Connect with us

Government

Railroaders Say Morale, Quality-Of-Life At All-Time Low

Railroaders Say Morale, Quality-Of-Life At All-Time Low

Authored by Clarissa Hawes via FreightWaves.com,

Nearly 115,000 railroaders were…

Published

on

Railroaders Say Morale, Quality-Of-Life At All-Time Low

Authored by Clarissa Hawes via FreightWaves.com,

Nearly 115,000 railroaders were closely following two votes Wednesday in the U.S. House of Representatives after President Joe Biden called on Congress to immediately pass legislation to avert a rail strike.

The House voted 290-137 Wednesday to avert a possible rail strike amid debate over the national tentative agreement brokered by the White House between union employees and Class I railroads in September. Nearly 40% of the nation’s freight is moved by rail.

Railroad workers for the 12 freight unions have been operating without a new contract for over three years.

However, strict attendance policies and the lack of paid sick days have been sticking points for the majority of rail workers, including the nearly 60,000 members of four freight rail unions that voted to reject the national contract in mid-November.

“It’s been a long three years, depending on how you look at it,” Jeremy Ferguson, president of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers (SMART-TD), told FreightWaves.

“The workforce is cut back to the bone, and those that are left are having to pick up the slack.” 

On Wednesday, SMART-TD issued a statement that it “does not support the notion of Congress intervening in our collective bargaining negotiations to prevent a strike.”

 “We firmly believe in the workers’ right to fight for their own best interests, as well as the best interests of their families,” according to the SMART-TD statement.

“Unfortunately, threats to the economy have caused this Congress to believe that a strike aversion is the best course for this nation.

Separately Wednesday, the House passed legislation by a vote of 221-207 to add seven days of paid sick leave to the tentative rail agreement. Both pieces of legislation aimed to stop a rail strike now head to the Senate.

None of the railroaders FreightWaves spoke to for this article want to go on strike but said they wanted the rail carriers and shippers “to put employees over record profits” and address some of the major challenges, including precision scheduled railroading (PSR), the attendance policy and lack of paid sick leave, that have resulted in a mass exodus among railroad employees.

Railroaders say morale, quality of life at all-time low

One locomotive engineer says morale is at an all-time low at the Class I railroad where he’s worked for more than 25 years. He’s seen engineers with 15 or 20 years “tie up for the last time” and quit.

He’s among nearly 24,000 locomotive engineers and trainmen who make up the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET). BLET was among eight freight unions that voted in mid-November to accept the national tentative agreement reached between the unions and railroads in September.

BLET, the second-largest rail union, voted 53.5% in favor of ratifying the national agreement, while 46.5% of its membership voted against it.

While the engineer, who didn’t want to be named in the article for fear of retaliation, wouldn’t say how he voted earlier this month, he understands why four of the 12 freight unions, including SMART-TD, the largest union, rejected the agreement. 

“I know some of the younger engineers voted for the agreement so they can receive their back pay because they plan to quit because they don’t have the seniority that I do,” he said.

“I don’t blame them — they want jobs where they are home more, can attend their kids’ events, and some are trying to save their marriages after being on call 24/7 for the past few years.”

He said there used to be several road engineers at any given time who were marked up as available to work once his shift ended. That’s not the case now, he said, as some have quit, were fired or took other jobs.

“Now, sometimes I get off the train after being gone on the road for a few days, drive an hour to my house, sleep for 10 hours, then I’m being woken up by a call from a crew dispatcher to report for work in two hours,” the engineer said.

“It’s not much of a life for road engineers and conductors anymore.”

He and his conductor both contracted COVID in 2020 at a time when all of the Class I railroads had slashed their workforces because of precision scheduled railroading (PSR) running longer trains with fewer employees. Around the same time, the rail carriers had made major cuts to middle management and ground employees, forcing him and others “to do more with less.”

