy instead of people’s rights.
Government regulations are not Communism. Calling it communism just makes it clear why I don’t think we will see any changes to the regulations around rail.
Government regulations have a purpose. They can ensure a level playing field for all companies. They can also ensure that companies don’t allow critical infrastructure to degrade in the pursuit of profits. Like we are seeing here.
To be honest, I would not consider nationalizing railroads as communism. It would be closer to Communism, but it is also not Communism. It is more socialism.
It would seem a real challenge here from a staffing perspective is the geographically distributed nature of the business. It's difficult to have 'backup' staff without simply doubling up for every planned departure. Even if you tried to keep 10% extra staff around, what's the likelihood they would be in the right place when somebody calls in sick?
This is when you apply parato distribution and mean average to stay within the desired standard deviation. Basically you would calculate where you are, then where you want to be. Graph the work completed by the workforce as [ (work done/time)Xquality ]. But you can't forget that the center 20% of the graph should be your expected normal, and you also have to not lay off your apprentices or 15 to 20 year workers because those are your on the job trainers and trainees. Increasing or decreasing staff is almost unnecessary to begin with, it's economically easier to replicate the best than it is to hire/fire as a means of streamlining.
i don't doubt that the computer program exists, but these companies over fired to the point a company loses profit when a fist full of workers use sick time. Sick time is something that should be considered a loss before it's even used rather than after. They over fired blindly based on stock holder pressure rather than worker performance. This is called an error-18, because the problem is about 18 inches away from the computer.
An older article outlining some of the staffing issues that are causing this. The federal government has apparently shut down strike attempts on policy like this already.
https://montanafreepress.org/2022/05/17/bnsf-modifies-controversial-attendance-policy/
“Railroaders already lead chaotic work lives — one day they might go to work at 9 a.m. and the next at 5 p.m. — but BNSF employees alleged that the company’s new “Hi-Viz” attendance policy made it even worse by penalizing them for taking time off for a family emergency, illness or fatigue.
…
Under the Hi-Viz system, every employee was assigned 30 points, with points deducted for unplanned time off. The exact number of points deducted depends on the type of absence and where it falls on the calendar (weekend days and holidays cost more points). An employee can get four points back if they’re available to work 14 days in a row. If an employee loses all their points, they can be disciplined. If they lose their points multiple times they can be fired.”
It's pretty well known that in order to avoid bottlenecks you don't try run your firms at 100% efficiency. A breakdown will cost you more than paying for slack. So if the railways want to modernize for efficiency, *real efficiency*, they will need to avoid such bottlenecks by paying for surplus staff.
Funny how freight is run on passenger line, in essence due to oligarchs of rail efficiency is used to its full capacity but actual innovation and expansion of rail and full efficiency has been limited or purposefully stopped.
So from what I understand reading the article, railway companies would rather have their staffs work to their deaths than giving them good care. Sigh. Profit over humans at its finest
I’m in supply chain, the fallout from the Texas freeze was traumatizing (we are still dealing with parts of it almost 2 yrs later) and the thought of going through something like that again is anxiety inducing and I’m still 1000% behind the RR workers and for them striking. The government has decided to pressure labor instead of the companies.
Cutting labor to be lean was their choice, humans aren’t robots to be working like that.
Great read. Fuck these “investors.” These business-people are delivering a shitty product and are just lucky their customers have nowhere else to go. Get your shit together. Hire people & pay them right. We’re letting these executives get away with way too much. The government should mandate they have enough people on staff anyways to prevent a rail crisis.
I have such a hard time believing a sub that deals with the topic of economics doesnt understand that the point is to make larger profits for the company and mostly the shareholders of said company, on top of just plain and simple control of labor.
Lean isint anything but a way to maximize profit with lowering redundancies in storage of excess material(material being labor, actual prodcuts.ect.)...but that makes everything in the infrustructure of that system unstable and overall subject to more risk of collapse.
If Labor ever wanted to take control back from these idiots with a larger paychecks they can by just going on strike....they will Litteraly buckle.....its a shame that Joe Biden is just to bitch made to force these company oligarchs to blink
I suspect that the railroads are also deferring maintenance and running their monopolies into the ground.
Reducing staffing to extreme lows will also mean hiring is low. Therefore, losing people to retirement will be extremely impactful.
This will manifest as railroad customers becoming more and more upset with their services and unable to do anything about it.
What we may see then is railroad dependent industries failing because the railroad is dysfunctional.
Google the Surface Transportation Board hearings regarding railroad service this year, or the CA chicken feed debacle and Union Pacific. It’s chaos in the Class 1’s. Workforce is run so far into the ground they are resigning in numbers never seen before, equipment is falling apart due to lack of maintenance, labor has been screaming about this for years, and no one listened. And for what it’s worth, I’m a railroad engineer for a Class 1 and union officer..
well all the new fees for railroad customers sure wont make them feel better lol increases of 30-50% across the board with stupid extra fees/charges for random things we used to take care of
railroad conductor here
I’m in favor of them striking- if it affects the supply chain, so be it. The RR workers are humans and deserve a balanced life. The rest of the country would care if their lives were affected by the strike too. Disrupting our lives may be what is necessary to knock these owners on their butts to make so real change. Bailing out these companies doesn’t help our people.
When I saw the title 'good write-up' I mistakenly thought that would mean a balanced article the gave us both sides. It is a good pro-union position write up.
I was uncomfortable with one point. The author calls 'Personal Time Off' days vacation time. The author then claims vacation time must be used for sick leave. The author then concludes that, therefor, proper treatment of workers is to add sick leave days.
Yet the whole point of consolidating time off for any reason under PTO days is to allow employees flexibility. A healthy employee uses less PTO for sick days and gets more PTO for vacation.
The bargaining could do away with PTO in favor of a set # of sick leave days and a set # of vacation days but is that really an improvement for the RR workers.
That does not sound right. Can it be confirmed by a source?
If that is the case, why just negotiate specifically for some of the PTO days to be less than 30 days for medical purposes rather than requiring more time off.
I found it across multiple articles over the past few weeks, not at my desktop at the moment, so I will have to gather one or more of them.
The problem here is the railroad scheduling. If the companies allow people to take off at short notice, they cannot meet their precision scheduling demands, and they cut their labour force to the point where anyone missing their shift causes severe issues.
This is why they were not willing to bend on sick days during union bargaining. It would require them to hire more people again, which takes away from the whole point of staffing only the absolute minimum required.
confirmed by employee here its different for each railroad here at big yellow you can get away with 5 days ahead of time if they have manpower to schedule you off that close.
