The RR owners seem confident that Biden will think he has more to lose from a strike than they do. Well, he and the country.
I feel like status quo bias is really screwing the workers here more than usual. From a purely procedural point of view, the White House is justified in thinking of themselves as having gone above and beyond for the workers - they demanded and got a deal better than that the government mediation board decided on. So now they see themselves as justified in forcing this on workers many or perhaps even most of whom want the deal. And there's also plenty of historical precedent for Congress taking this sort of action. But that doesn't change the fact that the contract is still objectively shitty.
I wrote my rep saying that if she supports this bill, I was urging her to support Pelosi's amendment to add 7 days of paid sick leave.
When Tim first heard about this dispute, he was kind of pissed at their demands, because he was like "who gets 24% raises?" But then he read that they hadn't gotten pay increases in years, and he supported the workers. The way it's covered makes a big difference.
I think they were even penalized for taking unpaid days when sick.
There's a theory I read (I forget where) that this is largely kabuki -- that the union rejected the deal knowing that this would force the hand of Biden/Congress. So the union gets the deal that Biden brokered, but also gets to oppose the deal as inadequate without needing to strike. Seemed plausible.
4: Erik Loomis has said as much. But that can be the case alongside them being genuinely angry about the result.
Someone--possibly Bave, elsewhere--said that the "no sick leave" + points system for absenteeism was imposed unilaterally on the unions after a judge found that it was a minor technical dispute that wasn't in violation of existing contracts. If I have that right, is there any way this was a non-crazy, un-disgusting decision from the judge?
It is especially ridiculous given this is an industrial sector whose officially recognized organization started in the 1880's, not the 1930's. And paid sick leave was definitely an issue then! (Health insurance less so since doctors were mostly there for comfort.)
Here's an interesting article about the points-based system. It was first adopted in 2020 by Union Pacific, and by BNSF in February of this year!
Health insurance less so since doctors were mostly there for comfort.
I'm not sure "comfort" is quite right; American doctors were notoriously interventionist even then, it's just that their interventions mostly didn't work and often made things worse. Medical care was definitely cheap and widely available, though.
Yes, better stated comfort was the best you could reasonably get out of them, except for a few things.
Indeed, part of the reason homeopathy and other alternative systems became so popular in the nineteenth-century US is that while their treatments didn't work, they were at least much less unpleasant than the treatments available from mainstream allopathic medicine, which also didn't work. It's wild what a mess medical care was before the bacteriological revolution.
Also wild how quickly the culture changed. One doctor served in both the Spanish-American War and World War I. In the first of those, he remembered his basic hygienic advice on latrines being scoffed at, and one officer ostentatiously drinking from a water source he had warned against. In the second, they were solicitously asking for and conscientiously following his advice. (Doctors couldn't do a lot more in the 10's, but it was becoming more obvious that their profession was onto something, with vaccines and so forth.)
Yeah, the Spanish-American War itself was an important turning point what with the Reed Commission demonstrating that mosquitoes spread yellow fever and so forth. I recently read Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters, which is very interesting on the transition though dated in a lot of ways.
it's just that their interventions mostly didn't work and often made things worse.
Don't remind me.
Update: after agreeing by a wide margin to block a strike, the House just completed its vote to add sick days to the provisions. It passed narrowly, 221-207. I understand it needs 60 votes in the Senate.
Its pretty amazing how much railroad employment was slashed in the years prior to covid, as railway companies moved to more "efficient" operations.
after agreeing by a wide margin to block a strike, the House just completed its vote to add sick days to the provisions.
We've seen this play before.... get past objections from the left by splitting the bill, then go let the good stuff die in the Senate. Centrist congressional leaders are not to be trusted.
The tell is that the vote for the full bill came and passed, then was subsequently amended. So the Senate could pass either the amended or the not amended version without it having to go back to the House. So there is no pressure on the Senate to actually pass the amended version.
Kevin Drum has a pretty good summary: https://jabberwocking.com/whos-got-the-best-argument-in-the-railroad-talks/
Gotta say: the "framing" of this 24% pay raise is suuuuch bullshit. You look at the graph, and it's clear that at least half of it is retroactive to cover past inflation. FFS. Really MSM, do better.
And then the sick days thing: sheesh. At least from the way (Even The Liberal ;) Kevin Drum puts it, it's all about management not trusting workers as far as they can throw them. Shit man, if you can't trust your workers, maybe you need a better class of worker? Or greater trust between management and employees? I hear that raising wages and giving workers a greater say in working conditions can help with that?
Just spitballin' here, O^ Masters of the Universe! [sigh]
I am taking a train trip in December so I recuse myself because I really would like that to still happen.
Anyway, seems to me like government interference with contracts between workers and their employers is Socialism.
