How Wall Street Ruins Everything
There was an article in the business section this morning about the railroad industry, and the just-averted railroad strike. From 1980 to today, the railroads were deregulated, resulting in some greater efficiencies, lower costs for some time, and a great consolidation into fewer and fewer railroads. The final squeeze for efficiency has the number of employees down to a barer than bare minimum, with lives that are at the mercy of railroad scheduling. The union held out for at least two employees manning each train, the minimum for redundancy, when management wanted to reduce that to one. And railroad industry stock buy-backs are now larger than infrastructure investment.