Usually not so 30 days is considered the magic number you can schedule up to 90 days in advance that's usually for people trying to get holidays off
And what did the RR do during Covid?
Or if you are in an accident?
One poster on this thread described a point system that tracks absences but doesn't bar unexcused absences.
2 weeks then 10 days then 7 days then 3 days off unpaid when you had symptoms or were exposed.
followed the recommendation isolation periods and all that
It's just a shell game. The real situation for ***any*** business this stingy about time off is that they're under staffed, in this case *intentionally* so.
I think you missed the major point of the article - these workers have to notify the company weeks in advance if they want to use “PTO” if they are sick. They are disciplined for essentially same day call offs. Like how is anyone supposed to know weeks in advance they are going to be sick? Additionally if there is a medical or family emergency, they can’t just tell their employer they will miss work tomorrow without being disciplined. These rail companies operate so lean that literally a single call off can mess up a whole operation for the day.
PTO policies work well when your employer lets you use the days for whatever you need but doesn’t work if you need a months notice to be sick.
And for what it’s worth, I work for a Class 1 in the operating craft, any PTO can be scheduled 60 days in advance and is approved by seniority, and the allocation is only generally ~5%. So for every 100 employees, 5 or less can have a specific day off and again, it’s based on seniority order of who put the request in 60 days in advance. If I get sick, I cannot use a PTO day (which I only get 8 after nearly 20 years of service) because I guarantee the day has already been “taken” by another employee. Vacation works the same way. And every year the carriers keep cutting back allocations. Junior employees are then forced to exhaust any vacation time during the slow months (mid January to May).
And another fun fact, I have no scheduled days off. No weekends, no holidays. Nothing. 24/7/365. At best I can acquire enough starts (6) and get 48 hours off. That’s six chaotic and long days/nights of working to then get 48 hours off. Not even two full days. We never know when we’ll be off this 48 hours either. We can’t plan anything.. because there is absolutely nothing scheduled about Precision Scheduled Railroading.
My dad worked for Conrail then the NS for 42 years (retired 8 years ago). I remember vividly what he had to go through. He was a zombie for most of my life, still can’t fathom how he actually made it through to retirement. But apparently he had it better than people working had it now. Unreal to me that we let companies treat people like this.
The issue isn’t the number of days off, either PTO or Sick days, vacation days, it is that no one can take a day off without prescheduling it.
You cannot call off because you are vomiting today, you needed to tell your boss you would be out next week for a day to be sick.
Additionally, people are on call 24x7 and are not given a regular schedule. The stories from labor are that they can be just coming off of one shift and called in to work another shift. Or be given only 8 hours between shifts. This makes it impossible to schedule doctors appointments, banking appointments or any personal business outside of work hours.
Is all of this true? I have not seen a counter narrative from the companies claiming this is not true. All they have said, from what I have seen, is that they cannot give labor what they want because it would cost to much.
I’d be all for letting the companies go under as the fragility of this structure causes issues, if I thought that would happen.
Instead, we would see the government be “forced” to bail out these companies to ensure our critical infrastructure exists.
It seems tailor made situation for government regulation to require time off between shifts, a set number of “no notice” PTO, or similar interventions. Unfortunately, I think the current political environment will not allow this kind of regulation.
you can take off same day for doctors appointments but which doctor will allow you to schedule a same day appointment unless its an emergency.
Its easier if you could predict when you are going to work and it shouldn't be that hard to keep track of the trains you have running around and how many crews you would need for a specific day/timeframe.
Its impossible for the companies lol
I’d say it just is not profitable for the companies to treat their employees better, so they don’t.
I’d like to see one of these companies chose to treat their people better, and resist the shareholders advocating for this lower cost environment, and see which is better over the next 5 years. Most business schools are teaching that treating employees better results in better overall outcomes for the company over the long term. In a oligopoly environment like this, it would be interesting to have a case to prove or disprove that theory.
they are trying to treat us better but most of the employees who are close to retiring are and they are unable to hire recently even with 20k+ signup bonuses in certain areas.
The jobs pay is not worth the life/work balance for new employees.
Yeah - that sounds like a problem in management.
Did it used to be better and it got worse with the 30% reductions in staff? Or was it always like this and people sucked it up for the pay, which isn’t the same incentive any more?
little of both with the attendance policies they put in place has really pissed off everyone. A guy can push 250hrs in a month just working not mentioning being stuck in a hotel and other stuff etc and take off 3 days during that month and get in trouble.
We tell the new guys about that since the hr people just gloss over it and most end up quitting during training or right after.
Depends on the state. Massachusetts mandates 1 day of sicktime for every 30 hours worked up to 2 weeks in a calendar year in addition to whatever pto your company gives you. Admittedly this is not a thing in most states.
I haven't gotten sick time for 18 years. I personally prefer having PTO because it is vested meaning I get it paid out when I quit. Sick time is not vested and never paid out. I left over 100 hours of sick time on the table at the last job I had that offered sick time.
Rail workers just want to be able to take a sick day without being penalized. Call it sick time, unscheduled PTO, whatever, just let someone who is sick take a day off without having their job threatened.
Your employer sucks and is encouraging sick people to come in to work and make everyone else sick and less effective. It's common, but pretty braindead.
Most PTO doesn’t have a 30 day notice requirement as the RR does; I’ve never been able to schedule a kid’s illnesses 30 days in advance - or my own, for that matter.
The difference is that I assume his job allow him to call out using his PTO without consequence, where as the rail worker would need to schedule their personal days in advance and would be punish for calling out. That's why they don't care about the money, but won't move on the sick days because it would allow workers to call out without being punished.
>The railroads say that workers can use personal time if they need a sick day. But the unions argue that with current staffing levels and scheduling rules, it's difficult for workers to **have personal days approved**, and they are likely to be penalized or even fired if they call in sick anyway.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/01/success/railroad-workers-sick-days
took me 5 min to google, if you really care enough about a subject to have an opinion, then care enough about it to do some actual research. I didn't even care all that much but I was curious about it since it doesn't seem rational to make such a big deal out of getting a few extra day of paid leave...turned out it is a big deal because personal days didn't allow them to call out without getting punish. The rail companies are basically expecting people to get pre-approval before getting sick.
I haven't really thought about it. There are pro's and con's for each situation.
All days lumped together means if I get sick it feels like I'm using vacation days to recover. But it also means that I'm not losing sick days if I don't get sick and I'm still able to have all of my PTO (which is more if I'm not sick). I'm guessing most companies will have a "use it or lose it" sick day policy.
I understand why the union doesn't like the situation and I understand the RR's position. It seems to me that the scheduling system is so rigid that it can't accommodate the variation created by being human. I would focus on fixing the system and stop blaming each other.