Unable to work for three days because of COVID, he received a call from his dispatcher threatening disciplinary action if he did not return to work.

His railroad does offer short-term disability that pays him 65% of his hourly rate after seven days of unpaid leave, but he couldn’t afford to stay home. The engineer said he also faced immense pressure from his bosses to return before he was well. Prior to the COVID-19 vaccine being available, he said engineers and conductors continued to pass the potentially deadly virus back and forth and to other employees amid demand to keep up with the freight volume.

“I had friends that I worked with for 20 years who died of COVID, but we couldn’t even go to their funerals without facing scrutiny by management,” the engineer said. “We had no choice but to work.”

Jeremy Ferguson, president of SMART-TD, appeared on a recent episode of FWNOW to talk about next steps to avoid a possible rail strike. (Photo Credit: FWTV)

Ferguson said his membership wants changes to the railroad carriers’ emphasis on PSR and building massive trains.

“One of the biggest issues that we’ve had in the past year with precision scheduled railroading was trying to cut the workforce and then the attendance policies being ratcheted up to a level that we’ve never seen before. … Before, some people were allowed five to six days off a month [but] now are down to one day a month and no family time,” Ferguson said.

A Class I railroad conductor with more than 25 years of experience said he’s never worked at a job that spends so much money to train employees, only to spend double that amount to find something to fire them for once they are considered trained and marked up to work. 

“There’s this rush to get everybody trained but management isn’t focused on teaching or ‘on-the-job training’ once they mark up at our railroad,” the conductor told FreightWaves.

“In the early days when I was starting out, I had a mentor who had been with the railroad a long time that would pull me aside and explain to me what I did wrong. There’s a learning curve to working on the railroad. Sure, I would get ribbed by the old-timers for a while, but they helped me.”

The biggest lesson he learned was to buy job insurance from companies that specialize in the rail industry.

“I explain it to new hires that it’s like ballerinas who have insurance on their legs and/or feet because that’s how they make a living,” the conductor said.

“Buying job insurance is a product of the way they treat people on the railroad; we have to do this.”

A locomotive engineer for another railroad agreed.

“The railroad wants to fire you at every turn — that’s why almost every single one of us carries job insurance,” the engineer said.

“I don’t know that there’s too many other industries on the planet that carries insurance to protect our jobs.”

A member of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division (BMWED), who also declined to have his name published for fear of being targeted, said he was among 56% of the rank and file who rejected the tentative national agreement in October.

The BMWED has nearly 26,000 workers who build and maintain the tracks and bridges on railroads across the nation.

He voted against the contract over the Class I railroads’ refusal to provide paid sick leave for railroad workers. He said he was told by railroad management that his union contract provided him with ample weeks of vacation time to go to the doctor if needed. The maintenance-of-way employee said that even though he ranks relatively high in seniority and is among the first to pick his weeks of vacation for the next year, there’s no way he could predict when he needs to go to the doctor or use a day to stay home with a sick child.

“My wife is my hero,” the employee said.

“She has a demanding job, too, but she never uses her sick days for herself; it’s always for the kids because I can’t do it without repercussions. It’s been a huge strain on our marriage.” 

He said most railroaders hope to avert a strike, which could result in economic losses of $2 billion per day. He said he and approximately 115,000 railroaders would be without paychecks right before Christmas.

“I’ve been called selfish and greedy because no paid sick time by the railroads is a deal-breaker for me, but the office employees at these railroads automatically get 80 hours of sick time,” the worker told FreightWaves.

“We worked through a pandemic and didn’t have the option of working from home or shelter in place like the office personnel,” he said.

“The railroad told us how proud they were and thanked us for being essential workers. When you offer some employees paid sick time and tell them to stay safe, but then management tells us to get back on the road because there are not enough workers, it sends a message that we aren’t important and we are only essential to their bottom lines.”

