[ All because they chose profits over humane working policies.
What this fight is really about: the persistent difficulty some large
corporations have in understanding that their workers are human
beings, and not just one more piece of machinery.]
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RAILROAD COMPANIES ALMOST INFLICTED AN ECONOMIC DISASTER ON THE U.S.
 
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Terri Gerstein and Jenny Hunter
September 15, 2022
Slate
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_ All because they chose profits over humane working policies. What
this fight is really about: the persistent difficulty some large
corporations have in understanding that their workers are human
beings, and not just one more piece of machinery. _

,

 

If you were planning to spend Thursday stocking up on toilet paper in
advance of a seemingly imminent freight-railroad strike or lockout,
you woke up to welcome news. President Joe Biden has announced a
tentative agreement [[link removed]] to avert the
disruption and the body blow it would have caused the economy and our
supply chains. The deal isn’t final—workers will soon vote on
it—but, nonetheless, it’s a relief following a week of headlines
warning about the potential of $2 billion a day in economic loss
[[link removed]],
including disruptions to passenger trains, grain shipments
[[link removed]], carmakers,
and refiners
[[link removed]].

What was missing from these headlines? The actual reason for the
conflict between railroad workers and their employers. The potential
strike or lockout was not because of any dispute over pay
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but because of inhumane attendance policies that currently mean
railroad engineers and conductors are either working or “on call”
90 percent of the time
[[link removed]].
When they’re on call, they can be summoned to work on two hours’
notice or less, and then may be away from home for days at a time.
Workers report that they have no sick days, paid or unpaid. If they
have to take time off unexpectedly, even because of illness, they lose
points in a convoluted, points-based attendance system. That means
workers are at risk of being disciplined or fired for getting sick,
going to a doctor’s appointment or a family funeral, or for any
other absence that can’t be planned far in advance.

As railroad worker Hugh Sawyer told the American Prospect
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this meant that on his 65th birthday this year, he got home at 7:30 in
the morning after working 12 hours the day before, slept for five
hours, and then spent the day refreshing his computer to see if he was
being called back to work. Another worker, describing the onerous
requirements for scheduling off-time in advance, wrote on Facebook
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“How do you schedule a funeral in October if it’s only
February?” He also noted that he gets 30 days fully off for the
entire year, no weekends. And the wife of an engineer told Vice
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“They go to work sick, they miss funerals of loved ones, they miss
final goodbyes to parents on hospice, they miss holidays, birthdays,
all of it.”

As the unions put it in a statement on Sunday, “these policies are
destroying the lives of our members.”
[[link removed]] The
unions initially pushed for paid sick leave, but later sought only
unpaid sick leave. Yes, really: They’ve had to fight in order not to
be punished for taking unexpected, urgently needed _unpaid _sick
leave. It appears that the tentative agreement
[[link removed]] between
the parties would address these attendance and leave policies by
creating “voluntary assigned days off,” granting one additional
paid day off, allowing workers to attend medical appointments without
penalty, and creating exemptions from attendance policies for
hospitalizations and surgeries.

It should not be controversial to say it, but: People should have sick
leave so they do not have to come to work when they get sick. They
should be able to take leave to attend doctors’ appointments or deal
with family emergencies without risking their jobs. Workers should
also have regular time off, not be on call almost every day of their
lives. This strike or lockout was threatened because of the railroad
companies’ refusal, right up until the last minute, to accept these
basic human needs, and their willingness to bring an already weary
country to the brink of yet another economic disaster, all in the name
of ever more profits.

The United States, unlike many countries, does not have a national law
guaranteeing sick leave; if we did, the railroads’ attendance
systems would be clearly illegal. The kind of point-based attendance
systems that railroads employ can still be considered unlawful
retaliation
[[link removed]] if
workers lose points for taking leave that is legally protected, such
as for absences guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act, the
Americans with Disabilities Act, or state or local sick-leave laws.
Apart from questions of legality, it is grossly irresponsible to
punish people for unexpected illnesses ever, and especially during a
pandemic.

