Originally Posted by
acptulsa
The issue with the coming availability policy is its failure to allow time off for employees in unassigned service.
Employees who work in assigned service, such as in yard jobs or locals, have a regular schedule with assigned days off. It might be a Monday through Friday job with Saturday and Sunday off, but it's far more likely to have less desirable days off like Tuesday and Wednesday. Either way, those employees currently can take one sick day off per month beyond the eight assigned days off.
Employees in unassigned service are on call and do not have assigned days off. The current system expects those employees to be available for work 75% of the time. Weekdays are considered separately from weekend days, so the current system allows an employee to take five weekdays and two weekend days per month.
The new system assigns a point value to days depending on how likely the day is to be taken off. For example a weekend day is more valuable than a weekday and a holiday is more valuable than a weekend day. Employees will start with a certain amount of points and each day taken off will deduct points from the total. Run out of points and the employee is subject to dismissal.
As far as employees in assigned service are concerned the new system doesn't change things much. But those in unassigned service will no longer have those two weekend days and five weekdays per month. In fact, if an employee in unassigned service observed those same 7 days off in a month almost two-thirds of their points would be gone. Less than two months of taking those 7 days off would put the employee in a position to be dismissed.
The only way to get points back is to work 14 consecutive days and that would only get you one weekend day or two weekdays worth of points back. Take a three-day weekend and you have to work 42 days in a row to get back to the starting point value.
Now you can use paid days off, such as vacation time, and that won't ding the points, but if the last two years are any indication of what the future will be like good luck getting time off approved. They'd sooner cut you a check in January for unused vacation time than approve time off requests throughout the year. Using a paid day off interrupts the 14 consecutive days you need to work to get more points. Also, you can't go over the starting amount of points and you can't bank them if say you were really eager and wanted to work two months straight.
Nobody who has worked for the railroad for any length of time has had an expectation they would work the same kind of hours as regular workers. It becomes clear very quickly that you'll go to work on holidays, at odd hours, during power outages, ice storms and heat waves, that you'll miss birthdays, weddings and recitals. You'll be out of town when friends and family wanted you home. Those who don't figure that out don't last long on the railroad.
And that leaves the people who are still around working on the railroad. They have shown up through each wave of the pandemic, when the schools were closed and kids had to stay home, when the only way to get toilet paper or lysol was to show up at the grocery store and get in line at 7am. They have done their duty as essential workers and have done it proudly, even as their families and marriages have suffered and friends and relatives have passed away because it has to be done to provide for your family. To say this new policy is out of touch misses the mark. It's inhumane to expect your workforce to power through two years of pandemic and time off requests being ignored (all the while creating record profits) to go from 7 days off per month to one or two.
In more than a decade on the railroad I've never had any trouble with attendance. The only things I've ever gotten for attendance have been letters and postcards thanking me for showing up on holidays or during the pandemic. I like railroads and I like my job as an engineer. I like coming to work. But there's no way - even for somebody like me who wants to be here - to work 42 days in a row in exchange for a long weekend.
But what about RSIA? Doesn't that guarantee two days off after working six consecutive starts? It does, but 24 hours and 1 minute between starts resets the count, and that can happen when you're at the away-from-home-terminal in the hotel waiting to be called (I had 21.5 hours in the hotel yesterday). Getting called to deadhead also resets the start count. When these loopholes can be exploited by the company to their advantage they are. I was only able to string together six starts three times in 2020 yet I worked more hours than ever before. Same story in 2021.
A big part of the reason conductor classes aren't filling up like before is the word is out on that job. I would no longer recommend the job to a friend or family member (up to two years ago I would have). I'm not alone on this; traditional railroad towns, where the railroad is a coveted job that you can only get by knowing someone, are having a difficult time filling up conductor classes. There were hundreds of people at the hiring session for my conductor class and only 14 got in, two of whom were alternates for the previous class and one of whom had many years with another class one railroad. If I didn't have family on the railroad I probably wouldn't have gotten the job myself. Well that scene is a distant memory. There aren't enough applications to process to try to put a class together.
Another reason is it's been years since we had a raise and the cost of everything has gone up during that time, and not by just a little. Moreover similar jobs with far better work-life balance have increased their pay to attract employees. Choosing between a conductor job and another outdoor/physical job doesn't mean working for half the pay anymore.
On top of that railroads have made it clear they want to eliminate the conductor position. Why take a job with a marginal pay increase and a terrible work-life balance where you might only have the job a year or two? And now you can't take even one day off per week?
If there's a hiring crisis it is self-inflicted. There are hundreds (thousands?) of furloughed employees across the country who could be called back to work if this was about being short of qualified and trained people. I was furloughed my first year and when I was called back to work I had 30 days to report or I'd forfeit my seniority. These people aren't being called back.
Do more with less is the name of the game now. Double up trains so fewer crews have to be used (nevermind the fact that it takes the equivalent of an extra crew to put the two trains together and break them apart resulting in zero savings). Eliminate carman jobs and have the train crew inspect and air test the trains. Train crews can't diagnose or repair any bad order cars because they don't have the training to do so. Guess what? They are far less likely to catch bad order cars or spot problems with air tests that aren't as obvious as "these brakes don't work." Fewer bad orders means fewer delays in the short run, until something catastrophic happens. When it does rest assured the conductor who performed the air test in a 2am thunderstorm with only the dying light of a lantern* to inspect the train will be who the railroad blames for negligence.
Morale is in the toilet and most people are afraid of losing their jobs. The railroad isn't the kind of place where people work for a year or two. People out here have decades of service. Computers in the workplace had Windows 98 installed and there might be one computer in an office connected to the internet when many railroaders left their last regular job to start out switching cars in the yard. The fear of losing your job is only slightly less than the fear of having to find a new job in the social media hellscape where your skills are so outdated they're unrecognizable. Nothing good comes from living and working in fear like that. If you've always got one eye looking over your shoulder you have one less eye to do your job. And with the backstops that used to be there to catch mistakes all but removed, from yard jobs to hostlers to carmen and machinists, to yardmasters and even train masters, even a little doubt or distraction can spiral out of control quickly. Nobody can be perfect 100% of the time, which is why we've always placed such importance on communicating with each other and looking out for each other. Even if you had a regular, predictable schedule, it would be exhausting to work like that all the time. Well we don't have a regular, predictable schedule. It is exhausting. And it's going to be very difficult to keep up with it for a fortnight at a time.
* You can't get replacement batteries for the lantern at the depot now because we've outsourced that to a contact company. Each employee has to register with them and order their supplies from the contractor. Too bad everything is on backorder because of supply chain problems.
OR-Reading, writing, and math proficiency dropped from HS diploma due to racism
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