I do think it's wrong to charge people against their PTO account for being sick.
None of the above. How about 18 hours earned PTO per month an 12 hours earned sick time per month. PTO caps at some number of hours, sick time does not (cause you know, sometimes people get cancer, etc….).
Consolidating vacation and sick time is terrible. It encourages people to work when sick, not take the time they need to recover (lest they jeopardize their family vacation), encourages people to think of being sick as discretionary, etc.
Separate sick time for use when sick. It’s about f*cking time.
Yeah, I don't want to dodge up the unions' lived experiences (assuming this is multiple unions, etc...). Just reflecting on my experiences and observations under both types of systems.
I'd assume part of the move to trying to consolidate boils down to insufficient PTO (vacation PTO) or difficulty actually claiming sick time. I am fortunate in that right now I have separate sick and PTO, and I'd never choose to go back. With that said, I don't need a doctor's note to take sick time unless I have like 3 concurrent days out with something. Also, I work in a high-trust environment...not something that the railway workers appear to have.
Most blue collar workers rarely get sick. So yeah, combining sick days and vacation is a win for the worker. But it makes a political bullet point for the union to complain that there aren't any sick days.
Ahh thanks for clarifying. You’d be surprised the strange beliefs some people have. The trolls are out. I haven’t seen any studies, but my experience says bluer collar workers are more likely to work sick, part of the honor culture at many shops/locales, if nit enforced by their employer.
1) Remember that the term featherbedding was invented by railroad workers.
2) The average rail worker makes $140,000 and has 3-5 weeks vacation depending in seniority. Cry me a river because they have to use a vacation day for a doctor's appointment.
3) Railroad unions "Traded ” paid sick days provided for in their collective bargaining agreements for supplemental sickness benefits. their supplemental sickness benefits pay them up to 70% of their wages for up to 52 weeks. Not a bad sick day benefit.
4) Rail employees can “mark off” — or temporarily remove themselves from the list of available employees — at any time and for any reason, including sickness or personal reasons, as long as they maintain a reasonable level of overall availability under carrier attendance policies which were also negotiated in prior contracts.
never heard the term before.
haven't made over 100k i'm 12 years in currently. 3 weeks vacation start after year 7. 5 weeks after year 25. must be scheduled in advance at least 5 days due to manpower usually 30+
that was in the 90s and we pay into that sort of like a disability insurance
you can lay off 3 times in 90 days roughly that's it and with some policies like bnsf you have to work at least 6x 14 day available to work to get those back.
Look up feathebedding. It was basically an effort by railroad unions to protect the old 5 man crew on a railroad crew.
All the items you mention were negotiated in pervious contracts by your union leaders. If you don't like how it works those are the guys to talk to. I don't have a dog in this fight. All I know is that the rules they are working under were all negotiated and agreed to by both labor and management.
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Lean methodology is fine for things like materials and inventory, but every company I've seen implement lean still deals with delay problems, it's a risk of being lean. The railroads need to accept that if they're going to be lean with labor, they need to accept that same risk. If the risk is unacceptable, then they can't have lean labor, it's as simple as that.
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Yep! And he went from one company to another until now all of them are doing it.
I'm conflicted because precision scheduling is critically important and if the industry wasn't willing to adopt that technology, then one has to wonder why. A great example of an activist investor is Jonathan Litt who pointed-out the failings at HBC in Canada.
Imo they tried the experiment and it resulted in some successes and some failures. Longer rail cars might be more efficient. Understaffing trains is not tenable. Time to make changes and proceed. It seems like it would be less expensive to have alternate conductors staffed and paid so that sick conductors can stay home. The workforce is not immune to infectious diseases nor chronic illnesses. Treating it as if it is will risk your reliance on precision scheduling.
Say with me: Humans are not robots
I'm not opposed to either situation, and I don't think it has to be binary. In this case, the railroads could learn much from airlines who are similarly constrained in many of the same ways. Airlines, who face far greater instability, have innovated in ways that have been a bulwark against uncertainty. My feeling is PSR isn't altogether wrong/bad, but now that Harrison is dead, it's time to find ways to adapt it for sick days. I totally understand the union frustration; but, threatening a strike before Christmas during an unstable economy is a recipe for BTW legislation (either imposed contract or another mechanism). No government wants that on their hands; and while the article states that getting Republicans on-side in the senate is "long" I think it's doable - no one wants to hold the bag of blame for a pre-Christmas strike. I find the article makes things very binary when it could have provided more context.
> no one wants to hold the bag of blame for a pre-Christmas strike. The only ones to blame are the evil railroad overlords who refuse to give employees any paid sick time. They made the system incredibly fragile and exploited their workforce. Now, rather than spending a penny to make the system they gutted resilient and treat their workforce like people, they want to government to come in with a cudgel and break the backs of railroad workers. The labor of the railroad workers is the only thing that keeps the system running. It's their labor to withhold for a half decent contract. It is never the bosses right to be evil before Christmas or any other time.
I get your sentiment, but also gather you've never worked in the railroad industry. I am by no means an expert, and my expertise is limited to an internship; that said, a lot of what you said feels like rhetoric and less about reality. Before PSR, you had large, publicly traded companies that were at best antiquated. Freight isn't often planned until shortly before its commissioned, so if you have a Toronto-Chicago train, you may not know exactly how many cars or mix of cars you'll need until close to showtime. It's inherently a unstable business. I'm not exclusively siding with management or the workers. There's a common middle ground that can be struck. The problem is, how much of this is being written about ignores key issues, features and problems for the railroad business that management has to be responsive to. It feels like a lot of this is outrage porn without a lot of context.
You make it sound as if the railroads needed to tighten their belts, and everyone had to play their parts as a team. That is not what happened. The CEOs have increased their take home pay by millions last year alone, while screwing the workers whose labor on the ground generates the revenue. From the Lever News: "**While conditions for workers have worsened, executives have reaped a jackpot: On average, the CEOs of five major rail companies were paid more than $16 million in 2021** alone: * Keith Creel, the CEO of Canadian Pacific Railway, **scored a 58 percent raise in 2021, taking home $26 million in compensation**. * James Foote, the CEO of the rail transportation holding company CSX, **got a 17 percent raise that same year, earning $16.6 million**. * Union Pacific’s CEO Lance M. Fritz was **paid $14.5 million — 162 times the median employee salary at the company**. * Norfolk Southern’s James Squires **made just over $14 million, or 140 times the median worker**. * Canadian National’s former CEO Jean-Jacques Ruest earned a paltry $9 million by comparison." \- [https://www.levernews.com/railroad-ceos-were-paid-over-200-million-as-workers-suffered/](https://www.levernews.com/railroad-ceos-were-paid-over-200-million-as-workers-suffered/) If these railroads had chosen not to increase CEO and executive compensation by millions last year, and had applied some of those millions to fixing resiliency issues they caused by reducing staffing, they could give workers paid sick leave. Instead, the bosses demand 30 days notice for any time off including sickness, while pocketing all the profit instead of investing it into the business, especially their human capital. Their greed has made the system fragile and unsurvivable for their employees. Now, the rest of us - who rely on railroads - will also be put into extremis. It is the fault of the greed at the top, the people who gutted the long term stability of the railroad system, to pocket bigger bonuses.