Tyler Durden Thu, 12/01/2022 - 13:35

Read More

Continue Reading

Government

Mistakes Were Made

Mistakes Were Made

Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that…

Published

on

Mistakes Were Made

Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that a bit during these past few years, but, if there’s one thing they’re exceptionally good at, it’s taking responsibility for their mistakes. Seriously, when it comes to acknowledging one’s mistakes, and not rationalizing, or minimizing, or attempting to deny them, and any discomfort they may have allegedly caused, no one does it quite like the Germans.

Take this Covid mess, for example. Just last week, the German authorities confessed that they made a few minor mistakes during their management of the “Covid pandemic.” According to Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health, “we were sometimes too strict with the children and probably started easing the restrictions a little too late.” Horst Seehofer, the former Interior Minister, admitted that he would no longer agree to some of the Covid restrictions today, for example, nationwide nighttime curfews. “One must be very careful with calls for compulsory vaccination,” he added. Helge Braun, Head of the Chancellery and Minister for Special Affairs under Merkel, agreed that there had been “misjudgments,” for example, “overestimating the effectiveness of the vaccines.”

This display of the German authorities’ unwavering commitment to transparency and honesty, and the principle of personal honor that guides the German authorities in all their affairs, and that is deeply ingrained in the German character, was published in a piece called “The Divisive Virus” in Der Spiegel, and immediately widely disseminated by the rest of the German state and corporate media in a totally organic manner which did not in any way resemble one enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument pumping out official propaganda in perfect synchronization, or anything creepy and fascistic like that.

Germany, after all, is “an extremely democratic state,” with freedom of speech and the press and all that, not some kind of totalitarian country where the masses are inundated with official propaganda and critics of the government are dragged into criminal court and prosecuted on trumped-up “hate crime” charges.

OK, sure, in a non-democratic totalitarian system, such public “admissions of mistakes” — and the synchronized dissemination thereof by the media — would just be a part of the process of whitewashing the authorities’ fascistic behavior during some particularly totalitarian phase of transforming society into whatever totalitarian dystopia they were trying to transform it into (for example, a three-year-long “state of emergency,” which they declared to keep the masses terrorized and cooperative while they stripped them of their democratic rights, i.e., the ones they hadn’t already stripped them of, and conditioned them to mindlessly follow orders, and robotically repeat nonsensical official slogans, and vent their impotent hatred and fear at the new “Untermenschen” or “counter-revolutionaries”), but that is obviously not the case here.

No, this is definitely not the German authorities staging a public “accountability” spectacle in order to memory-hole what happened during 2020-2023 and enshrine the official narrative in history. There’s going to be a formal “Inquiry Commission” — conducted by the same German authorities that managed the “crisis” — which will get to the bottom of all the regrettable but completely understandable “mistakes” that were made in the heat of the heroic battle against The Divisive Virus!

OK, calm down, all you “conspiracy theorists,” “Covid deniers,” and “anti-vaxxers.” This isn’t going to be like the Nuremberg Trials. No one is going to get taken out and hanged. It’s about identifying and acknowledging mistakes, and learning from them, so that the authorities can manage everything better during the next “pandemic,” or “climate emergency,” or “terrorist attack,” or “insurrection,” or whatever.

For example, the Inquiry Commission will want to look into how the government accidentally declared a Nationwide State of Pandemic Emergency and revised the Infection Protection Act, suspending the German constitution and granting the government the power to rule by decree, on account of a respiratory virus that clearly posed no threat to society at large, and then unleashed police goon squads on the thousands of people who gathered outside the Reichstag to protest the revocation of their constitutional rights.

Once they do, I’m sure they’ll find that that “mistake” bears absolutely no resemblance to the Enabling Act of 1933, which suspended the German constitution and granted the government the power to rule by decree, after the Nazis declared a nationwide “state of emergency.”

Another thing the Commission will probably want to look into is how the German authorities accidentally banned any further demonstrations against their arbitrary decrees, and ordered the police to brutalize anyone participating in such “illegal demonstrations.”

