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 😒
You joke, because you have nothing to contribute. You're not demoralised, this has no effect on you.
"They murder us... nothing but meat" And you are offering alternatives how? Stop pretending to be outraged when you care so little that you can't even be bothered to investigate the causes of issues and proffer solutions.
The alternative is to abolish the profit motive, end the accumulation of wealth, seize the means of production, and put the ruling class in work camps.
I joke so I don't kill myself. Honestly? Fuck you. I'm so fucking tired and angry all the fucking time, so either I joke or I cast a 9mm ballot into my fucking head for the next election cycle. At least that way my vote might fucking mean something.
How do you abolish the profit motive? It's literally just the motivation to benefit from a transaction.
"Put the ruling class in work camps"
So create another ruling class to imprison these people? Do the new ruling class have to be subject to imprisonment as well? What about the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is now oppressing the previously wealthy? Shouldn't they also be subject to imprisonment for abuses?
"At least that way my vote might mean something"
And it will mean more depending on how much you contribute to society.
"I'm so tired and angry all the time"
So am I. I'm so tired and angry, I have no recourse but to criticise you. Oh, that's not a legitimate reason, you say? My mood doesn't justify my behaviour you say?
A lot of people on lemmy are just bad at first principles of economics and politics. They don't quite get (as Marx didn't) that the structures of capitalism arise from scarcity and complexity, and that it doesn't matter what you actually call the mediation of scarcity via a monetary proxy - the end results will be largely the same. Which is why the focus needs to be on understanding these complex systems comprehensively and regulating them. Not useless bumper sticker platitudes quietly celebrating even more violence.
Edit - yeah, exactly, there's no bigger threat to outdated ML orthodoxy than a freshman economics textbook