Why class 1s and Amtrak cannot keep employees is not covered but these practices certainly apply to RRs. If employees loose confidence maybe only a complete turnover of top management is the answer?
Preemptive Layoffs and Rescinded Job Offers Destroy a Company From the Inside (msn.com)
EDIT: Appparenty only do or die layoff are acceptable. That was certainly not the situation of these RRs. Unless you call it do or die for the wall stree types?
Get the BEAN COUNTERS out of top management. They know the price of everything and the value of nothing. PSR is a bean counter strategy in the railroads. Similar bean counter strategies are wrecking other industries all across the country.
Today’s management doesn’t want to believe they have ANY responsibility to ANY PARTY but the shareholders. They don’t feature the continuing operation of their operation has any real value. They don’t feature their customers deserve the service the customers are paying for. They don’t feature they have ANY RESPONSIBILITY to their employee in being compensated and also having a life to be able to enjoy that compensation.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Some people also retire or, when jobs are plentiful, find work that pays better or is more to their liking. In a bad economy people will hunker down and accept a lousy job…which is not the case right now.
The ruling class was spoiled by decades of enjoying a buyer’s market as the boomers competed with one another for decent jobs.
Now with the boomers heading towards retirement, and the workforce shrinking as a result,…employers now find themselves on the other end of “market forces” that once were in their favor.
Yep! “Chickens home to roost.”
The problem of railroads not able to hire enough employees is a problem of the railroads, and there is one simple solution. Raise the pay. I have been told that railroaders are not concerned about the pay, but only concerned about the bad working conditions.
So under that theory, raising the pay will not attract new workers. I think it will attract new workers that care about the money and not about the working conditions. But the value of workers is only determined by what they are willing to accept as wages. There is no other measure that can determine the “correct pay.”
At this point, raising the pay is a condition for railroads staying in business.
This is also a time in which workers ought to care about their pay because it is dropping every minute as inflation eats up its value. Are railroads raising their shipping rates because of inflation raising their cost of fuel, materials, and equipment? Why should employees’ pay be frozen as its value evaporates?
Most guys I know that quit the RR took jobs with lower pay.
Raise the pay too much and the shippers move to trucks…which means the RRs go out of business.
Like truckers don’t want to be paid. Maybe we can do away with transportation companies and just have John Q Public carry around commercial products in the bed of their pick up trucks when doing their daily chores.
Cut the pay and I’m sure the savings will be passed on to the shippers.
…right?
If railroads need workers, they must raise the pay. If they raise it high enough, they will get all the workers they need. And they will be paying them what they are worth. Trucking companies will have to raise their driver pay too. These pay raises for truckers and railroaders will have to be paid for by the shipping revenue. If it turns out that railroads cannot hire labor at a low enough cost to make a profit, then they will go out of business.
Also, if railroads don’t want to raise their pay high enough to attract labor, they can start improving their working conditions, and couple that with a more modest pay increase in order to attract labor.
Higher pay may get workers, but working conditions is what’s going to keep them here.
Quite true. We had a technician working for us, a good one too, who got his commercial driver’s license and became a long-haul trucker. A year later he was back with us and we were glad to have him. The pay was better as a trucker than it was as a copier repair technician but the working conditions sucked.
He was never home, the trucking company bounced him all over the country like a ping-pong ball and finally he had enough.
A recent survey from the bureau of economic research showed that for most worker cohorts (except age 20-29) working from home is more valued than pay increases.
Another factor that crops up is that a lot of younger workers don’t seem to realize that if you want to make the big bucks then you will have to put in the time at work to earn them and that sometimes the job has to come first.
Sometimes there’s other things involved. Several years back I was reading a trade publication for the HVAC industry where an employer said his problem with new hires was they wanted to work but they didn’t know how to work! They’d never had part-time or summer jobs so he had to start from Square One teaching the basics of being in the workforce.
His attitude was “Hey, you do what you have to do but WHY do I have to do it? Where were their parents, teachers, or anyone else who could have influenced these kids and taught them how the real world operates?”
Disturbing, to say the least.
You just won’t listen, will you? It’s not about getting employees, it’s keeping employees. They leave because of QoL.
Correct. Remember when fast food restaurant were staffed with high school kids? Now it’s retirees and people in their 20-30s. Many parents spoil their kids by wanting them to “enjoy” HS and not have an afterschool job.
Several years ago I went to the McDonalds in Sebring, FL - not a single employee was under what appeared to be 70.
I didn’t have a job in HS because I was involved in scholastic sports - Track, Soccer and Baseball. Tried Football in Freshman & Sophomore year then the famaily transferred to