That’s a long-winded way of saying: ‘We’d rather make more money than care about the health of our employees.’
This makes precision scheduling impossible... what this really is, is let's make all the workers wait (for free!) while we figure out how we can finally get the freight in monstrously long trains moving through a system that wasn't designed for it.
The SECOND problem is that slashing the labor pool, and thus reducing the labor cost at the expense of reliability and system performance, appears to be the actual goal of PSR.
I stand with the workers, no essential worker should be forced to work "on-call". Especially not people so important to safety and National Security.
They are 8 hours on, and 8 hours off. The on call call is also 90 minutes ahead of time. So more like 6.5 hours off.
Many end up sleeping in the parking lot.
There's an alarm that rings every minute on the train - a dead man's switch. Oftentimes this is the only thing keeping them awake.
To top it off, no sick leave.
And these people are overseeing fucking trains.
Congress backing these companies in any way is absolutely disgusting.
Just to clarify, did you mean slashing a given company’s jobs? The labor pool is the group of people in the job market available to perform a function. Slashing _that_ would drive salaries and thus labor costs up, not down.
As soon as the Soviet Union went away, the negotiating power of labor started to weaken.
The statements above are not to be taken as an endorsement of the various kinds of genocide and horrors Communism created in the places where it ruled. It is just an observation that power, or the implicit threat of applying it, is what rules in the end. Lots of words are used to cover that raw reality.
Instead of single random days off to get healthcare taken care of, they'll have random worker unavailability of weeks, months, or forever [0]. But, it's postponed so their numbers this quarter look good, but the system is rotting.
Any forking idiot can make numbers look good for a while by rotting the underlying system. This seems to be the trained remit of MBAs. Outside of managing the already-earned profits in the accounts, MBAs really are toxic to the long-term health of any business and especially its workers.
[0]from the article: >>Last June, one middle-aged union engineer postponed a doctor’s visit for work then died of a heart attack on the job weeks later. A conductor who spoke with the Times began feeling rundown last year but declined to see a doctor for fear of being disciplined for taking an unplanned day off. Instead, he waited months for the next doctor’s appointment that aligned with a scheduled day off. He then learned he’d been suffering from an infection that could have been treated with medication weeks earlier but would now require surgery.
Every large company would rather make more money than spend more on labor. Railroads are in the unique position of having the government break their workers strikes.
Maybe this is better than the old way, but I still don’t see it as optimal.
If their target is to profit 10 cents on every $1 in cost, does that mean they wouldn’t take a job that profits 9 cents off a $1 in cost?
As a shareholder, I just care about total profit. If a railroad grew its revenue 3x but halves it’s margin, I’d be as happy as can be, profits just went up 50%. But it’s PSR would look awful.
I wanted to come here to say the same thing, so I'll quote you instead. Greed over all other things, how swell.
From wikipedia:
Precision railroading or precision scheduled railroading (PSR) is a concept in freight railroad operations pioneered by E. Hunter Harrison in 1993, and adopted by nearly every North American Class I railroad. It shifts the focus from older practices, such as unit trains, hub and spoke operations and individual car switching at hump yards, to emphasize point-to-point freight car movements on simplified routing networks. Under PSR, freight trains operate on fixed schedules, much like passenger trains, instead of being dispatched whenever a sufficient number of loaded cars are available. In the past, intermodal trains and general merchandise trains operated separately; under PSR they are combined as needed, typically with distributed power. Inventories of freight cars and locomotives are reduced and fewer workers are employed for a given level of traffic. The result is often substantial improvement in railroad operating ratios, and other financial and operating metrics; at the cost of less-reliable service, particularly to smaller customers, long-term capacity issues, increased derailments and other safety risks associated with longer trains, and crew fatigue.
PSR is the reason why half of the US rail fleet is in storage, they are no longer needed. this has significant positive and negative benefits. On the positive side, this includes the environmental impact, on the negative side, it makes US rail systems totally unusable for anyone other then the freight railroads.
Freight railroads (and rail in general) remains one of the most regulated business out there, but the rail companies are aggressively pushing back on new regulations that would address significant problems.
As a matter of public policy, we should make companies bear the true costs of their business and have those costs reflected in their pricing, rather than foist those costs on the public under the table and off the books.
