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 😒

  • @jasory
    link
    17 months ago

    “Arab spring …” So you cite an example of social activism that disastrously failed (by your own admission) to justify a similar action by your hand?

    Even then it doesn’t disprove that individuals that contribute more are statistically more likely to be noticed when absent. If you want to have an impact, especially a positive one, it helps to not have anger as your sole motivator.

    “So there is no ruling class”

    What exactly is a ruling class to you? There will always be a deciding group. Even in anarcho-fantasies that rule by consensus there will always be a small group that refuses to negotiate, they become the ruling class in that circumstance. So do they get deported to an archipelago for refusing to come to a consensus? Don’t the deporters become the ruling class then?

    Any sort of organized society outside of intimate groups needs some sort of hierarchical decision making. It’s one thing to advocate for positions to be more logically allocated, and another to be completely destroyed.

    “Don’t put words in my fucking mouth”

    I’m impressed that you aren’t apparently a hypocrite by holding others to a logical standard that you don’t follow. Unfortunately that logical standard is that being angry justifies spreading textual diarrhea all over Lemmy.