As evidenced by the fact that there is no federal law about it, and only a handful of states required a small number of paid sick days.
>if such workers wish to recuperate from an illness or make time to see a doctor about a nagging complaint, they need to use vacation time, which must be requested days in advance. In other words, if a worker wants to take time off to recover from the flu, they need to notify their employer of this days before actually catching the virus.
>Q: Why did the railroads reject proposals to add benefits on top of the framework recommended by the PEB?
>A: The request for additional benefits made by the few unions that have not ratified tentative agreements is similar to a proposal which was carefully considered and rejected by President Biden’s Presidential Emergency Board (PEB). It comes weeks after these same unions entered into tentative agreements that included the most generous wage package in almost 50 years of national rail negotiations.
>The health, safety, and wellbeing of rail employees is a top priority for all railroads, and any suggestion that rail workers cannot take time off when sick is easily disproven. Rail employees can and do take time off for sickness and have comprehensive paid sickness benefits starting, depending upon craft, after as few as four days of absence and lasting up to 52 weeks. The structure of these benefits is a function of decades of bargaining where unions have repeatedly agreed that short-term absences would be unpaid in favor of higher compensation for days worked and more generous sickness benefits for longer absences.
https://raillaborfacts.org/news/bargaining-status-faq-2022/
What's happened is that the unions negotiated higher pay for worse benefits. Now some of them are leaning on friendly politicians to get the benefits they traded away back without having to give up the higher pay.
> National Railway Labor Conference (NRLC) is an association of all U.S. Class I freight railroads and many smaller freight and passenger lines.
I can see how you assumed the reverse, given the misleading name, but that tells us something too, doesn’t it?
BLET - similar story https://ble-t.org/news/split-decision-unions-for-railroad-en...
IBEW? thats the electric workers union they aren't on call 24/365 to drive a train into the middle of nowhere sit for 12 hours then be shuttled to bunkhouse.
TCU, BRC that communications and car maintainance...
ATDA, dispachers
IAM, machinists
NCFO, well the Firemen and Oilers there refers to fixed plants not locomotives, and they've been part of the service industry union for the last 30 years, I don't know who exactly they cover but it's again probably not the engineers/conductors.
All of which is to say that the unions that have ratified the agreement are the ones that aren't being fucked by PTO/sick day shit (which isn't to say unaffected but, not fucked).
They didn't negotiate anything with the current contract being imposed on them. The contracts have been voted down by membership, hence the union does not agree with the terms.
The group who has "leaned on friendly politicians" is in fact management, who got Biden and the spineless Dems to impose this not-agreed-to contract via legislation.