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The younger generation is stressing the desire to have a healthy work life balance. What is the railroad doing to incorporate this concept? (Tony Hatch - ABH Consulting)

Published December 19, 2022by Tony Hatch - ABH Consultingin Ask The Experts Q&A

My first thought is ‘younger generation – bah humbug!

But my more rational thoughts are: The rails were aware of this for a decade and have made efforts to appeal to Millennials (etc) and change the “Command-and-Control” form of managing, especially in the field. One can only conclude that the results have been mixed at best! But remember – this Pandemic impact tends to get undersold, now that the masks were off. An undersized, post-furlough rail field force handled the shocking rapid recovery and faced Omicron. (See the correlation between rail ops and Covid and vaccines!) So the stress levels have more to do with that than, really PSR.(CSX excepted?) Furlough return rates were 50% of historical pattern…