And, while the Commission is inquiring into the possibly slightly inappropriate behavior of their law enforcement officials, they might want to also take a look at the behavior of their unofficial goon squads, like Antifa, which they accidentally encouraged to attack the “anti-vaxxers,” the “Covid deniers,” and anyone brandishing a copy of the German constitution.

Come to think of it, the Inquiry Commission might also want to look into how the German authorities, and the overwhelming majority of the state and corporate media, accidentally systematically fomented mass hatred of anyone who dared to question the government’s arbitrary and nonsensical decrees or who refused to submit to “vaccination,” and publicly demonized us as “Corona deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “far-right anti-Semites,” etc., to the point where mainstream German celebrities like Sarah Bosetti were literally describing us as the inessential “appendix” in the body of the nation, quoting an infamous Nazi almost verbatim.

And then there’s the whole “vaccination” business. The Commission will certainly want to inquire into that. They will probably want to start their inquiry with Karl Lauterbach, and determine exactly how he accidentally lied to the public, over and over, and over again …

And whipped people up into a mass hysteria over “KILLER VARIANTS” …

And “LONG COVID BRAIN ATTACKS” …

And how “THE UNVACCINATED ARE HOLDING THE WHOLE COUNTRY HOSTAGE, SO WE NEED TO FORCIBLY VACCINATE EVERYONE!”

And so on. I could go on with this all day, but it will be much easier to just refer you, and the Commission, to this documentary film by Aya Velázquez. Non-German readers may want to skip to the second half, unless they’re interested in the German “Corona Expert Council” …

Look, the point is, everybody makes “mistakes,” especially during a “state of emergency,” or a war, or some other type of global “crisis.” At least we can always count on the Germans to step up and take responsibility for theirs, and not claim that they didn’t know what was happening, or that they were “just following orders,” or that “the science changed.”

Plus, all this Covid stuff is ancient history, and, as Olaf, an editor at Der Spiegel, reminds us, it’s time to put the “The Divisive Pandemic” behind us …

… and click heels, and heil the New Normal Democracy!

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/16/2024 - 23:20

Read More

Continue Reading

Government

Harvard Medical School Professor Was Fired Over Not Getting COVID Vaccine

Harvard Medical School Professor Was Fired Over Not Getting COVID Vaccine

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A…

Published

on

Harvard Medical School Professor Was Fired Over Not Getting COVID Vaccine

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A Harvard Medical School professor who refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine has been terminated, according to documents reviewed by The Epoch Times.

Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologist and statistician, at his home in Ashford, Conn., on Feb. 11, 2022. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist, was fired by Mass General Brigham in November 2021 over noncompliance with the hospital’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate after his requests for exemptions from the mandate were denied, according to one document. Mr. Kulldorff was also placed on leave by Harvard Medical School (HMS) because his appointment as professor of medicine there “depends upon” holding a position at the hospital, another document stated.

Mr. Kulldorff asked HMS in late 2023 how he could return to his position and was told he was being fired.

You would need to hold an eligible appointment with a Harvard-affiliated institution for your HMS academic appointment to continue,” Dr. Grace Huang, dean for faculty affairs, told the epidemiologist and biostatistician.

She said the lack of an appointment, combined with college rules that cap leaves of absence at two years, meant he was being terminated.

Mr. Kulldorff disclosed the firing for the first time this month.

“While I can’t comment on the specifics due to employment confidentiality protections that preclude us from doing so, I can confirm that his employment agreement was terminated November 10, 2021,” a spokesperson for Brigham and Women’s Hospital told The Epoch Times via email.

Mass General Brigham granted just 234 exemption requests out of 2,402 received, according to court filings in an ongoing case that alleges discrimination.

The hospital said previously, “We received a number of exemption requests, and each request was carefully considered by a knowledgeable team of reviewers.

A lot of other people received exemptions, but I did not,” Mr. Kulldorff told The Epoch Times.

