#paid sick leave

[dispatchesfromtheclasswar]

#class war #class warfare #classism #capitalism #sick leave #paid sick leave #sick days #paid sick days #short staffing #kafka #metamorphosis

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

#us politics #twitter #tweet #2023 #sen. bernie sanders #Vermont #progressivism #progressive politics #paid sick leave #worker's rights #unionize

[thoughtportal]

#tweet #tweets #twitter #pandemic #COVID-19 #COVID #universal healthcare #paid sick leave #infrastructure

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Earlier this month, a train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, triggering a massive fire and forcing everyone within a 1-mile radius of the crash to evacuate. To avoid a potential explosion, officials conducted a controlled detonation of five tankers three days later, sending carcinogenic vinyl chloride into the air. Two days later, residents of the 4,500-person village were told they could safely return home. Many questioned the safety of the air and water supply.

Since then, reporting has made clear that this environmental disaster was less a freak accident than a predictable outcome of lax safety measures and capitalist greed. Here’s what you need to know about the Norfolk Southern rail company.

NORFOLK SOUTHERN CHOSE NOT TO UPGRADE ITS TRAINS’ “CIVIL WAR-ERA” BRAKES.

A report in The Lever notes that the train that crashed in East Palestine was not equipped with Electronically Controlled Pneumatic brakes—fully electric brakes that experts say could have reduced the severity of the crash. Although Norfolk Southern once touted its use of ECP brakes, it lobbied against requiring them on trains carrying hazardous materials. An Obama-era rule required that HHFTs have ECP brakes, but the Trump administration overturned this rule.

NORFOLK SOUTHERN WORKERS DON’T GET PAID SICK TIME.

Remember when the Senate voted to avert a rail strike and deny workers sick leave? Norfolk Southern workers were among those affected. When investors encouraged Norfolk Southern to offer paid sick leave, the company said, OK, we won’t furlough people as often. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT.) has since demanded that rail companies offer workers at least seven days of paid sick leave.

RAIL COMPANIES REFUSE TO HIRE ENOUGH WORKERS.

Unions say that the rail industry’s use of furloughs to reduce the workforce stretches staff too thin. As Timothy Noah wrote in the New Republic, the 141-car train that crashed in East Palestine carried just two crew members and one trainee:

"On February 10, Anya Litvak of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that security camera footage 20 miles short of where the derailment occurred showed a rail car axle that appeared to be on fire. Why this information was not transmitted quickly to the train crew remains unknown, but it seems likely that the answer has something to do with the number of people who were in a position to sound the alarm."

NORFOLK SOUTHERN HAS SPENT BILLIONS ON STOCK BUYBACKS.

Norfolk Southern made $4.8 billion in operating profit in 2022, More Perfect Union reported, and paid shareholders $4.7 billion in stock buybacks and dividends.

As my colleague Hannah Levintova explained last year:

"A buyback is when companies purchase shares of their own company from investors, driving up the value of the remaining stock because there are fewer shares circulating. Buybacks are taxed at the lower capital gains rate, which maxes out at 20% for the wealthiest households. But for those investors who don’t sell their shares back to the company, there’s no tax—even though the value of their holdings has increased. Until that investor sells the asset, their wealth will grow tax-free. And thanks in part to a tax code loophole that enables the wealthy to pass shares on to their heirs, who can then skip paying capital gains taxes on them altogether, buybacks play a role in building untaxed generational wealth."

THE TRAIN THAT CAUSED THE CLOUD OF SMOKE OVER EAST PALESTINE WAS NOT CATEGORIZED AS A “HIGH-HAZARD FLAMMABLE TRAIN.”

Thanks to pressure from industry lobbyists, the “high-hazard flammable train” categorization applies only to trains carrying a narrow set of materials, like crude oil, The Lever also reported. That designation would have required that the train follow specific speed and braking restrictions.

DESPITE MAKING BILLIONS IN PROFIT, NORFOLK SOUTHERN INITIALLY OFFERED JUST $25,000 TO EAST PALESTINE.

Norfolk Southern managed to scrape together $25,000 for the town that’s been doused in toxic chemicals. People who fled their homes under fear of death can claim $1,000 per person per household. Since then, the company has announced increases in charity.

#us politics #news #mother jones #2023 #east palestine #ohio #norfolk southern #vinyl chloride #carcinogens #Electronically Controlled Pneumatic brakes #railway workers #railroads #railway unions #furloughs #paid sick leave #stock buybacks #high-hazard flammable train #charity #train derailment #hazardous chemical spill #corporate greed

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Premier Ranj Pillai says that all Yukon businesses can apply to have the cost of employee wages on sick days covered by the government — even if they already have a program in place to cover those costs themselves.

