How come CSX’s attendance policy isn’t brought up. 2 points for a doctors visit, 4 points for a week day layoff and 6 for a weekend. 10 for miss call. Discipline at 20 points. Can’t get any points back unless you are marked up and available for 6 months you get 10 points back. If fmla is used it resets your six months so you possibly can never get them back. How is this job a long term career? Also get to 20 points and you lose your new hire bonus.
nevermind. Pressed the wrong button.
The points systems are often used in entry-level, low-skill and or part-time jobs where the expectation is not career employment. It’s insulting to professional railroad employees.
PSR has been insulting professional railroad employees since its inception.
The points system predates PSR.
I retired 2 1/2 months before EHH replaced Michael Ward. I was not aware of any form of points system that was being applied to T&E attendence.
Does T&E mean Train & Engine?
Yes
UP’s points based system is only a year and a half, maybe two years old. BNSF’s is even more recent. I believe about the time Ms Farmer took command and took BNSF deeper down the PSR path.
Attendence policies change from time to time. Wholesale changes aren’t for the employees’ benefit.
Point systems aren’t really new to railroads. Brownies anyone?
Jeff
This seems like a cruel policy except for those who wish only temporary employment. One who works for a ralroad for 30 years or so, would seem to inevitably at one time or another, perhaps more than once, accumulate 20 negative points and face disciplinary action. Not a good system for the best hiring possibilities.
Do any Class-Ones today schedule regular annual medical check-ups on company-time, with railroad-employed doctors on railroad property?
If the one with the railroad beany with the slogan “Your Health Matters,” and then uses this point sxstem but does not provide the annual medical check-up, may one call management hypocrits?.
In some ways one can feel for the railroad.
If they allowed the employees to work when they felt like it, they’d have a heck of a time crewing any trains. Hence the stick.
One would think it would be better to use a carrot, either rewarding good attendance, or making conditions better - some sort of regularity of hours would be a huge improvement, based on what I see here.
No.
We might remember that ‘brownie points’ come out of the Brown System… of Discipline. The same mentality that gave us ‘penalty applications’ in automatic train control, and inward-facing always-on cab cameras like those over the cash registers in cheap convenience stores…
I second what Tree said about the merit-points system. The first problem is that it costs money, and the second that it obligates the railroad to respect the employees rather than treating them like ‘human capital’ to be exploited just like the equipment and physical plant. I thought Warren Buffett, of all people, would be taking a lead in implementing this. Perhaps at some point the people he’s delegated will come to their senses.
How much time off should be allowed? Sometimes employees will feel that any time off should be okay as long as it is unpaid. Why should the company care if they are not paying for it?
But companies do not see it that way because they have a cost to have an employee on the payroll and that continues whether the employee is on duty or not. Most companies that I have worked for will allow an occasional unaccounted day off, like maybe once per couple months. But if you go over that, they will want to have a talk with you.
They were there. I am suprised you do not remember points systems for dispatchers, those also predate PSR. They were a Cindy special.
Over the past month or so, I’ve come to the same conclusion. The draconian rules wouldn’t even be necessary if every employee was a model servant. The “stick” as you call it, is designed to keep the chest-thumpers in order. Railroads are bound to have learned a thing or two over the past 150 years about getting men’s attention.
But that’s not what happened. It’s a cute story - but far from reality. What really happened is they laid off a lot of people, got rid of many scheduled and regular jobs, and when people started quitting and new people stopped trying to hire on, they freaked out because they couldn’t staff the pools/lists like they did just before the new operating philosophies. But that isn’t as fun as a story to tell on railfan boards.
Getting ‘attention’ and getting productive labor are two enitely different things. The current view of labor on the railroads is rooted in the Plantation Mansion of 1860.
The attendence policies are designed to have as few people on any specific board as possible by trying to limit the number of employees marking/laying off. If people don’t lay off as much, they can cut the number of turns on a pool or extra board.
For much of my 24 years, the attendence policy was such that if you had an 85% availablity, didn’t have a pattern (for example-same day every week) and not too many weekend (which includes Friday and Monday) layoffs, you were good.
I feel back then they wanted to make sure they got enough work out of employees to cover their cost of benefits. About the time we started PSR-lite practices, they made some changes but still allowed ample time off. I should note that under either policy some would run afoul of the policy and go to investigation, have to sign that they were bad and promised to be better, but rarely was anyone dismissed.
After going full blown PSR and the cuts they allowed, they still needed more cuts. Someone probably thought if we can reduce the layoffs to just compensated days and vacations, we can maybe cut another 5 or 10 off a particular board. And even the non week (single day) vacation and paid leave days can be controlled by denying their use.
What they didn’t figure in was that the “balanced” system that PSR envisions often runs into reality. The balance can be thrown off and then the repercusions start to snowball. A few extra trains, recovery from a derailment, people still laying off (I would guess about half of TE&Y have family medical leave and attendence policies can’t ding someone for usung it.) start causing to work enough that the RSIA requirement for 48/72 hours off kicks in depleting boards even more. They literally can’t move trains because either one or both crew positions aren’t available.
So they grudgingly add back s few to boards and to do so may have to recall furloughed people. Except ma
I believe if it were my decision alone, I’d likely take a position more lenient than the one the railroads currently seem to favor. But at the same time…I have to concede that the railroads have been having to deal with the (trying to be charitable here) more strident personality types that seem to gravitate towards railroading. So, their rules naturally have to take account of that.
I suspect part of the cornundrum is that idealized sets of circumstances get cast for effect. We are told of the instances where an otherwise well disciplined employee loses his job over an unscheduled doctors appointment made necessary when he injured his arm volunteering to put out the fire at the local orphanage…and I have little doubt such things do happen. But at the same time those rule sets are drafted having to take into account the type of person who believes the solution to every problem is to turn up their volume.
Both extremes exist. Only one being the problem (so far as the railroad is concerned) …so the rules are crafted to deal with them.
Hey, if it was up to me, I’d permit 5 unscheduled days off per yer, per employee…call in 6 hours prior to your normal availability time, and you’re good to go. (unpaid, of course) . Evidently the railroads don’t see it that way, perhaps out of concern that the chest thumpers and their knuckle dragging bretheren might find a way to take advantage of that?