Railroaded
Railroads
Normally when we’re talking about railroads around here it’s fish stick- or robbery-related. However! As we talked about back then, disgruntled, recently laid-off railroad employees may have been responsible for said heists:
According to the company’s annual reports, Union Pacific laid off almost 5,000 workers during the pandemic. The pandemic has been a boon to the rail operator, with freight and container costs hitting record highs due to supply chain disruptions.
Unbeknownst to me, I wrote those words a mere three days after a federal judge ruled in favor of the railroads against their workers:
Earlier in January, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) and the Transportation Division of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers (SMART-TD), which together represent roughly 17,000 railroad workers, initiated steps to prepare for a strike that would have begun on the Feb. 1.
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However, on Tuesday, Jan. 25, a US District Court judge granted BNSF a temporary restraining order blocking the two unions from striking, saying that a strike would cause the rail company “substantial, immediate and irreparable harm.”
At issue was BNSF Railway’s new “Hi-Viz” staffing policy, which went into effect over the winter. What is Hi-Viz?
Under the policy, each rail worker is given a balance of 30 points. Workers who “mark off” (take unscheduled days off) receive a penalty—anywhere from 2 to 25 points off the balance. If the balance drops to 0 at any time, the worker is then subject to disciplinary action, and the point total is reset to 15. If the balance drops to zero three times, then the worker is fired. Workers have a chance to regain points, but only if they work without accruing an infraction for 14 days straight. In mid-May, BNSF revised the policy to allow for additional bonus points to be earned, but only for top performers within a given period.
Unlike office workers, who have two days off a week - weekends - rail lines move 24/7, and rail workers do not have static schedules. They are essentially on call at all times, at the mercy of a system rife with delays due to supply chain backups and lack of staffing. Therefore, rail employees were expected to either predict which days they’d need off weeks or months in advance, or run the risk of incurring major penalties that could cost them their jobs. It’s no wonder they planned to strike over the policy. Enacting it during a pandemic was unusually cruel:
For railroad workers continuing to work in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the new attendance policy makes it increasingly difficult to care for themselves and their coworkers should they contract the coronavirus and fall ill.
BNSF does not allow for unpaid sick days, or unplanned days off, and now actively penalizes employees on a sliding scale based on factors out of their control. When unions objected to this insane staffing change, a judge overruled them and said, quite literally, that rail workers have to stay on the job, no matter what, or it could harm BNSF. BNSF is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet’s company, valued at $600 billion dollars. The railway makes around $6 billion dollars a year in profits.
Speaking of profits, the primary reason for the grueling schedules is the industry’s aggressive cost-cutting layoffs, going back to pre-pandemic times:
“Over the last six years,” Karl Evers-Hillstrom noted in May of this year, “the leading freight carriers laid off 45,000 employees, or nearly 30 percent of their combined workforce, according to the Surface Transportation Board…”
Railroads cut nearly a quarter of their workforce and continued to do so through the pandemic, even as demand for shipped cargo spiked. Perhaps feeling they are largely immune to labor laws, the carriers have pushed to remove backup conductors on freight trains:
In addition to draconian attendance policies, the railroad carriers are currently seeking via contract negotiations to eliminate two-person crews on their Class I trains, dropping the number from 2 people to 1 person per train.
Considering the size, weight, and potentially hazardous materials aboard any large freight train, I don’t feel great knowing the billionaire railway owners are attempting to put a single person in charge of its safety.
After Hi-Viz went into effect, workers quit in droves:
BNSF, one of two rail carriers that services the Port of Los Angeles, has lost nearly 1,000 rail workers since the Hi-Viz attendance policy was announced, according to Charlie Wishman, President of the Iowa Federation of Labor…
Which brings us to today, when railroad workers are back in the news, threatening a strike so big Biden has gotten involved:
Negotiators from railroad carriers and unions met in Labor Secretary Marty Walsh’s office Wednesday as the sides tried to negotiate a deal ahead of Friday’s strike deadline.