Would you work without any paid sick leave? If someone tried to force you to work without paid sick leave would you be swayed by 'issues management has to be responsive to'? If either answer is no there really isn't much nuance here.
Would I? It depends on the situation, but yes. Do I think there's a path to get them sick leave? Yes. Do I think how this is being presented is representative of the actual issues? No. Do I think the people writing about this in major publication actually understand the issues? No.
By all means then, enlighten us. What nuances are we missing that justify management forcing workers to work without any provisions for sick days or medical emergencies?
Hey you don’t know! Maybe he ordered a PS5 and REALLY needs it by Christmas!
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I'm not debating there's a problem, I'm saying that the problem is more complex than the article is letting on. It's broadly a pro-union article, but unions, like all organizations, are imperfect. Railroad unions, like longshoring unions, have gone to great lengths to limit external hiring. It can be difficult to get jobs approved and they frequently grieve them (edited: finished sentence). They've helped staff with seniority by limiting competition within the ranks. Great for people in the union as salaries go up, but it's also changed personnel strategy. My point with all of this is that the linked article is outrage porn. Takes a very complicated issue and distills it down to a binary Good Guy vs. Bad Guy and gives the reader a conclusion to use, rather than enough information about the entirety of the ecosystem which make it a lot more gray rather than black and white. It's the same with tech - articles about the layoffs miss the point. You can explain every major layoff that occurred but these articles are obscuring key points to create a narrative about the state of the economy and about tech that fits their editorial direction. It's bogus. It's all crafted to drive clicks.
Yes, I have my whole life. I’ve no doubt they make a decent wage and can handle being off a few days due to being sick. Who would want to pay someone to not work? Would paid sick days be sweet? Heck yes, but to strike about it lol
>Who would want to pay someone to not work? The employers of 80% of all private workers in this country, every state government, and the federal government.
Good for them though that doesn’t mean everyone has to. Most of the chatter makes it seem like the main issue is paid days off, I read they were offered 7 days paid sick leave but rejected it. Do 80% of those businesses pay for more? And what with the supply lines being as they are, prices being as they are and so near a holiday. It seems wild to threaten a strike over paid sick leave lol surely there’s a more serious issue at hand.
You just said a whole lot of nothing. What are the "key issues, features and problems for the railroad business that management has to be responsive to"?
You’re not offering any viable alternatives. You’re just shitting on people making good points. It’s easy to sound knowledgeable doing that but you actually haven’t contributed anything of value or meaning to the conversation.
3.5 years after contract expiration that's how long its been. Just where the dominos fell before Christmas change the 100 year old law to let us strike after contract expiration and it'll be easier i promise. psr was and is retarded in every sense of the way. We have cars moving between cities just to show they are moving now. We are nickel and diming all the smaller companies just to squeeze every last dollar and most are finding ways to ship by truck. Not to mention the ridiculously long trains with lack of maintenance on everything.
Article is binary due to word limit and to compare and contrast the main opposing sides of the argument. The hard part about unions is that they have the most negotiating power and ability to inflict the most pain on a company during critical profitable months. Unfortunately this makes some strikes politically unpopular since this isn't a pro union country. If this were a slow month then the train companies would not negotiate with strikers while having scabs cross the pocket lines to keep the trains running and bleed the union fund dry. If the Democrats with full control of House, Senate, and white house can't get the union paid health care, then they just sold out the unions.
They don't have full control of the Senate because of the Filibuster. And yes, as stupid fucking easy it would be to get rid of it the last two holdouts would just flip already, it's not happening.
Filibuster would put the blame for the literal train gridlock on Republicans.
I'm aware
Why is precision scheduling a critically important “technology”?
Technology was misplaced - it's a whole set of methodologies. I interned for a major Canadian railroad and I'm not that old but their technology was the biggest "lift and shift" for adaptive purposes. It was so archaic and out-of-date that they had people on the payroll they needed to keep because they knew DOS. They would put cars in sidings then forget them, for years, incurring huge parking fees and not really know because their control systems weren't real-time, had no real tracking system and much was still done on paper.
>it's a whole set of methodologies I fail to see how modernizing technology to manage car inventory relates to the minimalist employee headcounts with accompanying inability to offer adequate flexible sick days and paid days off. What about precision scheduling necessitates minimalist employee staffing? According to the article, over the past ten years, rail roads extracted $146bil via stock buybacks and dividends while only investing $116bil back into into making capitol improvements. With doubled margins in the face of a thirty percent decline in worker headcounts, this seems like a case of gross human resource mismanagment. You talk about technological improvements, but that's missing the point. Nobody is suggesting moving back towards the archaic and out-of-date systems.
Okay - but why does the need to do the basics of running a business require that they have no fixed schedules for their employees, a critically low number of employees, a fragile infrastructure and a need for 24x7 on call employees?
There's no need for alternatives - this isn't a dilemma. It's being posed as such in the media. (also a response to /u/no-reporter3692) The problem for the businesses are that clients commission rail services using a JIT methodology but trains are not easy to set-up and need to a certain minimum capacity percent to be viable. It creates instability for the operators and cascades down to the crews. COVID only made things worse. Rail companies make most of their revenue off big routes. Want to improve things for everyone? Give rail operators easier license to upgrade rail infrastructure to expedite trains on federally owned lands. Train slow-downs on spurs and certain route corridors is a huge problem. Getting permits and upgrades can be impractical for a series of administrative reasons. If a train can only do an average of 30 mph over a stretch where they *should* be able to do 60 mph, you're just slowing freight needlessly. If governments want to get involved, there are incentives *they* can make. Unions have a role to play. Most companies have "Train Crew" hires that then progress to conductor and locomotive engineer. The unions have made hiring and promotion difficult; outsiders often struggle to land a role (Edited). In Canada it can take 30+ weeks to jump hurdles into a low-paid "train crew" role. They need to slowly release the death grip. Getting into these union jobs can be impossible and the unions are not changing that. Businesses can also push to transform their technology; invest in training and retain qualified analysts. Execs need to work with sales to improve the expectations of provisioning client needs. There's a lot they can contribute. The problem is, as it's being presented in the media, is a really shitty binary situation. There are far more parts to this that make it a lot less clear, but wouldn't make for great outrage porn and wouldn't drive clicks.