Mr. Kulldorff was originally hired by HMS but switched departments in 2015 to work at the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which is part of Mass General Brigham and affiliated with HMS.

Harvard Medical School has affiliation agreements with several Boston hospitals which it neither owns nor operationally controls,” an HMS spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email. “Hospital-based faculty, such as Mr. Kulldorff, are employed by one of the affiliates, not by HMS, and require an active hospital appointment to maintain an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School.”

HMS confirmed that some faculty, who are tenured or on the tenure track, do not require hospital appointments.

Natural Immunity

Before the COVID-19 vaccines became available, Mr. Kulldorff contracted COVID-19. He was hospitalized but eventually recovered.

That gave him a form of protection known as natural immunity. According to a number of studies, including papers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, natural immunity is better than the protection bestowed by vaccines.

Other studies have found that people with natural immunity face a higher risk of problems after vaccination.

Mr. Kulldorff expressed his concerns about receiving a vaccine in his request for a medical exemption, pointing out a lack of data for vaccinating people who suffer from the same issue he does.

I already had superior infection-acquired immunity; and it was risky to vaccinate me without proper efficacy and safety studies on patients with my type of immune deficiency,” Mr. Kulldorff wrote in an essay.

In his request for a religious exemption, he highlighted an Israel study that was among the first to compare protection after infection to protection after vaccination. Researchers found that the vaccinated had less protection than the naturally immune.

“Having had COVID disease, I have stronger longer lasting immunity than those vaccinated (Gazit et al). Lacking scientific rationale, vaccine mandates are religious dogma, and I request a religious exemption from COVID vaccination,” he wrote.

Both requests were denied.

Mr. Kulldorff is still unvaccinated.

“I had COVID. I had it badly. So I have infection-acquired immunity. So I don’t need the vaccine,” he told The Epoch Times.

Dissenting Voice

Mr. Kulldorff has been a prominent dissenting voice during the COVID-19 pandemic, countering messaging from the government and many doctors that the COVID-19 vaccines were needed, regardless of prior infection.

He spoke out in an op-ed in April 2021, for instance, against requiring people to provide proof of vaccination to attend shows, go to school, and visit restaurants.

The idea that everybody needs to be vaccinated is as scientifically baseless as the idea that nobody does. Covid vaccines are essential for older, high-risk people and their caretakers and advisable for many others. But those who’ve been infected are already immune,” he wrote at the time.

Mr. Kulldorff later co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for focused protection of people at high risk while removing restrictions for younger, healthy people.

Harsh restrictions such as school closures “will cause irreparable damage” if not lifted, the declaration stated.

The declaration drew criticism from Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who became the head of the CDC, among others.

In a competing document, Dr. Walensky and others said that “relying upon immunity from natural infections for COVID-19 is flawed” and that “uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity(3) and mortality across the whole population.”

“Those who are pushing these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports—vaccine fanatics, I would call them—to me they have done much more damage during this one year than the anti-vaxxers have done in two decades,” Mr. Kulldorff later said in an EpochTV interview. “I would even say that these vaccine fanatics, they are the biggest anti-vaxxers that we have right now. They’re doing so much more damage to vaccine confidence than anybody else.

Surveys indicate that people have less trust now in the CDC and other health institutions than before the pandemic, and data from the CDC and elsewhere show that fewer people are receiving the new COVID-19 vaccines and other shots.

Support

The disclosure that Mr. Kulldorff was fired drew criticism of Harvard and support for Mr. Kulldorff.

The termination “is a massive and incomprehensible injustice,” Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, an ethics expert who was fired from the University of California–Irvine School of Medicine for not getting a COVID-19 vaccine because he had natural immunity, said on X.

The academy is full of people who declined vaccines—mostly with dubious exemptions—and yet Harvard fires the one professor who happens to speak out against government policies.” Dr. Vinay Prasad, an epidemiologist at the University of California–San Francisco, wrote in a blog post. “It looks like Harvard has weaponized its policies and selectively enforces them.”

