(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Railway company spent billions more of its 'record' profits on stock buyback than on workers [1]
['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']
Date: 2023-01-24
CNN reports that Union Pacific was able to crow about “another year of record earnings.” What did they do with the money, you ask? Did they begin building out some more infrastructure? Did they try to come up with new ways to make their responsibilities to our supply chains more robust? Nope. They spent most of it on stock buybacks of Union Pacific stock. I know that saying “stock buybacks of Union Pacific stock” is redundant, but so is saying “stock buybacks.”
For the year, the company’s employee pay and benefits rose by about $500 million, or 12%, to $4.6 billion, far less than the $6.3 billion that Union Pacific spent repurchasing shares of stock. [...] For the year, the company’s net income rose to a record $7 billion, up about $500 million, or 7%, from the previous record profit it posted for 2021. While overall operating expenses for 2022 rose $2.5 billion, that was outweighed by revenue rising $3 billion to a record $24.9 billion for the year.
It turns out that any issues the top executives had with making deals for sick leave were the result of their need to squeeze out as much work as possible on the thinnest of labor margins. Relying on a model known as Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR), Union Pacific was able to pull in big profits. It is a frequently problematic model in practice, because there is very little room for error. In this case, the word “error” means employees getting sick or needing time off or being unable to work unhealthy, demanding schedules.
On top of the detrimental abuses of the labor force that are essential to a Precision Scheduled Railroading business model, the entire enterprise degrades our railroad infrastructure. PSR amounts to being a fancy, Henry Ford assembly line-reminiscent way of cutting corners. According to railway experts and workers, the slim margins for error and the amount of pressure put on workers’ time means that things like track inspections and other basic safety checks fall by the wayside.
As a freight rail policy expert for the unions told Freight Waves back in 2021, “They want to run the leanest railroad they could possibly run to produce historic operating revenues to entice investors. The railroads are running themselves so lean that they are only capable of the railroad of today. They are not capable of running railroads when there are economic shocks or changes in shipping patterns.” Hurting labor hurts us all, because it degrades the things we actually depend on most: people and the integrity of their work.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/24/2149096/-Railway-company-spent-billions-more-of-its-record-profits-on-stock-buyback-than-on-workers
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
