Pretty good article. Cutting labor by 30% in the last past 6 years while demand and profits explode. I fucking hate our country and what a large % of our population deem normal and the standard for the rest of the world to live up to.
It's comically evil. My brother got bell's palsy last year from all the stress he's been under. Then Thanksgiving he had to work a mandatory double shift. He didn't find out about it until an hour before his first shift ended. The second shift didn't start for 3 hours and he lives a little over an hour from work, so he slept in his car in the parking lot. He worked 39/40 days earlier in the year. Shame on anyone who passed this trash. Forgot to add that he worked when he had palsy because he couldn't get off. He wore a mask to hide it.
Here's a little secret nobody even talks about in regards to the railroad sick days issue. The union would overwhelmingly pass the contract if it just included a provision for being off sick and not being forced to use vacation and PL days. They don't even care if the sick days are paid. The current system penalizes workers for being sick. This is as much a safety issue as anything. These guys live a miserable lifestyle.
That’s what I posted my dad was talking about. It’s impossible to even go to the doctor because even when you’re off you’d have to hope you can get in same day because you don’t know when you’re getting called again. Usually he was gone 3-4 days and home for maybe 2 it just depended. So he’d have to try and get some sleep and get everything done around the house and whatnot while trying to cram in anything he needed to do. Luckily his doctor’s husband worked on the railroad too so she would try to accommodate him, but a lot of the time he had so much stuff to do while still trying to see his family he would have to put it off. So you’d have to use 3 days of vacation for anything important and just hope you didn’t get called beforehand. It used to be you had unpaid leave you could take, but that was a long time ago. He hired out in 1980 and not sure when they changed it.
She’s absolutely right. My dad would have to take all his vacation in like blocks. He couldn’t just take off for thanksgiving or Christmas. If you called in sick you’d also get penalized, even though it was unpaid.
we always did family Christmas two weeks early cuz my dad and his 4 brothers all worked on Christmas/Christmas Eve. They never wanted to pass on the holiday pay, it was a big deal. My father would always work midnight shift over Christmas so he was home when we woke up on Christmas morning probably brutal on him cuz he’d get only like 4 hrs of sleep before heading in for another 12.
just like the defense of interracial marriage legislation that just (barely) passed right wing single millennial white boys will somehow blame progressives rather than the 40+ republican senators for the rail strike
Do you work for the railroad? I only ask because of all the railroader kids I know only 1 went into it and didn’t last long. I had a job as an engineer at 19 and pulled up for orientation and got back in my truck and went back home because I didn’t want that lifestyle.
What's hilarious is that most of the individuals in this country would personally murder rail workers in order to get their Amazon package on time, so none of this is surprising especially the dogshit media framing should shock anyone. BTW, CNN is 100% well on it's way too just being Fox News Lite
"Is you extending your life another 20 years really worth me missing out on getting my Christmas gift on time???????"
No I did not go to work at the oil refinery or any union job, my sister and I avoided it but my cousins all followed their parents and are now in unions. I have two cousins that work in rail: CTA as an electrician and another works at the rail hub for UPS in South Chicago both are union. I sell construction supplies for a living so still firmly in the blue collar world but I don’t work hard
Not sure what it is for like transit rail or anything like that, but my dad made really damn good money for what he did. Retirement benefits are insane as well. Railroad employees have their own separate Medicare (takes out for part A and B) and my mom gets half of what my dad gets in retirement every month and if he passes away before her she gets his full amount. Edit: I say this in the past tense. When he hired on the pay was good but years later he said it was shit for the new guys because they had lowered it so much and not worth what they had to do.
Also as a side note, Dick Cheney has been involved in the railroad industry for a long time and even on the board of directors at UP. I’m sure he had lots of good ideas on how to help the workers. I would have started working there in 2001 and would have made a lot less than my dad did in 1980 inflation not included. It’s why a few years after that my dad said it really wasn’t the good job it used to be to deal with what you do.
The railway shit is such a great microcosm of american capitalism as a whole. Rather than build a robust system that can accommodate sick days, the rail companies have built an incredibly fragile house of cards that squeezes out an extra 5% profit. They also refuse to engage in any sort of capital re-investment of any kind. The only thing left is to go crying to the government for a bailout when their stupid house of cards comes crashing down the moment the slightest thing goes wrong with it.
Average locomotive engineer makes around $110k per year. As Hoss Bonaventure said above, railroaders have great benefits. The confusion comes (intentionally by Republicans usually) that those benefits are union negotiated. The health benefits are union negotiated, but the great retirement is from the Railway Labor Act and established a separate social security system for the rail industry. It's guaranteed for ALL rail employees, including management. The Railroad Retirement Board loans money to social security all the time. It's 100% funded by the employees, because they don't pay into social security, but rather pay a Tier 1, 2, and 3 Railroad retirement tax and Medicare. I worked for a railroad for 20 years and was a union rep before switching to a management position. I taught locomotive engineers and then moved to HR before finally leaving to do something better. The rail industry now has one of the lowest retention rates in the US. I read a report recently that over the last 5 years, it's below 15%.
Railroads are the largest landowners in the country and have shifted their average operating ratio from the low 80's in 1995 to the mid 50's today.
$2Bn a day. Workers should be asking for more than 7 days sick leave imo. Thanks to CNN for highlighting how important these workers are
Hilariously, we know Cilizza is shit, but he's going to be replaced by a goon who's somehow worse than him
Its weird because, with CNN trying to entice R's, Cillizza is like their most experienced writer with the style that Republicans like to read
Cillzza can eat every dick and die. He tried to soft pedal nazi and fascist shit and make it palatable for the average American.