re: Somebody Explain The Potential Rail Strike

We were told the same, nights/weekends/holidays/rain/shine/snow/etc... However, if needed or wanted a day, no questions asked, you just called the caller and marked off/took off. The railroad maintained an extra board(relief workers/extra manpower) for reasonable layoffs of assigned or pool workers.

I agree that old policy was way to liberal, for example, we have to work 7 days a month for health insurance to kick in, I was told by roughly 20-30% of the conductors I worked with first several years, they would have to be sure to stay marked up to get their insurance restarted... Same with Vacation and leave days, had to work a number of days in previous year to quilify for VAC, a LOT of guys didn't work enough, so didn't have vacation for following year... Again, i agree this wasn't a good thing...

2006-07 the "Attendance Policy" was put in place... Simply, you had to be "available" for work 75% of the time, AVAILABLE means on call/marked up for work, not necessarily at work, this is an important distinction, beings we are subject to call 24/7, roughly this worked out to being able to take off 5 weekdays and 2 weekend days a month, it could be rolled into a 90 day window, and pile up 10 days and 4 weekends. We didn't like it, but could see it was "fair" we had off roughly the same number days a 9-5/40 hour a week worker had...

Feb 2022 BNSF implemented "hi-viz" discussed earlier, I believe UP had a version of this for a year or two...

I know I'm doing a lousy job of summarizing this, but I'll keep trying...