So it makes the companies more money at the expense of everything else and you think that detracts from the OPs point?
Your comment is accurate, I just want to put this here as an analogy to help people in case they read your comment as a defense of PSR or the rail industry as a whole.
Yeah, coming from a country with strong labour laws, it's mind boggling that this is legal in the US.
But also only “blue” led states have minimum required paid sick laws, so at least they are trying. Given the option between red and blue, it seems obvious which one to support if you support paid leave for all.
Agree, and furthermore, I'd argue that the blue "Third Way"[1] ushered in by Bill Clinton in the US is what hugely screwed labor, and 20 years later leads to the election of DJT.
Why can't Biden/congress make the agreement that the unions want and ratify that? There are multiple ways to avoid the strike; I don't understand why this has to be on ownership's terms. Long term, (or at least in 2024, which is about as long term as we get in American politics anymore) this is going to let team Red claim to be the pro-worker team.
Edit: A more extreme example; there is a rule that says airlines mustn't make pilots work more than a certain number of hours without a rest period. This rule applies to all airlines. This rule was introduced to reduce the number of planes crashed by tired pilots.
We (in America) saw the costs of this "just in time" slackless logistics in the economic reboot as we rebounded from the first waves of COVID: logjams at the ports.
Good system design allows for the absorption of interstitial disruptions.
There's a reason tall buildings sway in the wind; if they were so rigid that they didn't sway, they'd risk breaking when there is strong wind.
One thing people don't generally know is that as developed in Japan it's a quality control system. If a jig at a supplier gets out of alignment and parts made with it are out of spec and not noticed until assembly, you're better off with a feedback loop measured in hours instead of months.
COVID and the silicon shortage ... I'm not even sure JIT has any relevance, one of the biggest problems in the US was car makers canceling orders when as you could easily predict from historical plague patterns the demand for cars would go up as people left cities. Demand for a whole bunch of things changed due to the secular changes in the economy like work from home, JIT's shorter feedback loop might even help with that.
But chips are indeed one thing that shouldn't be done in JIT style. They inherently take a long time to make and are relatively easy to test. Toyoda was said to have changed their inventory strategy for them after the disruptions of the earthquake and tsunami.
And then there are disruptions like a fire taking out a fab line, I remember this happening in Japan for embedded type chips. Unlikely any relevant inventory policy would save you from that especially if there's an increase in demand where stockpiling won't save you.
The industry can't even in theory surge old nodes for which the equipment is no longer manufactured. We hear a not uncommon pattern is that they'll just suddenly stop making chips forever because they can no longer fix a critical machine.
It seems like the More Bad Advice crowd wants to keep living in a fantasy world.
Agree on the point - we have a huge amount of fragility built into the system, and just - in - time logistics are a huge driver of that.
I am a supervisor on a commuter rail, and in this respect they operate in a similar fashion.
Like any other business, profits are key. Someone figures out staffing. Pretty much cut and dry. For a line from terminal A to B, there is one train per hour in each direction, 48 trains in a day. We need for example a supervisor at each end, and one engineer and conductor per train. So, say that gives us 48 train crews, and 6 supervisors per day. So, we hire 6 supervisors, and 51 train crews - in case someone calls out sick.
What happens if someone calls out sick? A supervisor? We keep costs down there by requiring the on duty supervisor to stay an additional shift. A crew member? We have that extra crew. If we have too many people call out sick, we force on duty crews to stay on overtime. We don't want to be doing that, now do we? That affects the bottom line.
If no crew is available at all, then the train doesn't run. This is also bad, as it upsets the customer.
Running with a "skeleton crew" ensures we are not spending more on labor than we have to. This is because in some markets, paying fewer workers overtime still comes in at less than having more people to whom benefits are paid.
So, the employees are intimidated into coming to work every day.
What the freight railroads are doing here is forcing the employees to use their vacation pay when they are sick to discourage them from calling out sick at all, in effect penalizing them for calling out sick. That vacation you had planned with the family? Either lose a day (which may require you to cancel altogether), or come to work sick. If they have paid sick leave, they'd use it when sick rather than showing up to work.
