Despite President Biden’s efforts, the country may yet face the first national freight railroad strike in more than three decades. The biggest issue separating labor and management is not pay, health care or retirement benefits. It is the right of employees to take a day off without losing their jobs.
“It’s the primary outstanding issue, one we won’t budge on—the request that they stop firing people who get sick,” said Dennis Pierce, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.
“It’s the primary outstanding issue, one we won’t budge on—the request that they stop firing people who get sick.”
Freight rail carriers and a dozen unions representing 115,000 workers have been bargaining for several years for a new contract. The president brought about an agreement that helped avoid a strike last month, but only half of the 12 unions representing freight rail workers 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 four won’t wrap up voting until mid-November.
Attendance policy at America’s freight railroads is one of the most punitive in any American industry. In 2020, Union Pacific instituted a point-based attendance policy that punishes employees for taking any time off. BNSF Railway, controlled by billionaire investor Warren Buffett, adopted a similar system earlier this year. As The New York Times describes it, workers start off with a limited number of points. If they take a day off 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 is that workers are on call nearly all the time. Missing work due to a sick child or a doctor’s appointment could mean losing your job. “It allows no time 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 an online worker 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 doctor. But BNSF called him into work at the last minute, forcing him to cancel his visit. A few weeks later, he suffered a fatal heart attack while working in an engineer’s booth.
“It allows no time 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 workers have always faced challenging schedules, but the pressure has gotten noticeably worse in the past few years. One of the main drivers has been rail carriers’ policy of boosting profits, already at record levels, by slashing their workforces. Since 2016, the largest freight railroads have shrunk their workforces by 25 percent, forcing the remaining employees to work even longer hours and more unpredictable schedules to keep the trains moving.
The tentative agreement now up for a vote makes some positive changes to attendance policy, but for many workers, they are still not enough. “Railroaders do not feel valued,” said BMWE president Tony Cardwell, after his members voted it down. “They resent the fact that management holds no regard for their quality of life, illustrated by their stubborn reluctance to provide a higher quantity of paid time off, especially for sickness.”
The freight carriers may be the worst offenders when it comes to overwork, but rail workers are not the only ones fighting for more free time. Forced overtime is a crucial 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 a week and put in 15 to 20 hours of overtime. In some areas, UPS drivers have refused to work Saturdays, leading to disciplinary action.
Control over schedules has been an issue in many of the new union organizing campaigns that have sprung up in the previous year. One of the Amazon Labor Union’s top priorities for its first contract is eliminating mandatory overtime. And last-minute shift scheduling was one of the issues that drove workers at Colectivo Coffee—a small Midwestern coffee chain—to organize last year.
For many workers, collective bargaining is their sole recourse to getting paid leave because the United States is the only developed nation that does not mandate paid time off on a national level. President Biden promised 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave as part of his Build Back Better agenda, but it failed to 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 degree of flexibility in balancing home and work life responsibilities, but this has not been an option for many blue-collar and service workers in the United States. While 79 percent of workers with at least a bachelor’s degree have access to paid leave, that is true of only 64 percent of those with a high school degree but no college education. Just one in four workers without a high-school degree has any paid time off at all.
The United States is already one of the most overworked nations in the world. Compared with Great Britain, Americans put in nearly 300 more work hours per year, and more than 400 hours more than workers in Germany. Americans lag the rest of the industrial world not only in paid sick time but also in vacation time.
The United States is already one of the most overworked nations in the world. Americans lag the rest of the industrial world not only in paid sick time but also in vacation time.
The lack of time off is not only bad for employee morale and health. It is bad for families and society as a whole, something the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops noted in their groundbreaking 1986 pastoral letter “Economic Justice for All.”
“Without leisure,” the bishops wrote, ”there is too little time for nurturing marriages, for developing parent-child relationships, and for fulfilling commitments to other important groups: the extended family, the community of friends, the parish, the neighborhood, schools, and political organizations.”
Pope Paul VI made a similar point in “Gaudium et Spes”: “Though they should apply their time and energy to their employment with a due sense of responsibility, all workers should also enjoy sufficient rest and leisure to cultivate their family, cultural, social and religious life” (No. 67).
Overwork may mean higher profits on Wall Street, but 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 community or praying at church.
Confronting the problem requires policy change. While paid leave legislation has stalled out in Congress, there have been some victories on the local level. The most recent success came 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 help pass the Time to Care Act, an effort that could serve as a model for building broader faith-labor-family coalitions in other states.
The reality for millions of Americans is that finding time to take care of a family or get involved in any kind of activity outside of work is a luxury that they cannot afford. Rebuilding a social contract that respects and values workers requires more than just raising wages; it also means ensuring that everyone has the time to be a spouse, parent, friend, community member and citizen.
“In 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 how to harmonize action and rest, work and leisure, so that both contribute to building up the person as well as the family and community.”