The fact that the threat of a strike or lockout came as Americans’
approval for unions is at a record high
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midterm elections are around the corner makes it tempting to speculate
about the railroads’ motivations. Were they betting the unions would
ultimately fold (an unwise wager since workers will vote on any
ultimate agreement)? Have companies been engaged in a four-dimensional
chess attempt to tamp down national pro-union sentiment by
demonstrating their power over the railroad workers’ union? By
announcing that certain shipments would stop even before any strike
was announced, were they trying to pressure Congress to force the
workers to fold? Did they want to harm Democrats’ chances in the
midterms?

But the likely reason the companies held out on more humane scheduling
and leave policies is more obvious: The status quo is more profitable.
Rail companies reported record profits
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2021. Part of this results from recent decisions to drastically reduce
staffing: During the past few years rail companies have cut their
workforce by about 29 percent, or 45,000 jobs
[[link removed]].
They’ve also long been pressing to shift from two-person to
one-person crews on certain routes, a move which a recent
Transportation Department proposed rule
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likely curb if enacted.

Meanwhile, one of the rail companies, BNSF, reported a net income of
nearly $6 billion in 2021
[[link removed]].
It’s owned by Berkshire Hathaway, the multinational conglomerate
whose chairman and CEO is Warren Buffett, one of the world’s
wealthiest men. Company stock buybacks
[[link removed]],
even just this year, have added to shareholders’ wealth. These
companies are making, in technical terms, a gazillion boatloads of
money. Their financial viability cannot possibly rest on such a
slender thread that disaster would ensue if workers could take unpaid
leave without penalty for unexpected medical and family issues.

This is not how American businesses should be run. If the only way a
company can operate is to penalize or ultimately fire someone for
taking their kid to an emergency room, that’s a major operational
failing. That’s not appropriate for companies of any kind—even the
most nonessential ones, much less in an industry so central to our
economy. If staffing is too thin to allow for humane working
conditions, that’s a liability to address, not an asset to drill
down on. In fact, hundreds of railroad workers have already quit
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of the harsh attendance policies, exacerbating existing challenges.
The answer to current staffing shortages isn’t digging in on bad
policies that are already driving experienced people out.
It’s _fixing the problem_.

Perhaps the railroad companies had backed themselves into a corner,
extracting profits over the past several years through progressively
leaner—and ultimately unsustainable—staffing levels, making it
difficult to implement humane working conditions in the short term. To
the extent this may be the case, there’s not even any sign that the
companies acknowledge, as a general matter, that there’s anything
wrong with the current system. Until last night, there was no public
sign that they’d offered _any_ concessions, not even some warped,
dystopic, split-the-baby option like: Your attendance record takes a
hit if the hospital trip is for your sick child, but not for your own
personal heart attack.

While it’s a relief in the short term that there will not be a
strike or lockout, the current situation, created by the rail
companies, already affects all of us. Overworking people or making
them work while sick is just plain dangerous. It’s not good for
anybody if the engineers operating trains carrying explosive hazardous
materials show up to work dragging their feet and seriously ill
because they’ll be penalized or fired if they don’t.

In the end, railroad companies are highly complex operations with
extremely sophisticated logistics. It’s not plausible that it’s an
unsolvable challenge for them to find a way for workers to take unpaid
unscheduled leave for urgent reasons without penalizing them, which is
perhaps why they ultimately made concessions. Maybe it was hard for
companies to look Biden and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh in the face
and say they just couldn’t figure it out.

Meanwhile, as we breathe a sigh of relief that there will not be a
strike or lockout on Friday, we should remember what this fight is
really about: the persistent difficulty some large corporations have
in understanding that their workers are human beings, and not just one
more piece of machinery

_[TERRI GERSTEIN is director of the Project on State and Local
Enforcement at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program._

_JENNY HUNTER is a labor lawyer, writer, and consultant who lives in
D.C.]_
 

* Labor
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* railroads
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* railroad safety
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* transportation
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* Supply Chains
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* rail unions
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* RAIL WORKERS
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* Rank and File
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* corporate profits
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* Biden Administration
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