My agency uses a different tactic, just as effective in the employer's view, but no less exploitative of the employee. When an employee calls out sick, a Special Inspector may be sent to their home to check if they are really sick and at home. If the employee doesn't answer the door (They're sleeping and don't hear the door? Doesn't matter), they're charged with falsely calling out sick, and face suspension or termination.
Edit: This industry can be very time sensitive. It may not seem to you a big deal if say a train is late, but cargo is critical or a passenger gets to work late, that is not a good thing. The shipper may take some action if it happens enough. That passenger may start driving.
I'll never understand why people think it's alright to infantilise other adults like this. If they're sick and go to the doctor, that doesn't count? If they're sleeping (you know, because they're unwell) _that's_ not ok either? I'm not sure why you're advertising this kind of disrespect like its a genuine alternative.
Employees get draconian not just because they're wanna-be tyrants. They sometimes get draconian because they're tired of being gamed by a subset of their employees.
I would be willing to place a wager it's similar at freight, on the subject of time off: no guaranteed holidays. My commuter rail runs 24-7, the only way an employee gets the holiday off is if it falls on their regular day off.
At my railroad a lot of the workers did not have the resources to go to college or get a job with better conditions. So, while morale is low, some take the view "it could be worse." I'm sure you get a lot of that there, too.
> If no crew is available at all, then the train doesn't run.
Cool, then treat them better before they all walk out.
Because there are many people for whom that job is extremely well-paid compared to other options they have available. And people put up with tons of shitty situations when they don't really feel they have an alternative.
This song from 1928 indicates this is not a new problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8-PZFPCs3g
This is how many (most) jobs work. There is a bank of "Paid Time Off" (PTO) which can be used flexibly for sickness or vacation. The term bank is used purposefully to describe it, since it can be paid out as pay at separation. Many employers also limit the total amount of PTO an employee can accumulate. This is done to control potential liabilities from the bank.
While I don't call for the elimination of sick/PTO/etc, I also recognize that they are essentially irrational, similar to employer sponsored health care as an artifact of tax privileged "fringe benefits" that come with working in a large org. Funds paid to a worker for not working come from funds withheld from the worker when working. Sick/PTO benefit just makes a complicated system on top of the work/pay transaction.
US jobs, really. The concept of sick days / requiring taking time off from some pool always struck me as a) horribly abusive, b) ripe for employee abuse (sick days when not sick), c) bad for everyone (workers work when sick).
I grew up in Switzerland which doesn't have those. And (to prevent abuse...) you are required to have a doctor's note when sick for more than 3 days. Of course, a bunch of commenters find this kind of requirement abusive... (There is no system that pleases everyone?)
For "knowledge workers" as most of HN is, they can just not show up today and then do today's work tomorrow. But something like a railroad ceases to function at some point and that has severe repercussions.
Now likely the "railroad" problem could be solved with some work, imagine a nation-wide company that handles railroad staffing emergencies, with on-duty employees available to go to a stranded train at a moment's notice. There's some dollar amount this would cost (even if you utilized jets and helicopters, those are just a cost) and it'd work. But that cost is what the railroads don't want to pay, as they could also do the same thing by hiring more employees (and have some percentage of them "idling" at any given time).
It should not matter to the employer why an employee is not working.
If the issue is insufficient time off for illnesses, then the negotiation should be for more paid time off (PTO) in general.
This eliminates all the resources wasted on catching fraudulent use of sick days.
This is how it works in the military. So shouldn't you provide the same benefits? You can't expect to treat people this way without holding your end of the bargain. Namely with guaranteed job security, full paid benefits, set time off and vacation, clear paths to promotion, etc. etc.
Capitalists want to have their cake and eat it too. There's no concept of a social contract anymore.
Here, we see the tug of war and companies trying to have it both ways.
The solution, as others have pointed out, is that this should be a regulatory requirement rather than negotiated business-by-business.
There are not really any "losers" in such a fix: The workers get a more appealing and reasonable benefit package and life. Managers keep highly paid managing jobs. The businesses keep making large profits, perhaps a tiny sliver less. The stock remains very valuable, whatever variance this causes would likely not even be noticed among the daily swings of the market. Consumers never even notice their new widgets cost pennies more because of a tiny change in freight rates, etc.
Congress did not see what the winning play was, and instead perpetuated the bad situation.
