Despite President Biden’s efforts, the country may yet face the primary national freight railroad strike in greater than three many years. The most important issue separating labor and management shouldn’t be pay, health care or retirement advantages. It’s the precise of employees to take a break day without losing their jobs.
“It’s the first outstanding issue, one we won’t budge on—the request that they stop firing individuals who get sick,” said Dennis Pierce, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.
“It’s the first outstanding issue, one we won’t budge on—the request that they stop firing individuals who get sick.”
Freight rail carriers and a dozen unions representing 115,000 employees have been bargaining for several years for a latest contract. The president led to an agreement that helped avoid a strike last month, but only half of the 12 unions representing freight rail employees have approved it. The third largest union, the BMWE, voted to reject the tentative agreement on Oct. 10, followed by the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, who voted it down on Oct. 26. The remaining 4 won’t wrap up voting until mid-November.
Attendance policy at America’s freight railroads is some of the punitive in any American industry. In 2020, Union Pacific instituted a point-based attendance policy that punishes employees for taking any day off. BNSF Railway, controlled by billionaire investor Warren Buffett, adopted the same system earlier this yr. As The Recent York Times describes it, employees start off with a limited variety of points. In the event that they take a break day for nearly any reason, including illness and family emergencies, they lose points, and when the points run out, they face suspensions and eventual termination.
The result’s that employees are on call nearly on a regular basis. Missing work because of a sick child or a health care provider’s appointment could mean losing your job. “It allows no day off without penalty. It doesn’t allow for time with families, to make appointments for our health and safety,” Kari Cecil, a conductor for BNSF, said during a web-based employee forum sponsored by the A.F.L.-C.I.O.
In September, The Washington Post reported on the case of Aaron Hiles, a locomotive engineer for BNSF. Mr. Hiles admitted to his wife that he was not feeling well and made an appointment to see a health care provider. But BNSF called him into work on the last minute, forcing him to cancel his visit. A couple of weeks later, he suffered a fatal heart attack while working in an engineer’s booth.
“It allows no day off without penalty. It doesn’t allow for time with families, to make appointments for our health and safety.”
Employed in a 24/7 industry, rail employees have at all times faced difficult schedules, however the pressure has gotten noticeably worse previously few years. One among the most important drivers has been rail carriers’ policy of boosting profits, already at record levels, by slashing their workforces. Since 2016, the most important freight railroads have shrunk their workforces by 25 percent, forcing the remaining employees to work even longer hours and more unpredictable schedules to maintain the trains moving.
The tentative agreement now up for a vote makes some positive changes to attendance policy, but for a lot of employees, they’re still not enough. “Railroaders don’t feel valued,” said BMWE president Tony Cardwell, after his members voted it down. “They resent the incontrovertible fact that management holds no regard for his or her quality of life, illustrated by their stubborn reluctance to supply the next quantity of paid day off, especially for sickness.”
The freight carriers would be the worst offenders relating to overwork, but rail employees aren’t the one ones fighting for more free time. Forced extra time is an important issue in upcoming contract negotiations between UPS and the Teamsters Union. A Teamster leader in Maine complained to a reporter that his UPS members often work six days per week and put in 15 to twenty hours of extra time. In some areas, UPS drivers have refused to work Saturdays, resulting in disciplinary motion.
Control over schedules has been a difficulty in most of the latest union organizing campaigns which have sprung up within the previous yr. One among the Amazon Labor Union’s top priorities for its first contract is eliminating mandatory extra time. And last-minute shift scheduling was certainly one of the problems that drove employees at Colectivo Coffee—a small Midwestern coffee chain—to arrange last yr.
For a lot of employees, collective bargaining is their sole recourse to getting paid leave because the US is the one developed nation that doesn’t mandate paid day off on a national level. President Biden promised 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave as a part of his Construct Back Higher agenda, but it surely didn’t make it into his signature Inflation Reduction Act. Currently, just 11 states, plus the District of Columbia, offer paid family leave.
Post-pandemic work-from-home policies have given some white-collar professionals a level of flexibility in balancing home and work life responsibilities, but this has not been an option for a lot of blue-collar and repair employees in the US. While 79 percent of employees with no less than a bachelor’s degree have access to paid leave, that’s true of only 64 percent of those with a highschool degree but no college education. Only one in 4 employees with out a high-school degree has any paid day off in any respect.
The US is already some of the overworked nations on this planet. Compared with Great Britain, Americans put in nearly 300 more work hours per yr, and greater than 400 hours greater than employees in Germany. Americans lag the remainder of the economic world not only in paid sick time but in addition in vacation time.
The US is already some of the overworked nations on this planet. Americans lag the remainder of the economic world not only in paid sick time but in addition in vacation time.
The dearth of day off shouldn’t be only bad for worker morale and health. It’s bad for families and society as a complete, something the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops noted of their groundbreaking 1986 pastoral letter “Economic Justice for All.”
“Without leisure,” the bishops wrote, ”there is just too little time for nurturing marriages, for developing parent-child relationships, and for fulfilling commitments to other vital groups: the clan, the community of friends, the parish, the neighborhood, schools, and political organizations.”
Pope Paul VI made the same point in “Gaudium et Spes”: “Though they need to apply their time and energy to their employment with a due sense of responsibility, all employees must also enjoy sufficient rest and leisure to cultivate their family, cultural, social and non secular life” (No. 67).
Overwork may mean higher profits on Wall Street, however the long-term damage it inflicts on families and society is incalculable. Every hour at work is one less hour spent with family, volunteering in the neighborhood or praying at church.
Confronting the issue requires policy change. While paid leave laws has stalled out in Congress, there have been some victories on the local level. Essentially the most recent success got here in Maryland. Last spring, Catholic organizations, including the Catholic Labor Network, Catholic Charities Baltimore and the Maryland Catholic Conference, worked with labor unions, family advocates and other faith groups to assist pass the Time to Care Act, an effort that might function a model for constructing broader faith-labor-family coalitions in other states.
The truth for hundreds of thousands of Americans is that finding time to maintain a family or become involved in any form of activity outside of labor is a luxury that they can’t afford. Rebuilding a social contract that respects and values employees requires greater than just raising wages; it also means ensuring that everybody has the time to be a spouse, parent, friend, community member and citizen.
“Within the creation narrative, God worked six days to create the world and rested on the seventh,” wrote the U.S. bishops in “Economic Justice for All.” “We must take that image seriously and learn the best way to harmonize motion and rest, work and leisure, in order that each contribute to increase the person in addition to the family and community.”