A petition to reinstate Mr. Kulldorff has garnered more than 1,800 signatures.

Some other doctors said the decision to let Mr. Kulldorff go was correct.

“Actions have consequence,” Dr. Alastair McAlpine, a Canadian doctor, wrote on X. He said Mr. Kulldorff had “publicly undermine[d] public health.”

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/16/2024 - 21:00

Read More

Continue Reading

International

“Extreme Events”: US Cancer Deaths Spiked In 2021 And 2022 In “Large Excess Over Trend”

"Extreme Events": US Cancer Deaths Spiked In 2021 And 2022 In "Large Excess Over Trend"

Cancer deaths in the United States spiked in 2021…

Published

on

"Extreme Events": US Cancer Deaths Spiked In 2021 And 2022 In "Large Excess Over Trend"

Cancer deaths in the United States spiked in 2021 and 2022 among 15-44 year-olds "in large excess over trend," marking jumps of 5.6% and 7.9% respectively vs. a rise of 1.7% in 2020, according to a new preprint study from deep-dive research firm, Phinance Technologies.

Algeria, Carlos et. al "US -Death Trends for Neoplasms ICD codes: C00-D48, Ages 15-44", ResearchGate, March. 2024 P. 7

Extreme Events

The report, which relies on data from the CDC, paints a troubling picture.

"We show a rise in excess mortality from neoplasms reported as underlying cause of death, which started in 2020 (1.7%) and accelerated substantially in 2021 (5.6%) and 2022 (7.9%). The increase in excess mortality in both 2021 (Z-score of 11.8) and 2022 (Z-score of 16.5) are highly statistically significant (extreme events)," according to the authors.

That said, co-author, David Wiseman, PhD (who has 86 publications to his name), leaves the cause an open question - suggesting it could either be a "novel phenomenon," Covid-19, or the Covid-19 vaccine.

"The results indicate that from 2021 a novel phenomenon leading to increased neoplasm deaths appears to be present in individuals aged 15 to 44 in the US," reads the report.

The authors suggest that the cause may be the result of "an unexpected rise in the incidence of rapidly growing fatal cancers," and/or "a reduction in survival in existing cancer cases."

They also address the possibility that "access to utilization of cancer screening and treatment" may be a factor - the notion that pandemic-era lockdowns resulted in fewer visits to the doctor. Also noted is that "Cancers tend to be slowly-developing diseases with remarkably stable death rates and only small variations over time," which makes "any temporal association between a possible explanatory factor (such as COVID-19, the novel COVID-19 vaccines, or other factor(s)) difficult to establish."

That said, a ZeroHedge review of the CDC data reveals that it does not provide information on duration of illness prior to death - so while it's not mentioned in the preprint, it can't rule out so-called 'turbo cancers' - reportedly rapidly developing cancers, the existence of which has been largely anecdotal (and widely refuted by the usual suspects).

While the Phinance report is extremely careful not to draw conclusions, researcher "Ethical Skeptic" kicked the barn door open in a Thursday post on X - showing a strong correlation between "cancer incidence & mortality" coinciding with the rollout of the Covid mRNA vaccine.

Phinance principal Ed Dowd commented on the post, noting that "Cancer is suddenly an accelerating growth industry!"

Continued:

Bottom line - hard data is showing alarming trends, which the CDC and other agencies have a requirement to explore and answer truthfully - and people are asking #WhereIsTheCDC.

We aren't holding our breath.

Wiseman, meanwhile, points out that Pfizer and several other companies are making "significant investments in cancer drugs, post COVID."

Phinance

We've featured several of Phinance's self-funded deep dives into pandemic data that nobody else is doing. If you'd like to support them, click here.

 

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/16/2024 - 16:55

Read More

Continue Reading

Trending