Absolutely unacceptable (to them). They will fight tooth and nail to prevent any federal action that could harm their bottom line. It's one of the most predictable plays in American politics.
But if they all operated at slightly less margin, this dynamic would not occur; and the vast bulk of investors are not going to flee from an otherwise stable and long-term profitable asset class because it becomes a tiny (perhaps not even noticed) increment less lucrative. The vast bulk of investors are not going to march with (financial) pitchforks to Washington about this.
Think of the alternative: that no stockholder in any business would ever tolerate companies offering reasonable sick day policies. That is obviously not true; in most industries, at most companies, there is some kind of sick policy. So we should look at what is unique about this industry for the cause.
Monopoly behaving like a monopoly. The only real power the employees have in this situation is to leave, especially when the government's interests are also not aligned with employee interests.
Numbers tell us there are 10M open jobs in the US. Obviously leaving the devil you know for the devil you don't is not an easy decision, but I wonder how possible it even is? Are the rail employees in a position in which those 10M open jobs are not viable alternatives for them and how 'real' is the 10M number?
My cousin is a tree guy who runs a crew. He has been with the company more than twenty years and just now started getting a fair cut. They didn't have a choice but to cave to his demands (which were quite modest) because they simply can't run their business without him. They also promised something in the deal that never came through (a $300k piece of equipment to make his job easier).
I had been screaming at him for years that they had no viable business without him and that he should be getting a bigger cut. He just didn't have the business sense to believe it or leverage his power. He got fed up and had a much better offer from a startup and handed in his resignation. They panicked and started pitching better deals to him. Which he took.
This lock-in give the companies more leeway to abuse the workers if the unions are prevented from functioning to protect them. Which is what's happened thanks to Congress throwing the workers under the bus.
Moreover, I'm more than happy to pay a little more for things in the long term to ensure that there's enough slack in the system to absorb the shocks that periodically come around.
We've just spent almost three years slowly killing everyone in healthcare because every "inefficiency" in the system has been trimmed to the bone. We've been asking people to shoulder crushing loads to make up for the lack of what is normally excess capacity. We shouldn't need a reminder that all that inefficiency is what adds resilience to the system so soon.
Airlines claim to have learned this. They say they're reducing schedules to more realistically match their ability to absorb hiccups during the holiday travel season. Time will tell, but it seems nobody wants a repeat of last year. If you make flying awful enough, evidently people will find ways to not do it.
Maybe part of the solution is to treat other industries like the banking and finance industries. Banks get periodic stress tests; perhaps it's time to do the same for all of the other systems that we rely on holding together but don't have to think about until they're falling apart under load.
As evidenced by the fact that there is no federal law about it, and only a handful of states required a small number of paid sick days.
>Q: Why did the railroads reject proposals to add benefits on top of the framework recommended by the PEB?
>A: The request for additional benefits made by the few unions that have not ratified tentative agreements is similar to a proposal which was carefully considered and rejected by President Biden’s Presidential Emergency Board (PEB). It comes weeks after these same unions entered into tentative agreements that included the most generous wage package in almost 50 years of national rail negotiations.
>The health, safety, and wellbeing of rail employees is a top priority for all railroads, and any suggestion that rail workers cannot take time off when sick is easily disproven. Rail employees can and do take time off for sickness and have comprehensive paid sickness benefits starting, depending upon craft, after as few as four days of absence and lasting up to 52 weeks. The structure of these benefits is a function of decades of bargaining where unions have repeatedly agreed that short-term absences would be unpaid in favor of higher compensation for days worked and more generous sickness benefits for longer absences.
https://raillaborfacts.org/news/bargaining-status-faq-2022/
What's happened is that the unions negotiated higher pay for worse benefits. Now some of them are leaning on friendly politicians to get the benefits they traded away back without having to give up the higher pay.
In my experience calling, text messaging, and WhatsApp has basically always had capacity issues on New Year's Eve, as literally everyone is trying to contact their family members the moment the clock hits twelve. Failed connections/messages are basically expected, and many people even intentionally call earlier or later to avoid this.
I wish it was as cut and dry as telling them to just strike, but I don’t think it’s that simple.
But instead they get the same treatment the airlines do: public support for private profit.