Unions are asking carriers for unpaid sick time as a compromise, but even that was proposal was rejected:
Union negotiators offered the rail carriers a one-page, single-sided proposal to spare employees disciplinary points if they schedule routine medical visits in advance for days they would otherwise have to work, according to Pierce.
“You have to understand these workers are not on scheduled days. They have no scheduled days off. They work whenever they get called,” he said. “We are just asking for our workers to be able to go get their medical appointment done and not have to be at work that day.”
That does seem reasonable! The major us railway carriers who control billions in freight and monopolistic swaths of US rail corridors, won’t give their workers the basic flexibility of the most entry level office employee. Much is being made over how much the strike could cost the country - $2 billion a day! supply chain backups for weeks! - remember that the sole cause is a bunch of rich railway owners refusing to treat their hollowed-out workforce with even basic dignity.
As of this morning (Thursday) the White House announced a ‘tentative’ agreement to avert the strike - the deal will still need to go to union votes. It is telling that once the railroad companies’ cruel policies received enough national attention, they were forced to cave on the key point of contention. Here’s hoping rail workers can take a day off - or two - to celebrate.
Yeshivas
What if you were born and raised in America, attended school into your twenties, and were unable to speak, read, or write English, perform basic math skills or any other entry-level job requirements in today’s economy? Typically these types of stories feature victims of child kidnapping or people raised in cults. For 50,000 Hasidic Jewish boys in New York, however, it’s the norm:
The leaders of New York’s Hasidic community have built scores of private schools to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition — and to wall them off from the secular world. Offering little English and math, and virtually no science or history, they drill students relentlessly, sometimes brutally, during hours of religious lessons conducted in Yiddish.
The result, a New York Times investigation has found, is that generations of children have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency.
The system fails boys especially acutely, putting strict focus on religious studies to the near exclusion of all else. Girls often receive more secular education, if only because they are expected to raise children and take care of family duties once they are married off.
If this story took place in Israel, with different rules around religious education, it might not raise many eyebrows. However, New York yeshivas take billions in government money under the auspices of providing an education on par with the state’s public schools:
Tax dollars are not supposed to go toward religious education. But public agencies pay private schools to comply with government mandates and manage social services. Hasidic boys’ yeshivas, like other private schools, access dozens of such programs, collecting money that subsidizes their theological curriculum.
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The analysis showed that New York’s Hasidic boys’ schools received more than $375 million from the government in [2019].
The community has become adept at taking advantage of city programs intended to help low-income families:
The city voucher program that helps low-income families pay for child care now sends nearly a third of its total assistance to Hasidic neighborhoods, even while tens of thousands of people have languished on waiting lists. The program provides more than $50 million a year to Hasidic boys’ schools that claim the end of their regular school day as child care, records show.
And other forms of government aid:
Hasidic boys’ schools also received about $30 million from government financial aid programs, which they access by counting their older students as pursuing higher education degrees in religious studies.
The schools got roughly $100 million through antipoverty programs to provide free breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks every school day to virtually all Hasidic boys, including during the summer
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The Times review also found that Hasidic boys’ schools benefit from about $100 million annually from federal Title 1 programs and other sources of funding for secular education.
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And they collected about $200,000 in federal money for internet-related services, even though they forbid students from going online.
This is a key issue with the yeshivas - they are receiving aid under the auspices of providing an education to the community’s children, and using it to indoctrinate successive generations with strict religious ideology that virtually guarantees they will find it difficult or impossible to assimilate into any other culture. They aren’t exactly holding these kids captive, but they’re severely limiting their life options if they decide to choose anything other than a life within the community.
The stories of those who did try to leave are heartbreaking - adults unable to read or write, or communicate in English. Many turn to drugs, or end up in a permanent cycle of poverty. Even within the Hasidic community, all but the most privileged experience a poor quality of life despite the billions in government aid:
Spread across Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, the schools turn out thousands of students each year who are unprepared to navigate the outside world, helping to push poverty rates in Hasidic neighborhoods to some of the highest in New York.