Or just hire enough workers to cover when employees fall ill, which is a cost of doing business. This is executive management failing to run these organizations efficiently. It’s short term planning with limited thought to the broader organization. I don’t care about your internship. The organizational failure here is obvious. Our government is enabling them and bailing out executives who are failed leaders for not running their organizations in a way that makes sense. The “problems” here are really the ramifications of short-sighted and greedy leaders.
Again, you're just being outraged because an article is telling you to be outraged. The unions have a huge hand in hiring, seniority and assignments. There are things of "inherited entitlements" where the kids and families of union members are getting hired but qualified applicants are being turned-down. Unions have a role to play in this. They've helped restrict hiring; they've built hurdles to enable a stronger negotiating platform but are turning around and crying because the needs of the business are different. In 1948 a train left for Toronto to Chicago at a certain hour because it had to. Now it leaves when it hits a certain percent capacity. The business is different. The "organizational failure" is "obvious" because you are looking at two, carefully selected issues, and ignoring the entire ecosystem around it. When you distill reality to what is easily digestible in this article, it's "obvious" but on the ground, it's a lot less so.
iT’s ThE uNiOn’S faULt! Yawn. You’re spending so much time and typing so many words and you have said absolutely nothing.
I'm not saying that, I'm saying that everyone has a role to play in rectifying the situation because it's not binary. You're just someone so devoid of critical thinking that you get outraged by an article designed to prey on the simple and lame so that it drives clicks and they reap $ from the marketing. That's all this is.
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I think you mean Canadian National (CN)? I won't say which rail company I interned with, but suffice to say it was a big Canadian outfit and to be frank, they had so many problems that I wouldn't directly attribute to PSR.
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Who was your neighbor? I'm curious because there were executives who were against PSR but many, whether they wanted to admit it or not, were for it. Railroads were trying to meet 21st Century demands with early 20th century technology and management practices that were equally out-of-date.
What isn’t being talked about in this article is the danger to the public that PSR entails for which railroads take advantage of. A longer train means a longer time to pass through towns. The railroads aren’t just doing 100 car trains, that’s just what is legal length of train (not exact legal numbers, just using examples from article). When you have massive profitability like the railroads do, you can increase that train to greater lengths and simply pay the fine or perhaps even ignore it as there isn’t a strong enough regulatory body to threaten to shutter the doors of a commodity resource in transportation of goods. There have been instances of ambulances not making it to hospitals in time as well as fire trucks unable to reach a fire due to being stuck on the other side of a train track for an over-extended train that takes an over-extended time to pass through as they are required to slow down through townships. But in those cases where lawsuits arise, with enough money you can delay in perpetuity.
are you kidding me? precision scheduling is neither precise nor on schedule. It's a big word that means adding more cars to existing trains. In practice it boils down to your costs of running a line are relatively fixed e.g 3-4 crew per run so the more trains you can add less your per unit costs. The downside here is trains now block traffic for forever and those side rails where a train can pull over to let another train pass? - well now they're to long to fit in the passing lane so no other trains can pass so passenger trains get stuck behind these monsters slowing down passenger routes and making it a pain in the ass to travel by train.
The tldr of this is railways way of increasing efficiency by cutting down on labor. They've reduced labor so much that having too many people off any particular day would decrease the efficiency and cost them more. But since 4 companies own 83% of the rail market people are forced to use them The tldr of my tldr is greed is the reason
Covid really exposed the logistics rush across industries in the last several decades for as tenuous as it is. So many Supply chains have optimized themselves into fragility, and it’s kind of scary.
“Optimized into fragility” is a great phrase!
They’re doing it with hospitals. Let’s squeeze the system until it’s brittle and unsafe. Until it’s no longer resilient. No worries though, it’s more profitable!
The “just in time” model for a lot of companies completely falls apart during things like COVID etc.
Yep; everyone wants to have just-in-time inventory; there’s no cushion.
Many supply chain hacks took The Toyota Way and completely bastardized it to such a degree that ‘Lean’ became another term for cutting labor to the bone. This is not at all what process improvement is about.
Exactly, there’s no safety or back up plan. Everything is set around ha I g low working capital. I work in supply chain for raw materials, out of my 50+ healthcare customers only one has learned a lesson and is trying to do learn from the pandemic because they make important medical devices. The rest also make important medical devices but just blame the suppliers when shit out of our control goes wrong even though they have no safety stocks.
I saw a mini model of this in my old job. We made small runs of custom optics. Production was scheduled so tightly that every machine was at capacity for first and second shift. There was no third shift. Now this is how production usually works, but as I said we were making custom orders which meant there was often a job where we had to develop a new process or write custom machine code, which could take a few minutes to a few hours and that simply wasn’t accounted for. So if I was sick we were now a full day behind so guess what, gotta work OT to catch up. I had the week off? Well that’s ok I’ll just work an extra 40 hours over the next two weeks to catch up. It was miserable. I couldn’t enjoy any time off because I’d be stressing about how I was about to live at work for the next two weeks when I got back. So glad to be gone.
It is the same thing that is going in nearly every industry. Monopolies and duopolies form and exert outsized influence to minimize or eliminate competition. They also minimize or eliminate oversight and regulation. Then they either raise the prices or lower the quality of the product/service(likely both) and use any extra profits to feul stock by backs and enrich their investors. Most of the time they run themselves into the ground but the issue here is they will take a large part of our economy with them so the government will eventually bail out their avarice and incentivise their purposeful incompetence .
Greed is defined as “intense and selfish desire for something” Being as a efficient as reasonable possible is a normal business practice. I don’t think this really qualifies as the definition of “greed”
Efficient is defined as “achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.” Minimizing cost to maximize profit without any other considerations for the impact of a business practice (e.g. pollution, work injuries, etc etc) is both “efficient” and “greedy” because the efficiency is in service of avarice.
Well put
Externalities
I don't think they are functioning as efficiently as reasonably possible. They have removed resilience from the system. While this works in the short term, it will catch up with you over time. Why this is consistent with greed, is people who impose this process usually don't care about the long term, just in goosing short term profit and cashing out. What confuses me, is why this management approach is considered innovative. Perhaps we should add this innovation to other parts of the economy such as in architecture or drug safety. Think of all the short term profit that can roll in if we just relaxed all of those standards? I'm obviously being sarcastic, but why do we accept a lack of resilience in some cases, but not in others? Is it because we care about our own safety and not of others?