When the new government-funded paid sick leave program was announced earlier this week, one of the stipulations was that only businesses that did not already have a policy promising to pay employee wages on sick days could apply for the rebate.

NDP MLA Lane Tredger said that approach punished businesses who chose to do the right thing.

"If I were an organization that already pays for sick leave and will be getting nothing through this program while my competitors are subsidized, I would be outraged," Tredger said. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

#cdnpoli #Yukon #workers' rights #paid sick leave #Liberals

[heyninja]

Ah, 'Murica my beloved. Where I am beginning to be sick, but I cannot stay home because I do not have enough sick time to pay my bills if I jump the gun.

How am I supposed to be able to think of protecting others when I can't even comfortably make the decision to protect myself from a short paycheck that won't cover my bills?

This is why people go to work sick here all the time. We don't want to hurt anybody, but we want to be able to eat and not end up homeless and on top of that most systems punish us for taking the actual amount of days it would require to not longer transmit illness.

-- To be clear this isn't about my CURRENT job. It's fine (other than yeah I'm juggling my PTO because 2022 kicked me in the nuts a lot). I love my job, they're understanding and chill. But it got my thinking about my last few jobs before that and uh.

I did indeed have thoughts about my prior few jobs indeed.

#paid sick leave #america do better #'just stay home if you're feeling bad' #sure susan and when HR has a serious meeting with me about did i really NEED that absence what happens then susan #and when your manager starts asking personal questions about why exactly you need off even when they're not supposed to #and on top of that there's no universal level of basic time off or sick leave #so you just get what you get #and they fucking hate when you use it anyway #WONDER WHY EVERYONE IS ALL BURNED OUT AND QUIET QUITTING #a question for the ages

[kp777]

#bernie sanders #rail workers #paid sick leave

[indizombie]

Sick leave is a major sticking point not just for rail union members. The US is one of only two countries in the 38-member Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development without a national law guaranteeing paid sick leave for its workers. (The other, South Korea, is now trialling a paid sick leave programme.) Though 16 states have passed laws requiring paid sick leave over the last decade, one in five workers across the country still does not have access to the benefit, with low-wage workers most at risk. The issue has emerged repeatedly in labour disputes in recent years, as workers, empowered by a strong job market and contending with coronavirus and an unusually severe flu and virus season, demand more from employers.

Natalie Sherman, ‘Rail strike is cancelled - at the cost of paid sick leave’, BBC

#BBC #Natalie Sherman #United States #OECD #South Korea #paid sick leave #labour disputes

[dispatchesfromtheclasswar]

What's that, Sam Jones? Since you started paying your 22 staff members at your cafe a living wage + giving them 10 paid sick days/year you've had zero problems attracting staff, in a city where restaurant owners are constantly crying about how they are chronically short-staffed because "no one wants to work anymore?" GEE I WONDER WHAT SAM'S SECRET IS???

#class war #living wage #class warfare #paid sick leave #classism #2% jazz cafe #sam jones #paid sick days #minimum wage

[scarefox]

Oh I think / hope my work played my immune system down far enough so I might get sick 👀 not that I wanna be sick but being away from this clown station for a few days would be nice~

Customs officers and post employees are currently so far up their high horses and passive aggressive war with each other, that the customs team refuses to continue working with the post office team. And guess who has to even out the time / work overlode now? We temporary employees. 

Like yesterday we were supposed to push some packages through the X-Ray with a customs officer. They said only 1h and about 6 containers full of packages. We managed to get 5 containers in 1h while working fast (about 220 packages x 20kg / 44 lbs )... that’s like 1h non-stop weight lifting....And then the boss of the customs team had the audacity to tell us we will get another load of TWELVE containers we were supposed to do the next 1h ?!?!?!?! Because the customs guy working with us on  the X-Ray is literally the only person in that whole building who is allowed to do X-Ray and he was sick that day, still working .................... , and they predicted he will be calling in sick the next day so we were supposed to push through the whole work load within the next 1h. Needless to say we didn’t finish on time (we went home on time and left the work for them to finish). Not only because of the time + workload issue but mainly because some management issues came up as well.

But yea... they changed my tasks and now I have to do way harder (heavier) work the whole day long. 3 Days in a row now, I am tired af and feel sick.