The same groups who run the schools have accumulated large real estate portfolios, with one valued at over $500 million, while leaders funnel government aid to their own food and logistics companies.
What can be done about the abuses in the system - not only the children, but the Hasidim who’ve become wealthy exploiting state and federal aid? Given their political power in local and state politics, probably not much:
That’s in part because Hasidic sects control small but influential voting blocs in parts of the city and Rockland County. For ambitious Democrats, courting them has always been paramount, especially in an era with fewer and fewer power brokers who can control hundreds or thousands of votes. An influential Hasidic rabbi can command members of his sect to vote in lockstep. Other politicians worry about perceptions of antisemitism; for defenders of Hasidic education, any attacks on their standards amount to a blanket attack on Jewish people.
Those in charge control not only what their people learn, but when and for whom they vote. Any criticism of this imbalance is met with accusations of anti-Semitism and shouted down by Jewish groups who see any scrutiny as an assault on the religion and culture as a whole.
It is important to protect marginalized groups in American society, to be sure, and Jews have seen a recent surge in harassment and violence, largely driven by right-wing bigots who have spent years demonizing prominent Jews and blaming us for the country’s failings. However, we must also find ways to protect Hasidic children, who may end up victims of physical and emotional abuse in a school system the state of New York has been content to shovel money into for decades, turning a blind eye to what it’s actually doing to the students forced into it.
Tennis
This year’s US Open has been full of exciting plotlines, with Serena Williams’s maybe-retirement and an American men’s player reaching a dramatic semifinal. As the NY Times points out, the Open is a popular event among Wall Street and Silicon Valley types, the stands regularly packed with the rich and famous. But, as a business, the sport is failing its athletes:
The problem, in [Vasek] Pospisil’s view, is not that Roger Federer and Serena Williams make too much; rather, it is that the players as a group do not receive anything close to a fair share of the revenue generated by tennis. At the U.S. Open, for instance, prize money amounts to around 14 percent of gross revenues; by contrast, around half of the National Basketball Association’s total revenues goes to the players, and the same is roughly true in the National Football League, the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball. “There’s so much money in tennis,” Pospisil said. “The pie is huge; the piece we’re getting is tiny.” If the tournaments gave the players a bigger cut, he argued, the extra money could be directed to lower-level events.
For the top twenty or thirty stars in tennis, life is good. Everyone outside the top fifty, may have to take second jobs or rely on wealthy families to stay on tour - they can lose money, even while they win matches. Compared to any other pro sport with a large international following, the math is unthinkable:
Tennis is roughly a $2 billion business. But the industry can support only 100 or so players. If you’re the 50th- or 60th-best basketball player, you’re probably making $12 million a year at least, assuming you’ve been in the league a few years.
Where does the $2 billion go? Executives and middle management, of course:
There’s a bureaucracy in this sport that doesn’t exist anywhere else. It’s run by seven organizations…
Each of those organizations has its own C.E.O., layers of management and P.R. staff, and there’s a lot of overlap and overhead. You’re supporting a lot of lifestyles there. From a player’s perspective, people are paying money to see them. But the money those players are producing is going to pay for a lot of senior vice presidents. They often wonder: Are these organizations built to serve the players, or to serve themselves?
Men’s and women’s tours operate separately, the four major tournaments are all separate entities with large, well-paid staffs of people doing everything other than playing actual tennis. Meanwhile, players are self-employed, pay for their own travel, coaching, health care, and other expenses, and those unlucky enough to not have sponsors depend solely on tournament winnings to survive, while each ruling organization is funneling more than three quarters of ticket and sponsor money to themselves.
Given all the sets of competing interests, it’s unlikely tennis will reform itself in a way that pays its top players equitably, but there is recent movement towards change - the sport’s former number one Novak Djokovic - currently disallowed from many tournaments due to his refusal to get vaccinated - has been an unexpectedly loud voice on behalf of players in the lower echelons. Nadal and Federer, the other two giants in men’s tennis, have been more reticent, understandably content with the status quo. Hopefully a new crop of young, less traditionalist players can apply pressure on the various ruling bodies in tennis to form a proper player’s union that represents the interests of all the sport’s talent, rather than the CEOs and VPs of tennis’s sprawling bureaucracy.