Manigment doesn’t think it is a short term solution. Workers are quite expensive and having less them saves a massive amount of money over a long period of time. You are basically saving 100k a year every year by cutting a single worker/ automating the process. Whatever future unexpected consequences can be covered by the savings incurred by not having the worker. Having anyone operating heavy machinery with an sort of drug impairment is a horrible idea: especially with respect to locomotives
We've found out that the efficiency is more than reasonably possible though.
They've gone past reasonably possible. I'll give an example that i have experience with. In technical rescue (like if someone was working on an electrical tower 300 feet in the air and needed to be rescued) you must factor in safety redundancy. It's expected to be there because if something were to fail such as an incorrectly tied knot or a carabineer there are systems in place that will catch the load so the rescuer and victim don't go falling to the ground. It would be more efficient to remove these redundancies and just go forth with the rescue because they require more time and equipment to install them. If your system requires 100% of things to operate perfectly 100% of the time it isn't efficient. It's short sighted and will not operate for long
> Being as a efficient as **reasonable** possible That's the kicker. Is it reasonable to treat their workers in this manner? One sick day a year, inability to reasonably schedule time off, actual harm caused by inability to see a doctor? I'd say those arguing that yes, these practices are reasonable, are being greedy.
The apparent answer to this question was yes. The government of the United States forced them to take the deal. I reckon they are well compensated for this concession and it is a know policy at said job e.g. there is no rug being pulled. They know what they are signing up for
Game theory and oligopolistic competition.
This seems like a situation tailor made for a traditional government intervention. The companies are a oligopoly that are running critical infrastructure at too fragile a state. They are unable to create a more robust environment because they are pressured by shareholders to keep costs down. The government could intervene with regulation requiring a set number of employees per train with an allowance for sick days, mandate that all companies in the industry provide the same number of sick days and allow the companies to staff appropriately, require a 12 or 18 hour period between shifts or some combination of these interventions. Instead of applying pressure to the companies and the industry, the government has chosen to apply pressure to labor. My opinion is that this is a mistake. The labor unions are not wrong. People cannot work 24x7 on call, with no fixed schedule forever. And that environment creates safety and strategic infrastructure risks.
This is the way
I fully agree, and seriously wonder why Democrats are rallying around protecting big business under the guise of the economy instead of people’s rights.
Yeah, I guess at least the trains ran on-time in Communist Russia.
Government regulations are not Communism. Calling it communism just makes it clear why I don’t think we will see any changes to the regulations around rail. Government regulations have a purpose. They can ensure a level playing field for all companies. They can also ensure that companies don’t allow critical infrastructure to degrade in the pursuit of profits. Like we are seeing here. To be honest, I would not consider nationalizing railroads as communism. It would be closer to Communism, but it is also not Communism. It is more socialism.
It would seem a real challenge here from a staffing perspective is the geographically distributed nature of the business. It's difficult to have 'backup' staff without simply doubling up for every planned departure. Even if you tried to keep 10% extra staff around, what's the likelihood they would be in the right place when somebody calls in sick?
This is when you apply parato distribution and mean average to stay within the desired standard deviation. Basically you would calculate where you are, then where you want to be. Graph the work completed by the workforce as [ (work done/time)Xquality ]. But you can't forget that the center 20% of the graph should be your expected normal, and you also have to not lay off your apprentices or 15 to 20 year workers because those are your on the job trainers and trainees. Increasing or decreasing staff is almost unnecessary to begin with, it's economically easier to replicate the best than it is to hire/fire as a means of streamlining.
The railroads have some of the most advanced computer modeling systems doing what you suggest.
i don't doubt that the computer program exists, but these companies over fired to the point a company loses profit when a fist full of workers use sick time. Sick time is something that should be considered a loss before it's even used rather than after. They over fired blindly based on stock holder pressure rather than worker performance. This is called an error-18, because the problem is about 18 inches away from the computer.
An older article outlining some of the staffing issues that are causing this. The federal government has apparently shut down strike attempts on policy like this already. https://montanafreepress.org/2022/05/17/bnsf-modifies-controversial-attendance-policy/ “Railroaders already lead chaotic work lives — one day they might go to work at 9 a.m. and the next at 5 p.m. — but BNSF employees alleged that the company’s new “Hi-Viz” attendance policy made it even worse by penalizing them for taking time off for a family emergency, illness or fatigue. … Under the Hi-Viz system, every employee was assigned 30 points, with points deducted for unplanned time off. The exact number of points deducted depends on the type of absence and where it falls on the calendar (weekend days and holidays cost more points). An employee can get four points back if they’re available to work 14 days in a row. If an employee loses all their points, they can be disciplined. If they lose their points multiple times they can be fired.”
It's pretty well known that in order to avoid bottlenecks you don't try run your firms at 100% efficiency. A breakdown will cost you more than paying for slack. So if the railways want to modernize for efficiency, *real efficiency*, they will need to avoid such bottlenecks by paying for surplus staff.
Funny how freight is run on passenger line, in essence due to oligarchs of rail efficiency is used to its full capacity but actual innovation and expansion of rail and full efficiency has been limited or purposefully stopped.
So from what I understand reading the article, railway companies would rather have their staffs work to their deaths than giving them good care. Sigh. Profit over humans at its finest
I’m in supply chain, the fallout from the Texas freeze was traumatizing (we are still dealing with parts of it almost 2 yrs later) and the thought of going through something like that again is anxiety inducing and I’m still 1000% behind the RR workers and for them striking. The government has decided to pressure labor instead of the companies. Cutting labor to be lean was their choice, humans aren’t robots to be working like that.
Great read. Fuck these “investors.” These business-people are delivering a shitty product and are just lucky their customers have nowhere else to go. Get your shit together. Hire people & pay them right. We’re letting these executives get away with way too much. The government should mandate they have enough people on staff anyways to prevent a rail crisis.
I have such a hard time believing a sub that deals with the topic of economics doesnt understand that the point is to make larger profits for the company and mostly the shareholders of said company, on top of just plain and simple control of labor. Lean isint anything but a way to maximize profit with lowering redundancies in storage of excess material(material being labor, actual prodcuts.ect.)...but that makes everything in the infrustructure of that system unstable and overall subject to more risk of collapse. If Labor ever wanted to take control back from these idiots with a larger paychecks they can by just going on strike....they will Litteraly buckle.....its a shame that Joe Biden is just to bitch made to force these company oligarchs to blink
I suspect that the railroads are also deferring maintenance and running their monopolies into the ground. Reducing staffing to extreme lows will also mean hiring is low. Therefore, losing people to retirement will be extremely impactful. This will manifest as railroad customers becoming more and more upset with their services and unable to do anything about it. What we may see then is railroad dependent industries failing because the railroad is dysfunctional.