Wow what a run-on sentence! :P
This isn't a push against your overall point, but I think a larger systemic view is necessary. E.g., maybe the idea of retirement after 20 years is outdated. Or maybe the system needs to be re-thought in terms of how to keep that paradigm funded, particularly in economies with declining birth rates.
If they strike, the trains just won't run.
We cancelled all flights in the USA for two days after 9/11 and it really didn't do much of anything major, but Walmart turns over all stock every month or so, and groceries are turned over much faster.
Trains also provide a significant amount of coal still used to fuel power plants.
Otherwise these people will strike to gain some decency in their labor conditions, but it will be "wasted" effort in the sense that other industries will still lag behind with similar problems. Wouldn't it be better to have a more general change that applies to everybody? Companies are greedy, they'll always try to get as much as possible from their workers, if law allows for it.
(note: not american. I'm just an observer from afar, in an european country where a lot of these worker rights are coded in the law; companies can offer perks above those rights, but never below)
It might not remain legal to strike (for this set of workers on this occasion).
On several occasions, Congress has intervened to delay or prohibit strikes. For example, in 1994, Congress passed P.L. 103-380, which extended the final cooling-off period by four months to allow the United Transportation Union and the Soo Line Railroad to continue negotiations. In 1970, P.L. 91-226 imposed a tentative agreement ratified by three unions but rejected by a fourth, similar to H.J.Res. 100.
Each day the rail industry strikes costs 2 billion dollars.
This type of loss would most certainly have a permanent effect on prices. Given how bad inflation is currently, this would further drive inflation higher. This complicates the decision to strike when people are already having trouble affording basic necessities as it is.
Sure would. Sounds like the railroad should give sick days or be nationalized.
Clearly the Biden administration understands that these factors, when combined with a huge supply shock caused by a rail strike, would devastate households (the vast majority of which don't earn premium tech salaries - the median household income in the U.S. is $70K).
How many millions would need to go bankrupt before you would reverse your position? This is the calculus being done by Biden's admin.
Isn't the largest share of household debt a home mortgage? Implying that talking about the rail strike is a distraction from the root cause. There are still real consequences to Americans from the rail strike, but (very much like the student debt crisis) it seems like tap dancing around the root cause doesn't really fix the problem.
Inflation is largely caused by the same issues driving this rail strike: corporate profits. Maybe Biden should actually tackle directly that rather than continuing to shit on the working class.
Now this wasn't terrible, mind you, because I did get to disconnect and enjoy some quiet time in my private room. But it was obvious the whole thing was still run like it had been for decades.
There's always some vocal sociopaths, I mean libertarians who won the career lottery coming out to defend this behavior on here too. Sad it's so internalised that workers should suffer for their employer.
This means that if benefits are increased, one way or another, that comes out of the employee's paycheck.
Nothing comes for free. The so-called "employer's contribution" to Social Security is actually paid by the employee in the form of a reduced paycheck. The same for the "employer's paid sick leave benefit".
Or maybe it comes out of stock buybacks.
What they can't do is reduce staffing further if they're already operating with a skeleton crew, which is what additional time off would do. This appears to be one of those cases where efficiency and resilience in a system are at odds.
Aggressively cutting staffing levels to the bare minimum required to operate leads very directly to worse service, more disruptions, and more sick and injured workers.
It leads less directly to lower wages, via higher unemployment, a catastrophic loss of institutional memory, as there's rarely anyone in your position when you're hired—you're just expected to figure it all out once you get there, rather than have anyone who can train you.
Lean staffing is devastating the middle and working class, and it needs to die a thousand deaths.
It is important to remember that the railroad industry was THE original big money monopoly that made its money exploiting workers. It's just continuing its tradition in the hands of Warren Buffet and similar owners.
There are also monopolistic forces driving control of certain tracks, routes, and stations that make deviating from this system hard.
I would think breaking the rail industries monopoly would be a priority to giving the laborers what they want.
Such double standards don't do well to mend confidence.
That said, I won't be surprised if there are sick outs in the coming weeks. This negotiation might be over for now, but it's not over for good.