Instagram Reels
Among Metabook’s many missteps in the last few months was their push to get everyone on Instagram to use Reels, their TikTok clone. Zuckerberg and other senior Instagram executives swore Reels was their ‘growth’ product, assuring investors their nth pivot to video would for sure work this time. How’s that going?
Instagram users cumulatively are spending 17.6 million hours a day watching Reels, less than one-tenth of the 197.8 million hours TikTok users spend each day on that platform, according to a document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that summarizes internal Meta research.
Well, that just means they’ve got a 900% growth target, right? Right?
One reason is that Instagram has struggled to recruit people to make content. Roughly 11 million creators are on the platform in the U.S., but only about 2.3 million of them, or 20.7%, post on that platform each month, the document said.
Hmm, that’s not good. I wonder why:
This spring, [Landen] Purifoy posted the same video across TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Snapchat’s Spotlight and Instagram Reels. The video received millions of views on every platform except Instagram. There, it got less than 100,000.
“Nobody’s going to make original content for Instagram,” Mr. Purifoy said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Well that makes sense. So instead of laboring over original content for a tenth of the views, creators are simply recycling videos from other platforms onto Reels:
The internal document showed that nearly one-third of Reels videos are created on another platform, usually TikTok, and include a watermark or border identifying them as such. Meta said it “downranks” these videos, meaning it shows them to smaller audiences to reduce the incentives for those that post them, but they continue to proliferate. For Reels users, the result is that often they are shown videos recycled from another, more popular platform.
I mean, can you blame them? Don’t worry, though, Meta is going to use its market dominance to shove more Reels down everyone’s throats as it attempts to catch the speeding TikTok locomotive:
To encourage users like Mr. Purifoy to post more, Meta announced last year that it was launching a fund to pay creators a total of $1 billion by the end of this year. The internal document said that Instagram Reels thus far has paid out $120 million.
That seems like…a lot of money? Though closer inspection seems to indicate Instagram is paying creators a slice of ad revenue through a series of convoluted, gamified app features:
This investment will include new bonus programs that pay eligible creators for hitting certain milestones when they use our creative and monetization tools. We’ll also provide seed funding for creators to produce their content. Our goal is to help as many creators as possible find sustainable, long-term success on our apps.
Uh…cool? Leave it to Facebook to come up with a bewildering system to creator rewards that sounds like it was written by the legal department. They’re investing a billion dollars in this? Likely most of the funds will flow to large creators with existing followings, or scammers will find ways to exploit it, like they do every other facet of Facebook. For everyone else, the Instagram experience will stay bad, or possibly get worse, when the company figures out a way to stuff our feeds full of unsolicited videos without pissing off any Kardashians.
Short Cons
Insider - “Today, about a quarter of Congress is over the age of 70, the highest percentage ever. At the same time, while half the country is aged 38 or younger, just 5 percent of Congress can say the same.”
Mississippi Today - “The newly released texts, filed Monday by an attorney representing Nancy New’s nonprofit, show that Bryant, Favre, New, Davis and others worked together to channel at least $5 million of the state’s welfare funds to build a new volleyball stadium at University of Southern Mississippi, where Favre’s daughter played the sport.”
WSJ - “Russian businessman Mikhail Fridman is offering to transfer $1 billion of his personal wealth into a Ukrainian bank he co-founded, a proposal that people familiar with the issue said is intended to persuade the U.K. to lift sanctions against him.”
ProPublica - “After Sen. Richard Burr, told his broker to sell off more than a million dollars in stock a week before the 2020 coronavirus market crash, he called his brother-in-law, Gerald Fauth. Immediately after, Fauth called his wealth manager to sell off almost $160,000 in stock.”
Tips, thoughts, or rail nationalization plans to scammerdarkly@gmail.com