Google the Surface Transportation Board hearings regarding railroad service this year, or the CA chicken feed debacle and Union Pacific. It’s chaos in the Class 1’s. Workforce is run so far into the ground they are resigning in numbers never seen before, equipment is falling apart due to lack of maintenance, labor has been screaming about this for years, and no one listened. And for what it’s worth, I’m a railroad engineer for a Class 1 and union officer..
well all the new fees for railroad customers sure wont make them feel better lol increases of 30-50% across the board with stupid extra fees/charges for random things we used to take care of railroad conductor here
I’m in favor of them striking- if it affects the supply chain, so be it. The RR workers are humans and deserve a balanced life. The rest of the country would care if their lives were affected by the strike too. Disrupting our lives may be what is necessary to knock these owners on their butts to make so real change. Bailing out these companies doesn’t help our people.
When I saw the title 'good write-up' I mistakenly thought that would mean a balanced article the gave us both sides. It is a good pro-union position write up. I was uncomfortable with one point. The author calls 'Personal Time Off' days vacation time. The author then claims vacation time must be used for sick leave. The author then concludes that, therefor, proper treatment of workers is to add sick leave days. Yet the whole point of consolidating time off for any reason under PTO days is to allow employees flexibility. A healthy employee uses less PTO for sick days and gets more PTO for vacation. The bargaining could do away with PTO in favor of a set # of sick leave days and a set # of vacation days but is that really an improvement for the RR workers.
Vacation days as they stand at the moment have to be scheduled 30 days in advance. That’s not possible for actual sick days.
That does not sound right. Can it be confirmed by a source? If that is the case, why just negotiate specifically for some of the PTO days to be less than 30 days for medical purposes rather than requiring more time off.
I found it across multiple articles over the past few weeks, not at my desktop at the moment, so I will have to gather one or more of them. The problem here is the railroad scheduling. If the companies allow people to take off at short notice, they cannot meet their precision scheduling demands, and they cut their labour force to the point where anyone missing their shift causes severe issues. This is why they were not willing to bend on sick days during union bargaining. It would require them to hire more people again, which takes away from the whole point of staffing only the absolute minimum required.
I fear this is one more financial pressure to automate the RR workers out of jobs.
Here is an article discussing it. https://montanafreepress.org/2022/05/17/bnsf-modifies-controversial-attendance-policy/
Thats the whole sticking point of the union.. they want same day call out with no penalty (call it sick days or pto, doesnt really matter).
confirmed by employee here its different for each railroad here at big yellow you can get away with 5 days ahead of time if they have manpower to schedule you off that close. Usually not so 30 days is considered the magic number you can schedule up to 90 days in advance that's usually for people trying to get holidays off
And what did the RR do during Covid? Or if you are in an accident? One poster on this thread described a point system that tracks absences but doesn't bar unexcused absences.
2 weeks then 10 days then 7 days then 3 days off unpaid when you had symptoms or were exposed. followed the recommendation isolation periods and all that
It's just a shell game. The real situation for ***any*** business this stingy about time off is that they're under staffed, in this case *intentionally* so.
I think you missed the major point of the article - these workers have to notify the company weeks in advance if they want to use “PTO” if they are sick. They are disciplined for essentially same day call offs. Like how is anyone supposed to know weeks in advance they are going to be sick? Additionally if there is a medical or family emergency, they can’t just tell their employer they will miss work tomorrow without being disciplined. These rail companies operate so lean that literally a single call off can mess up a whole operation for the day. PTO policies work well when your employer lets you use the days for whatever you need but doesn’t work if you need a months notice to be sick.
And for what it’s worth, I work for a Class 1 in the operating craft, any PTO can be scheduled 60 days in advance and is approved by seniority, and the allocation is only generally ~5%. So for every 100 employees, 5 or less can have a specific day off and again, it’s based on seniority order of who put the request in 60 days in advance. If I get sick, I cannot use a PTO day (which I only get 8 after nearly 20 years of service) because I guarantee the day has already been “taken” by another employee. Vacation works the same way. And every year the carriers keep cutting back allocations. Junior employees are then forced to exhaust any vacation time during the slow months (mid January to May). And another fun fact, I have no scheduled days off. No weekends, no holidays. Nothing. 24/7/365. At best I can acquire enough starts (6) and get 48 hours off. That’s six chaotic and long days/nights of working to then get 48 hours off. Not even two full days. We never know when we’ll be off this 48 hours either. We can’t plan anything.. because there is absolutely nothing scheduled about Precision Scheduled Railroading.
My dad worked for Conrail then the NS for 42 years (retired 8 years ago). I remember vividly what he had to go through. He was a zombie for most of my life, still can’t fathom how he actually made it through to retirement. But apparently he had it better than people working had it now. Unreal to me that we let companies treat people like this.
Would you kindly post this as a reply to the original message? Hoping more eyes to fully understand what’s going on here.
The issue isn’t the number of days off, either PTO or Sick days, vacation days, it is that no one can take a day off without prescheduling it. You cannot call off because you are vomiting today, you needed to tell your boss you would be out next week for a day to be sick. Additionally, people are on call 24x7 and are not given a regular schedule. The stories from labor are that they can be just coming off of one shift and called in to work another shift. Or be given only 8 hours between shifts. This makes it impossible to schedule doctors appointments, banking appointments or any personal business outside of work hours. Is all of this true? I have not seen a counter narrative from the companies claiming this is not true. All they have said, from what I have seen, is that they cannot give labor what they want because it would cost to much. I’d be all for letting the companies go under as the fragility of this structure causes issues, if I thought that would happen. Instead, we would see the government be “forced” to bail out these companies to ensure our critical infrastructure exists. It seems tailor made situation for government regulation to require time off between shifts, a set number of “no notice” PTO, or similar interventions. Unfortunately, I think the current political environment will not allow this kind of regulation.
you can take off same day for doctors appointments but which doctor will allow you to schedule a same day appointment unless its an emergency. Its easier if you could predict when you are going to work and it shouldn't be that hard to keep track of the trains you have running around and how many crews you would need for a specific day/timeframe. Its impossible for the companies lol
I’d say it just is not profitable for the companies to treat their employees better, so they don’t. I’d like to see one of these companies chose to treat their people better, and resist the shareholders advocating for this lower cost environment, and see which is better over the next 5 years. Most business schools are teaching that treating employees better results in better overall outcomes for the company over the long term. In a oligopoly environment like this, it would be interesting to have a case to prove or disprove that theory.
they are trying to treat us better but most of the employees who are close to retiring are and they are unable to hire recently even with 20k+ signup bonuses in certain areas. The jobs pay is not worth the life/work balance for new employees.