To 6: I am rusty on this, and have never been great with the Railway Labor Act, but basically disagreements between carrier and union can be either "minor" or "major," and the unions said the imposition of the point-attendance system was a big enough change to create a major dispute, meaning it had to be bargained. The company said no, it's just a different interpretation of the current agreement, so it's a minor dispute and the company can act unilaterally. And the court went that way. I haven't read the decision and RLA stuff is outside my expertise, so I don't know how legally sound the decision was. But it does seem clear, both from that dispute and the comments from lots of railroaders about the current disagreements, that the railroads have been changing the employment conditions for their workers fairly gradually over the past six years or so. Frog in a heating water pot situation. From what I gather, there's never been formal sick leave in these contracts, but in the past there wasn't a need for it because there were enough extra employees that anyone who needed to could take themselves off the rotation for assignments and their spot would easily be filled by someone else. So there is a bunch of complicated background, but it seems clear it's a genuine issue.
I'm sure a lot of the union leadership is thinking along the lines of 4, although keep in mind the union leaders signed the tentative agreements so committed some of their clout to getting them ratified. But the contracts were put to the membership for ratification, and I doubt anyone who voted against ratification is going to be happy with having them imposed by Congress. My read is that a lot of the rank and file who voted for the agreements weren't really enthusiastic, they were just following the lead of their leadership who told them this was the best they could get (which was probably correct, as we're seeing). I think the Democrats are really going to piss off a lot of railroaders. The rest of organized labor will probably look the other way, I'm afraid. Biden had some agency here and is blowing it.
The sick days would cost the railroads just 2% of the top 4 railroads' 2021 profit. That, to me, is gobsmackingly indicative of the fight being about nothing but pure stupid greed on the railroads' part and wildcat or not I'm in support of a strike that burns the economy to the ground before giving the railroads an inch. Fuck 'em sideways if they can't bend that tiniest of amounts.
The excellent article Apo links has a link to this in the NYT, which gets at how the railroads' scheduling and other operational changes are what activist investors want. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/business/freight-rail.html.
It is especially ridiculous given this is an industrial sector whose officially recognized organization started in the 1880's, not the 1930's. And paid sick leave was definitely an issue then! (Health insurance less so since doctors were mostly there for comfort.)
But doctors can treat injuries as well as illnesses. Even if in the 1880s their interventions against disease were not very effective, their interventions to treat injury were definitely effective, and if you were working on a railway in the 1880s you had a significant chance of injury!
25: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/business/freight-rail.html
I think the period at the end of the link in 25 is causing an error.
And the Senate vote to impose paid leave has "failed", with 52 votes in favor.
(I suspect some of those votes would mysteriously evaporate if the filibuster were eliminated tomorrow, like with card-check.)
Who voted against the final bill. Wondering how Sanders voted without sick leave included.
Vote tally is here. Sanders voted no.
Still irritated that card check had so much support until the Democrats actually had 60 votes, then it got people with "concerns" or just no public comments from purported supporters anymore. Also wonder what would have happened in the alt-universe of a full session of 60 votes, of a strategy of doing more than one big thing at a time.
But my memory of the period is probably compressed and inaccurate since I moved to Canada in the fall of 2009 and stopped paying as close attention to Congress until I came back a couple years later.
"or a strategy" - my memory is that some other parts of the agenda that might have passed with 60 were held back as something to get to after health care. What I don't remember is if they were completely halted or just running on parallel tracks with less press coverage.
30: 5 Dems voted against it. Sanders, Warren, Gillibrand, Hickenlooper and Merkley. A little surprised that Sherrod Brown voted for it.
I had turned around on Joe Biden for a while but I'm back to thinking he's a shitty president. Being pro-labor has to be about more than handing out goodies to domestic manufacturing industries.
The schedules the rail workers have sound like they really suck. I want to understand more of the technical structure here - it sounds like workers are on call a lot and have to schedule their vacation many months in advance. Within this structure, what does "sick days" mean? When can they be used, can they override being on call, etc. (My wife has dozens upon dozens of "sick days" per year, but also an attendance policy that basically prohibits their use, so they're just a kind of back-door boost to retirement compensation... not something that's actually useful for being sick. For that you get FMLA.)
Tangentially, being on-call is terrible. My if-I-were-emperor position is that being on call for work should be compensated at 75% of the job's regular wage (or minimum wage, if that's higher). Something sufficiently punitive to make it a bad idea for employers.
Reading the links in 24 & 25/27 I am reminded of a maxim of mine I used in IT (but I think more universally applicable): " Except for the 'unsustainable' part, unsustainable systems are almost always better than sustainable systems on various relevant measures (cost, ease of use, etc.)". And thus very seductive. In the case of something like the railroad's PSR (Precision Scheduled Railroad*) stuff the primary potentially unsustainable part is the people part. However, that is only in the context of a set of societal norms and government regulations. History (and the wider world today) shows that under the right circumstances humans can adapt to much more draconian working conditions. So the answer is to hack the society/government in which the system operates and voila! a "sustainable" system. (Or let's say more sustainable, the failure mode now requiring broad societal upheavals rather than issues with the maintenance of your specific workforce.
*See also many different commercial strategies requiring "creative" staffing.
33: Markey voted for it. Damn, I'll have to write him.
The Washington Post has like 40 opinion writers on staff who seem to have published a grand total of zero opinion pieces critical of Biden screwing over the railroad workers. Your left-leaning media, folks.