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With potentially even more catastrophic effects, Israel has begun pumping seawater into Gaza with the stated aim of flooding underground tunnels and structures. The Netanyahu government has said the hostages are being held in underground tunnels, but President Joe Biden said on Tuesday he has been told Israel is not flooding tunnels where hostages are being kept.Besides potentially drowning its own citizens being held hostage, Israel’s pumping of vast quantities of salt water into Gaza will have catastrophic health and economic consequences for the enclave and its inhabitants.
A substantial portion of the water is likely to make its way into Gaza’s underground aquifer, potentially poisoning the water supply. The salt water could also have a massive impact on Gaza’s agriculture, as a high salt content in soil is poisonous to plant life.
Union Pacific maintenance of way worker. [Photo: Union Pacific]
Union Pacific is laying off around 1,350 of its maintenance of way employees, reducing its total workforce to almost half of what it was seven years ago, according to a letter to federal regulators written by the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes (BMWED).
The layoffs at Union Pacific, one of six remaining Class I railroads in the United States, are part of a years-long attack on jobs by the railroads, which have become the most profitable industry in the country through massive levels of exploitation. Last year’s ban on a national strike passed by Congress with bipartisan support, including “left” Democrats such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, amounted to a blank check to the railroads to continue slashing spending to the bone, endangering both the workforce and the public at large.
A letter from BMWED President Tony Cardwell to Martin Oberman, chairman of the federal Surface Transportation Board dated November 22, says that the planned furloughs will reduce the railroad’s maintenance of way workforce to 4,737, compared to 6,078 in September and 8,791 in July of 2015. With these layoffs, the ratio of employees to miles of track will have increased from one worker for each 6.45 miles of tracks in 2016 to over 11 miles per track.
While Union Pacific has claimed that the furloughs are temporary and that the workers affected will return in January, the BMWED said in its letter that in reality the company “has not guaranteed” this. “Moreover, Union Pacific has yet to confirm a work program for 2024.”
Management has explicitly told BMWED that the layoffs are purely a financial decision. “Simply put, unforeseen, large-scale service interruptions greatly accelerated our spend through the first three quarters of the year,” an email from management stated. “The need to balance the workforce was not readily apparent until very recently, thus leadership made the difficult decision to push a number of projects into 2024.”
In a statement announcing its third quarter results on October 19, Union Pacific reported a decrease in net profits and total revenues, bringing an operating income of about $2.2 billion, a 17 percent decrease, and an overall operating revenue of $5.9 billion, or a 10 percent decrease compared to the Third Quarter earnings in 2022. However, 2022 was the most profitable year ever for the railroad, in spite of the possibility of a national strike looming until late November.
Union Pacific CEO Jim Vena blamed the results as due to inflation and lower carload volume. “We faced many challenges in the quarter, including continued inflationary pressures and a drop in carloads,” he said, adding, “through our day-to-day actions, we will continue to make improvements as we exit the year.” In other words, cuts to maintenance and other critical spending.
In its letter, the BMWED requested the Surface Transportation Board to “use [its] authority to continue challenging Union Pacific on this matter.” In reality, as the BMWED bureaucracy knows perfectly well, the STB will continue to “use its authority” to allow Union Pacific to do whatever it wants, perhaps covering its tracks with a handful of meaningless public hearings.
The BMWED letter was sent only a few days before the one year anniversary of Congress’ strike ban, passed at the request of the Biden administration. The strike law imposed a contract that workers themselves had already rejected, which was modeled after a report from a White House-appointed Presidential Emergency Board, and which resolved none of workers’ demands, especially dramatic overwork that has pushed tens of thousands out of the industry in only a few years.
It amounted to a declaration that the management can continue to drive the railroads into the ground in order to maximize profits, secure in the knowledge that the government will use its authority to shield them from the consequences, including by ripping up the right to strike.