36-hour shifts, 80-hour weeks: Workers are being burnt out by overtime
36-hour shifts, 80-hour weeks: Workers are being burnt out by overtime
Americans say they are being required to work an exorbitant amount of overtime to compensate for staffing shortages that have plagued the economy.
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 😒
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While they mention the number of people who retired during the pandemic, they failed to mention the million or so who died, the tens of millions with long covid, and the family and friends who are now helping out those who are disabled and can't pick up shifts they might have covered before.
Well of course they don't mention the actual health consequences of the pandemic (that never actually ended) - that would make the money line sad!
Are cheeky responses like this hindering progress? It's nothing about you, I just want to speak about this trend that is everywhere and I guess here is where I start.
Read comically, yea, it is funny to laugh about how terrible something is. But it sucks the serious nature of the topic away and now it's a joke.
Considering a significant amount of people browse just headlines and top comments, everything is a joke. No one is actually talking about anything.
Again, not you in any way. Yours is one of the millions of normalized joke-respones the internet has conditioned us to.
We are beholden to the system, so at least laugh about it. But then take it down too.
We joke because we're too demoralized to be angry anymore. Outrage and tragedy takes a lot out of us, eventually we burn out and resort to gallows humor. I don't think that's what's hindering progress though!
It's the evil motherfuckers in the ruling class that hinder progress. They murder us to maximize profits because we're nothing but meat to them.
I get it %100. I'm not meaning to target you as a bad actor or any of the people saying these things, because you're totally right that all we have power over is laughing about the corruption.
My curiosity is if our collective "well shit, that's how it is haha" is a negative feedback loop discouraging a ny action
I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Mockery is the result of helplessness, I don't think it causes it. It's a coping mechanism.
Take that away and people would just... tune out.
Alcoholism is a coping mechanism 🤷☹
Religion is a coping mechanism too, but that doesn't stop religious people from fighting for their freedom. 🇵🇸
I didn't make a clear point. I meant that alcoholism is a coping mechanism and it is a net negative. Is mocking situations and derailing the seriousness of those situations similar?
I'm asking in a curious mood. I have no agenda here.
My point was coping mechanisms keep us alive so we can keep fighting. Without them we either tune out of current events or committ suicide. Religion is the opiate of the masses but I'm too irreligious for that, so instead I snark to keep myself alive.
Alcoholism is literally deadly so it's a bad comparison.
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.
You joke, because you have nothing to contribute.
Says you, hoppin in a thread to give your contribution of checks your work ad hominem... swing-and-a-miss!
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.
This comment goes hard for me
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?
Golly, i was gonna ignore you but you keep showing me that you need my help.
You joke, because you have nothing to contribute.
says the man who only adds hominim to a discussion he was not part of. Can you show me where your arrogance springs from?
And you are offering alternatives how?
You forget your place, meat.
You are not a supervisor, you're the same muck monkey i am, sitting down in the dirt. You're a wage slave, a mook. A gear for the machine.
So am I. I’m so tired and angry, I have no recourse but to criticise you.
Don't you ever forget what a worthless removed you are, how little your matter matters to the folks that actually have power.
My mood doesn’t justify my behaviour you say?
You fucking LARPer, you dont have power so you act superior in a place where no one can touch you... well i see who you are, so don't you dare forget your place here in the dirt with me.
I know that pretending to be better than others is how you cope with how shitty the world is, but try not to make your bullshit our problem next time, k?
Does that help? Do you remember who you are? That's right! We're brothers. We are all brothers here. Now please show me that you actually read this long yet important lesson and,
TLDR; no, read it again.
So create another ruling class to imprison these people?
How do you abolish the profit motive? It’s literally just the motivation to benefit from a transaction.
By abolishing private ownership of capital and the accumulation of wealth.
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?
The goal is to eventually abolish class society completely, so there is no ruling class.
And it will mean more depending on how much you contribute to society.
That's really not true at all. The Arab Spring was started by a simple street vendor who set himself on fire in protest of the confiscation of his wares, and that triggered the collapse of multiple countries. Unfortunately it didn't amount to any actual progress because there wasn't an organized party that was ready to take advantage of his sacrifice, and then of course America had to get involved and make it all worse, but he had a huge impact despite not being important or famous or powerful.
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?
Don't... put words in my fucking mouth?
I heartily recommend you waste not one more second on someone so obviously overrating their importance. They can't see you thru their hubris and arrogance, cursed as they are with dunnig-kruger. Come friend, drop them like a bad habit
"Arab spring ..." So you cite an example of social activism that disastrously failed (by your own admission) to justify a similar action by your hand?
Even then it doesn't disprove that individuals that contribute more are statistically more likely to be noticed when absent. If you want to have an impact, especially a positive one, it helps to not have anger as your sole motivator.
"So there is no ruling class"
What exactly is a ruling class to you? There will always be a deciding group. Even in anarcho-fantasies that rule by consensus there will always be a small group that refuses to negotiate, they become the ruling class in that circumstance. So do they get deported to an archipelago for refusing to come to a consensus? Don't the deporters become the ruling class then?
Any sort of organized society outside of intimate groups needs some sort of hierarchical decision making. It's one thing to advocate for positions to be more logically allocated, and another to be completely destroyed.
"Don't put words in my fucking mouth"
I'm impressed that you aren't apparently a hypocrite by holding others to a logical standard that you don't follow. Unfortunately that logical standard is that being angry justifies spreading textual diarrhea all over Lemmy.
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
the first thing I learned in economics (which I studied to a masters level) is that modern theories of economics that dont incorperate marx tend to only work in closed systems and fail when exposed to the real world.
source; my freshman economics proffesor and textbook
I completely agree with this take and also think that similarly, we should refrain from typing/saying things ironically, because eventually, they are communicated unironically.
I remember as a child "if you keep your face that way, it will stick"
It's something to be aware of :)
Oh - and I also forgot to mention that, even in the current 'slow' period, the US is still averaging over 100 covid deaths per day. And that also means that we're averaging an additional 1500 people with long covid every day.
And no one cares about getting a vaccine because "COVID is over" 🙃