Of particular note:
The Association of American Railroads, which represents freight railway operators, said its members have been hiring in recent years to address staffing needs and recognize employees’ desire for better scheduling. The group said the number of overtime hours worked by BMWE union members increased to 4.7 hours per week in 2022, compared to 4 hours in 2016.
Cory Ludwig, who works as a machine operator repairing railway tracks in Iowa, said he’s been working Saturdays and some Sundays along with 10- to 12-hour shifts since September. Recently, he worked 13 days without a day off. With the mandatory Saturday work, he’s had to rely on friends and relatives to take care of his five-year-old and nine-year-old kids. He said the overtime demands have increased as he’s seen the number of workers assigned to his crew go down.
“You fall asleep and then you wake up in the morning and you go right back to work. It can really break a person down, it gets really wearing on a person after a while,” Ludwig said. “With less people trying to do the same amount of work, working long hours, working multiple weeks in a row without one day off, you get irritated and you get burnt out.”
Recently one of the union’s members had been working 22 hours straight when he fell asleep on the job, an error that could have put his colleagues’ lives at risk but also could have been avoided had the employee had a rest period, said Ballew. Another member was recently disciplined for refusing to work through his scheduled days off on short notice so he could care for a family member having health issues, Ballew said.
“The stress it puts on marriages and parenting and the things you leave behind for your spouse to deal with or the things you miss, that kind of stress builds up,” said Ballew. “In the rail industry, we have noticed recently a spat of suicides and I can’t help but think there is a correlation there.”
Thank God Biden stopped the railroad strike!
I swear if I hear another fucker say that the railroad workers got everything they wanted because Biden helped them negotiate I’ll lose it.
Good thing I voted for the lesser evil in 2020! Gosh if I had stuck to principles we’d have had a genocide or something 😒
Pretty standard in manufacturing sector. There are so few people with the skillset and reliability to operate a factory, that they perpetually pay out overtime because they really have no other option.
I don’t get it. We pay well, have some of the best benefits around, and can’t find anybody that wants to work.
I wouldn’t want to work 88 hour week, tbh.
The point is, we’re short handed because we can’t get people to stay. 15 years ago, you could easily work a 40 hour week. You couldn’t get a 64 hour week in if you wanted to. Today, I could literally work 16 hours every day.
– Karl Marx, Das Kapital
Basically if your boss is paying you and your coworkers overtime, then they’re just not paying another employee. You make a little more money but your boss makes a lot more, and has no incentive to hire another person. In fact as long as he can get people to work overtime, its actually against their interest to hire more people. The whole time they’re crying how none wants to work, but really they’re not willing to hire anyone unless it is for less than half of your salary. If they do they lose money.
Get organized
It’s basically positive feedback loop: longer hours - more people resign and less people are hired - hours become even longer.