I'm holding out hope for a wildcat strike the way this went down. Remember, union negotiators sent this sellout contract for a membership vote, and now it's being imposed by the party that at least pays lip service to labor. People are going to be pissed. Teachers won some solid victories over the past few years doing wildcat strikes against top brass' wishes, and these guys genuinely have the whole economy by the throat.
It's also going to be interesting how this plays out during the next election cycle.
People still talk about COVID testing as if it is a "Are You Contagious?" testing. Even medical facilities keep pushing COVID testing even though it doesn't change the diagnosis, treatment, or outcome; even if you test negative for COVID, you could (1) still have COVID, or (2) still have another contagious disease. If you test positive, you could (1) have COVID, (2) have something else similar enough to COVID, or (3) be a false positive.
It's entirely inconsistent and useless. If your sick and you might be contagious, stay home. If your not sick (or sick but not contagious), then you do you.
For some people their infection with covid is going to be mild, and their infection with a cough or cold is going to feel to them similar to covid. But for other people covid is very much more severe than a cough cold.
I have cancer, I'm going through chemo. I must not catch a cold, because it could be really serious. But I really must not catch covid, because it could kill me.
I'm not expecting society to live in lock down to accommodate me, but if an event asks people to do lateral flow testing before attendance, and someone tests and is positive, I'd like them to not attend, or attend with masking and social distancing. I don't want them to attend, not mask, not socially distance, and then near the end of the event say "oh, by the way, I tested positive for covid this morning". I don't attend events because this is a thing that people do.
(X) Doubt
If you're not very sick then sure the treatment isn't going to change much (just fight it off with OTC drugs). But if you actually need any sort of intervention (rare) they'll give you different drugs than say an Ebola infection.
> If your not sick (or sick but not contagious), then you do you.
Unclear how you know if you're not contagious if you don't actually know what you're sick with.
- Take back the railroads that the public built and maintained. Then charge commercial rail for the use of them. This is a huge issue since it currently is a major limitation of passenger rail in the US, and once again, having these be public could help spur the necessary improvements for passenger rail.
- Breaking up the railroad monopolies. We've broken up companies before, so there is precedent to do it again.
- Nationalize the railroad companies. This is highly unlikely it will ever happen in the US, but it should be discussed. It could become something similar to the post office.
A great deal of Trump's otherwise inexplicable popularity is that he's a 1970s NYC Democrat just like Reagan in the 1980s was a self-described FDR Democrat and he doesn't hate these people. Doesn't care or do much for them, but this is a palpable difference from the GOPe.
Okay, it's a scheduling problem. It's an optimization problem. It's possibly to a significant extent an optimization under uncertainty problem. Oh, and it's an optimization over time problem.
Did my Ph.D. dissertation in one of those, not for trains but for airplanes. Oh, for math majors in the audience, yes, did use Fubini's theorem (the core of the proof that the work really was in a very general sense actually optimal) and measurable selection.
Such problems can be challenging in practice for business operations, for the math, and for the computing.
And, right, the problem is no doubt, oh, I mean, even quite simplified versions of the problem, in NP-complete or if don't like that fact then can be challenging to get even approximately optimal solutions.
But, however look at the complexity of the problem, I'd
Guess: Including a 7 day paid sick leave should be possible to include in the problem.
That is, just because are attacking a challenging optimization problem, there is likely no fundamental or even very important practical reason can't also include as a constraint, feature, property, requirement, whatever, something like 7 days of paid sick leave.
Besides, we're talking about scheduling workers to run freight trains, maybe 100 cars long, with several big Diesel-electric engines, across major parts of the US. Uh, just the Diesel oil costs what? And in comparison for that trip the workers cost what? I'd guess a small fraction of even just the Diesel oil. Then there is the capital cost and maintenance cost of all that equipment. E.g., the track has to be in really good condition or ... don't want even to imagine what the costs could be, i.e., the term train wreck is used broadly as a really big disaster. And just a little maintenance on one of those Diesel-electric engines costs, how many hours of worker pay?
My nose smells more politics than business, applied math, computing, technology, etc.
And CSX and Norfolk Southern's response is just: "too bad"
There is no equivalent here in Germany, if you're sick you're sick and you do get paid (long-term illnesses are handled differently, but that's almost an entirely separate topic). This is really a subject that should be regulated from the top, and not something everyone has to fight for over and over again.