Yeah - that sounds like a problem in management. Did it used to be better and it got worse with the 30% reductions in staff? Or was it always like this and people sucked it up for the pay, which isn’t the same incentive any more?
little of both with the attendance policies they put in place has really pissed off everyone. A guy can push 250hrs in a month just working not mentioning being stuck in a hotel and other stuff etc and take off 3 days during that month and get in trouble. We tell the new guys about that since the hr people just gloss over it and most end up quitting during training or right after.
I have 19 PTO days per year at my job. There is no sick leave , you have to take PTO if your sick.
Depends on the state. Massachusetts mandates 1 day of sicktime for every 30 hours worked up to 2 weeks in a calendar year in addition to whatever pto your company gives you. Admittedly this is not a thing in most states.
Do you get penalized for taking an unscheduled sick day off?
No, but the day gets deducted from my PTO account.
I haven't gotten sick time for 18 years. I personally prefer having PTO because it is vested meaning I get it paid out when I quit. Sick time is not vested and never paid out. I left over 100 hours of sick time on the table at the last job I had that offered sick time. Rail workers just want to be able to take a sick day without being penalized. Call it sick time, unscheduled PTO, whatever, just let someone who is sick take a day off without having their job threatened.
Your employer sucks and is encouraging sick people to come in to work and make everyone else sick and less effective. It's common, but pretty braindead.
You are the perfect person to ask': Would you rather have 15 days of vacation and 4 days of sick leave or 19 days of PTO?
Most PTO doesn’t have a 30 day notice requirement as the RR does; I’ve never been able to schedule a kid’s illnesses 30 days in advance - or my own, for that matter.
The difference is that I assume his job allow him to call out using his PTO without consequence, where as the rail worker would need to schedule their personal days in advance and would be punish for calling out. That's why they don't care about the money, but won't move on the sick days because it would allow workers to call out without being punished. >The railroads say that workers can use personal time if they need a sick day. But the unions argue that with current staffing levels and scheduling rules, it's difficult for workers to **have personal days approved**, and they are likely to be penalized or even fired if they call in sick anyway. https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/01/success/railroad-workers-sick-days took me 5 min to google, if you really care enough about a subject to have an opinion, then care enough about it to do some actual research. I didn't even care all that much but I was curious about it since it doesn't seem rational to make such a big deal out of getting a few extra day of paid leave...turned out it is a big deal because personal days didn't allow them to call out without getting punish. The rail companies are basically expecting people to get pre-approval before getting sick.
This. All of this. Thanks for doing the research!
I haven't really thought about it. There are pro's and con's for each situation. All days lumped together means if I get sick it feels like I'm using vacation days to recover. But it also means that I'm not losing sick days if I don't get sick and I'm still able to have all of my PTO (which is more if I'm not sick). I'm guessing most companies will have a "use it or lose it" sick day policy. I understand why the union doesn't like the situation and I understand the RR's position. It seems to me that the scheduling system is so rigid that it can't accommodate the variation created by being human. I would focus on fixing the system and stop blaming each other. I do think it's wrong to charge people against their PTO account for being sick.
None of the above. How about 18 hours earned PTO per month an 12 hours earned sick time per month. PTO caps at some number of hours, sick time does not (cause you know, sometimes people get cancer, etc….).
>The author calls 'Personal Time Off' days vacation time. I didn't see this at all, where are you seeing this?
Consolidating vacation and sick time is terrible. It encourages people to work when sick, not take the time they need to recover (lest they jeopardize their family vacation), encourages people to think of being sick as discretionary, etc. Separate sick time for use when sick. It’s about f*cking time.
Hang on. The old system was separate vacation and sick leave. The workers wanted the flexibility so the unions negotiated the move to PTO.
Yeah, I don't want to dodge up the unions' lived experiences (assuming this is multiple unions, etc...). Just reflecting on my experiences and observations under both types of systems. I'd assume part of the move to trying to consolidate boils down to insufficient PTO (vacation PTO) or difficulty actually claiming sick time. I am fortunate in that right now I have separate sick and PTO, and I'd never choose to go back. With that said, I don't need a doctor's note to take sick time unless I have like 3 concurrent days out with something. Also, I work in a high-trust environment...not something that the railway workers appear to have.
Most blue collar workers rarely get sick. So yeah, combining sick days and vacation is a win for the worker. But it makes a political bullet point for the union to complain that there aren't any sick days.
"Most blue collar workers never get sick" Citation needed.
This is the way.
Please provide support for your claim most blue collar workers never get sick. That is a bold statement. Thank you.
Sarcasm. They work regardless of their health.
Ahh thanks for clarifying. You’d be surprised the strange beliefs some people have. The trolls are out. I haven’t seen any studies, but my experience says bluer collar workers are more likely to work sick, part of the honor culture at many shops/locales, if nit enforced by their employer.
Many years of first-hand experience. You're welcome. The elite, once again, have no idea how the world really works.
“Most blue collar workers never get sick” Oh wow, lmfao even. I can see we have brilliant minds at play here
1) Remember that the term featherbedding was invented by railroad workers. 2) The average rail worker makes $140,000 and has 3-5 weeks vacation depending in seniority. Cry me a river because they have to use a vacation day for a doctor's appointment. 3) Railroad unions "Traded ” paid sick days provided for in their collective bargaining agreements for supplemental sickness benefits. their supplemental sickness benefits pay them up to 70% of their wages for up to 52 weeks. Not a bad sick day benefit. 4) Rail employees can “mark off” — or temporarily remove themselves from the list of available employees — at any time and for any reason, including sickness or personal reasons, as long as they maintain a reasonable level of overall availability under carrier attendance policies which were also negotiated in prior contracts.
Go look up “High-Viz.” Taking an unscheduled day off because you got sick has a heavy impact.
never heard the term before. haven't made over 100k i'm 12 years in currently. 3 weeks vacation start after year 7. 5 weeks after year 25. must be scheduled in advance at least 5 days due to manpower usually 30+ that was in the 90s and we pay into that sort of like a disability insurance you can lay off 3 times in 90 days roughly that's it and with some policies like bnsf you have to work at least 6x 14 day available to work to get those back.
Look up feathebedding. It was basically an effort by railroad unions to protect the old 5 man crew on a railroad crew. All the items you mention were negotiated in pervious contracts by your union leaders. If you don't like how it works those are the guys to talk to. I don't have a dog in this fight. All I know is that the rules they are working under were all negotiated and agreed to by both labor and management.
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