What’s crazy to me is that they aren’t even asking for that many!

And the reason is exactly what you’d expect, cost cutting.

“Over the past six years, America’s major freight carriers have shed 30 percent of their employees.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/rail-strike-why-the-railroads-wont-give-in-on-paid-leave-psr-precision-scheduled-railroading.html

Ironically their “reason” for why they can’t afford to provide sick days (“we don’t have enough manpower to give people more days off”) is going to do the exact opposite by increasing attrition and making attracting new talent more difficult. But don’t worry, they’ll just lobby congress to repeal the minimum safe staffing requirements to address their created “labor shortage”.

Don’t believe me, look up how hard they’re pushing for one man crews right now. Soon they’ll have just one guy (who has been working 80 hour weeks and hasn’t seen his kids in months) running a 3 mile long industrial machine solo, carrying hazardous materials through all weather conditions, likely right through your residential neighborhood.

Will there be casualties? Without a doubt. But the returns for shareholders will be glorious.

If we thought about this enough, we’d be two steps from nationalizing the railways.

But then think about how we treated our essential workers in 2020.

Fully agree. However, most people are ignoring the fact that the Biden administration, with a lot of help from Bernie, came back and got the rail workers their sick time. I’m not a huge fan of Biden but he did come through on this one.

The wealthiest 1% could disappear tomorrow and the world would keep going, probably improve drastically. But if all the rail workers disappeared we’d be fucked.

❤️✊