Trains got longer than the yards they are assembled in and that results in 10-12 extra hours. Now multiply that times the number of trains per Railroad. Result is the real reason why paid leave was not given. Not as a logic way to solve a problem but as a way to avoid solving the problem that would work as workers have the least amount of power in the economic equation.
Personally, I think nationalization is good for many reasons, but just wondering how government workers collectively bargain, if at all. How does this work with USPS for example?
https://www.railwayage.com/news/fra-issues-crew-size-nprm-aa...
Can probably also optimise things such that shifts and/or journeys start and end closer to home for workers, less nights on road more overtime / less overtime when people want it etc.
And that was just the first paragraph. The use of similar terms were repeated further in the article.
Read a better article - this one isn’t worth the electrons.
In his telling (and I'm paraphrasing heavily here), PSR — as it was originally designed — was meant to get everything on precise scheduling (surprise), thereby allowing you to better predict when and where you'd need workers well in advance. That would let you better optimize not just your trains but also your workforce. If you have a schedule, you can make optimizations that keep train cars from sitting around, and your workers reap the benefits of a fixed schedule (time off, less on-call time, things like that).
In practice, getting things to run on a schedule often meant capital costs that a of these companies balked at, like upgrades to rail yards and track maintenance to keep things running on schedule. The only real part of P.S.R. that ended up getting adopted, as this article points out, is the optimization part. But without the capital investments, you don't get a precise schedule, nor do you get any of its implied benefits.
Optimizations ended up meaning things like pulling more cars with fewer trains. I don't think the article mentions this in explicit terms, but these longer trains are often a few miles long. This length means the trains don't fit in rail yards, nor do they fit in the sidings that allow Amtrak trains to pass them (which in turn keeps Amtrak trains from running on time). Since trains don't fit in the yards, they have to leave as soon as possible, and since there's no fixed scheduling, "as soon as possible" ends up meaning any time at all with little notice, meaning engineers are on call almost all the time. Plus, when you have a train that's almost 3 miles long, they're more likely to derail on curves, and staff have to walk literal miles to fix problems along the train.
There's a whole lot more to this than I can repeat off-hand on a Friday afternoon, but this issue isn't going to go away. The rail industry is untenable, and given how scared everyone is of a rail strike, it also isn't going away any time soon.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/opinion/business-economic... [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69A_UCdikE8
> A decade ago, the activist investor Bill Ackman won a proxy battle at Canadian Pacific and proceeded to replace its management with a team led by Hunter Harrison, the railway executive who’d pioneered P.S.R. After imposing the gospel of “more with less” at Canadian Pacific, Harrison left to spread the good news to the freight giant CSX. At each firm, P.S.R. succeeded at generating higher returns. Pretty soon, major investors in other railroads started calling on their firms to imitate Harrison’s methods. Testifying to the government’s Surface Transportation Board about freight rail’s performance last spring, industry analyst Rick Paterson said, “Lurking in the background is the constant threat of shareholder activism if any of the railroads’ operating ratios become outliers on the high side.”
It could be considered a key defect of American railroads that they are operated as for-profit corporations with public stock listings and shareholders. In such a scenario, so long as profits can be raised, they must be — or else hostile takeovers will be led to do so regardless. America’s government is poorly equipped to combat this with the usual hands-off approaches. They would need to either pass laws guaranteeing sick days, nationalize rail services to protect against hostile takeovers, regulate that rail networks must be operated by (for example) “B Corps”, or other similar steps taken that interfere with corporate sovereignty. Such interference is typically avoided by modern American labor politics, and so here we are.
Railroad retirement begins full strength at age 60, and looks to be $4,838/mo for an ex railroad employee and spouse. In contrast, Social Security on $130,000 earnings would be $1,919/mo if you retired at age 62. The railroads pay for the retirement expense via tax.
So yes, by US labor standards, railroad employees are quite expensive.
I'll preface this by stating that I have not looked into the railroad pension, but instead I will draw a parallel to my own. I can get 80% of my top recent pay when I retire after 32 years, which is quite generous as pensions go. The long-term cost of this is around 16-18% of payroll - 8-9% from my employer, 8-9% from me. Current cost to be in the social security program is about 12% of payroll. Increasing current retirement spending by 1.5x is enough to get you to an extremely generous pension. This is a decent amount of money but far from back-breaking.