#paid sick leave #fingers crossed I will be sick next week and NOT on the weekend #student jobs #literally not getting paid enough for this #they pay 2€ less than amazon and I did less exhausting work at amazon in a 9h shift than what I do now in a 7h shift

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Sen. Bernie Sanders said late Tuesday night that it was time to "put up or shut up" for any U.S. lawmaker who claims to fight for the working class as he and other progressives in Congress vowed to insert paid sick leave into a labor agreement between railway workers and the nation's rail companies.

With a vote in the U.S. House as early as Wednesday morning, Sanders was asked by MSNBC host Chris Hayes whether Congress has the authority to mandate that sick leave—the final key demand of railway workers unions who have battling the carriers for months—be added to the deal that congressional lawmakers have been asked by President Joe Biden to force through as a way to avert a strike by the workers that would have huge impacts on the national economy.

"Congress has the power to come up with an agreement in order to protect the economy," said Sanders. While he said that he doesn't know anybody who wants a strike—and acknowledged that such a work stoppage would hurt the broader economy—Sanders said the "bottom line" in this fight is quite clear.

"The bottom line," said Sanders, "is that the American people and workers throughout this country are profoundly disgusted by the kind of corporate greed that we are seeing. Everybody knows that billionaires are getting richer, working people are struggling, corporate profits are at an all-time high, and they're making goods unaffordable for ordinary Americans—that's the overall reality. And what you're seeing in the rail industry is that phenomenon in spades."

Citing statistics that show the major rail carriers have made an estimated $21 billion in profits over the last three quarters, another $25 billion in stock buybacks to enrich their wealthy investors, and multi-million dollar salaries to top executives, Sanders slammed the fact that the railway workers themselves "have zero—underline zero—guaranteed sick leave."

Watch the full interview:

On Tuesday night, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) introduced an amendment in the House that would add seven paid sick days to the labor contract proposal that was negotiated with the assistance of the White House earlier this year, but subsequently rejected by a number of the railway unions for lack of sick leave. With the strike deadline looming, Biden on Monday angered many rank-and-file union members and outside progressives by asking Congress to force through the previous contract deal without pushing for the inclusion of sick leave.

While House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday backed Biden's call to push through a vote on the contract "with no poison pills or changes to the negotiated terms," but in a Dear Colleague letter issued Tuesday evening she adjusted that course by indicating that two votes would be held, explaining to members:

• First, we will consider the strike-averting legislation to adopt the Tentative Agreement, as negotiated by the railroad companies and labor leaders.

• Next, we will have a separate, up-or-down vote to add seven days of paid sick leave for railroaders to the Tentative Agreement.

• Then, we will send this package to the Senate, which will then go directly to President Biden for signature.

With Sanders vowing to fight for the same kind of inclusion in the Senate, reporting from Capitol Hill indicated that there may be enough Republican support for adding the paid sick leave to bypass the 60-vote threshold and overcome a filibuster in the upper chamber.

Asked if he thought he could get the ten necessary votes from the GOP in the Senate, Sanders said, "Well, who knows?" as he mentioned that Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the party caucus' whip, has indicated "significant" support for the amendment among Republicans.

"Look, you have a number of Republicans who claim—claim—to be supporters of the working class," he added. "Well, if you are a supporter of the working class how are you going to vote against the proposal which provides guaranteed paid sick leave to workers who have none right now? So I am cautiously optimistic that we can get this done."

Asked by Hayes if this represents a "put your money where your mouth is" moment for a Republican Party that has tried to claim the mantle of being the authentic blue-collar party, Sanders nodded in agreement.

"Put up or shut up," said Sanders. "If you can't vote for this, to give workers today—who really have hard jobs, dangerous jobs—if you can't give them paid sick leave, don't tell anybody that you stand with working families."

#us politics #news #2022 #sen. bernie sanders #vermont #biden administration #railway workers #railroads #railroad unions #railroad strike #paid sick leave #us house of representatives #us senate #msnbc #chris hayes #common dreams #progressives #progressivism #worker's rights #union workers #working class #YouTube #videos #Rep. Jamaal Bowman #twitter #tweet #speaker nancy pelosi #rep. nancy pelosi

[quisqueno]

New video out now!!! Alongside CatLovingCommie, we discuss the Railway Labor Act of 1926 & how Congress used this law to suppress the bargaining power of Railway workers. We also talk about AOC & the Squad & their votes re Railway workers paid sick leave.

#railway #trains #AOC #the squad #union #workers #unionize #sick leave #paid sick leave #labor rights #labor unions #labor strikes #strikes #labor #twitch #youtube #usa #progressive #liberal #conservatives #socialist #communist

[atheoryofinquiry]

#this is America #elf on shelf #Santa #Christmas meme #ai #artificalintelligence #aiart #paid sick leave #sick leave #labor #labor rights