As well, I have no clue what their benefits are like. It is quite possible they contribute to their benefits as well as most people do, which means their take home may be even less than you'd expect. I for one have employer provided health coverage where the employer contributes, as well as a portion comes out of my paycheck, with co-pays upon an office visit.
No. Railroads have the largest profit margins in American business.
> For the nation as a whole, profit margins generally sit at about 9% (8.89% to be precise), however, in transport, specifically railroads, this stands at 50.93%, the highest in the US.
https://ajot.com/news/railroads-are-usas-most-profitable-ind...
> US freight railroads are in a bit of a predicament, and it’s not just because they are going down to the wire on labor contract negotiations with their 115,000 workers.
> Large railroads, including Union Pacific Corp. and Warren Buffett's BNSF Railway Co., have juiced their profits so high by increasing efficiency and paring their workforces over the last several years that they have boxed themselves into a corner with no catalyst to keep attracting investors. Adjusted operating margins for the five largest US railroads were 41% last year, compared with 29% 10 years ago and 15% less than a couple of decades ago. Those margins are off the charts when compared with other transportation companies, including trucking, parcel, air freight, maritime shipping, airlines, you name it.
> In pushing those margins over the past five years to a level that analysts most likely would have thought were unobtainable, the railroads have angered their customers with high prices and poor service and have alienated their workers, who complain they’re being overworked after the railroads cut their ranks as much as possible.
> But far from looking to improve those relationships with customers and workers, the railroads still seem fixated on operating margins. Even as negotiations with the labor unions have dragged on for more than two years and have frozen rail workers’ salaries at 2019 levels, the railroads are asking union members to pay more out of pocket for health care.
> And no one can argue the railroads can’t afford their workers. In one example, Union Pacific, the largest publicly traded US railroad, paid investors more than $41 billion in dividends and share buybacks over five years through 2021. In the first six months of this year, the Omaha, Nebraska-based company heaped an additional $5 billion on shareholders.
> Instead of looking at the labor contract as an opportunity to win over their employees and work together to improve service — again, the key to any strategy to take truck traffic — the railroads seem to be more concerned about protecting their profit margin gains.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/railroads-get...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-08-03/railro...
The requirement for always increasing profits has resulted in mismanagers squeezing the railroad system until there is no further slack in the system. Because railroad workers form an "equal but separate" employment system to what the rest of the public sees, the public ends up staying terribly misinformed about just how different that railroad employment system is.
Since the executive classes get bonuses based on the wrong sort of incentives, the only way they can get bonuses is to abuse their workers to the point that even the public starts to notice.
> Railroad pensions are the only private pensions that I know of that are specifically called out in IRS tax forms. That has always seemed odd to me, and is probably some indication of how tightly regulated labor in the railroad business is.
Railroad workers have been kept out of the Social Security system from the very beginning. They can only get retirement benefits from the Railroad Retirement Board. Until recently (most of the changes were in 2006), many state & local government workers were also kept out of Social Security and were forced to rely on underfunded public pensions. No such changes have been made for railroad workers.
https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/retirement/planner/railroad.htm...
I'm not defending the lack of sick leave, but that profit margin figure is just wrong.
Notice the names of the railroads involved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_la...
In February 2022, BNSF Railway implemented a points attendance system named "Hi Viz" that a union president called, "the worst and most egregious attendance policy ever adopted by any rail carrier." In the system, each worker starts with 30 points and loses points for taking a day off. Workers can accrue 4 points by being on-call for 14 straight days, but any time off, even for illness or a family emergency, resets the clock. Unions representing about 17,000 workers threatened to strike over the points system, but BNSF Railway sued and won a restraining order to prevent the unions from striking.There are vacation days (guaranteed by law!). And then there is sick leave, and there is no fixed number of days.
They’re totally separate. If you’re sick, you’re sick - if you’re sick long term it’s covered by insurance. If you’re sick on holiday you even can get your vacation days back.
It’s so gross to me how this is handled in America. Certainly there are flaws in the Dutch approach, but it’s inhumane and precarious for so many people in America.
Makes me never want to return to life in the US.