Hard-Fought Success on Rail Sick Days
Okay, not sleeping yet. My friend Bill posted this. Biden didn't back the rail worker striker, but since this team has helped keep the pressure and it seems the rail workers are getting what they want.
(Emphasis mine.)
After months of negotiations, the IBEW’s Railroad members at four of the largest U.S. freight carriers finally have what they’ve long sought but that many working people take for granted: paid sick days.
This is a big deal, said Railroad Department Director Al Russo, because the paid-sick-days issue, which nearly caused a nationwide shutdown of freight rail just before Christmas, had consistently been rejected by the carriers. It was not part of last December’s congressionally implemented update of the national collective bargaining agreement between the freight lines and the IBEW and 11 other railroad-related unions.
“We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.
“We know that many of our members weren’t happy with our original agreement,” Russo said, “but through it all, we had faith that our friends in the White House and Congress would keep up the pressure on our railroad employers to get us the sick day benefits we deserve. Until we negotiated these new individual agreements with these carriers, an IBEW member who called out sick was not compensated.”
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"Wagner Group halts march on Moscow"
Russia is about to get very interesting. We'll see how it shakes out.
Edit:
I'll add a link to Vox's excellent explainer for what is going on in Russia. Check it out.
The chaotic, fast-moving events at first suggested a potential coup, with Prigozhin threatening a march on Moscow and insisting he aimed to rout out corruption in Russia's leadership. But within 24 hours, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko had apparently brokered an agreement between Prigozhin and the government, and Prigozhin announced his plans to send his troops back to Ukraine, while he will live in apparent exile in Belarus.
"They wanted to disband the Wagner military company," Prigozhin said Saturday. "We embarked on a march of justice on June 23. Now, the moment has come when blood could be spilled. Understanding responsibility [for the chance] that Russian blood will be spilled on one side, we are turning our columns around and going back to field camps as planned."
The Wagner Group is Prigozhin's private army, created initially to further Russia's military goals while still giving the government plausible deniability of actual involvement.
Prigozhin has long been part of Russian President Vladimir Putin's circle, but he is not one of the classical Russian elites. The convict-turned-hot dog seller eventually won lucrative government contracts for catering and construction through his Concord Group business; in 2014, he began building the paramilitary organization known as the Wagner Group. Initially used in Russia's invasion of Crimea that year, the so-called "little green men" began popping up elsewhere, too — in Syria, where Russia supports the regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad, and in Mali and the Central African Republic, too.
Wagner has been accused of participating in horrific human rights abuses, most recently in Mali, where the military junta has contracted with the fighting force to try and wrest control from Islamist extremist groups that dominate parts of the country.
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Sometimes your blog breaks for no reason
I don't know why.
A few weeks ago, I rewrote how the blog generates what I call the "link tails" which is when a link is followed by the (domain.com) information. It was originally part of the publication of the blog and thus embedded in the html files directly. But then I decided I wanted to move it to be javascript.
Honestly... I'm not sure why. I had a reason. I'm sure of it.
In any case, it wasn't working today. I'm not sure what happened, but it appears to be an issue with how I was filtering the links. Not every link on the blog gets a tail. Only ones which go off the blog (so no trickjarrett.com tails) as well as no links in the sidebar.
And something stopped working with that such that no links were getting tails. I did the filtering a different way and it's all fixed.
Also it looks like there was a reversion of the CSS file. I'm not sure why, but something got lost and I had to recreate a bit of CSS. My best guess is that I accidentally overwrote the site's CSS file with a local copy which was not the most recent, as I sometimes tweak the CSS file on the server. Oops.
In any case, it's fixed now.
Edit: Regarding Wikindle project
It finished running overnight. I spent a little while coding a cleanup function which scans downloaded files and removes ones I don't want. This is one of the features I mentioned wanting. So I've got that figured out. And it blacklists articles so I don't re-download them in the future.
I started working on having it generate cross linking between articles, but there were enough bugs that I stopped and decided to come back to it.
For now, I consider the project done and stable. There are improvements, but it's time for me to move back to working on the blog and on Behemoth.
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Automated Archives for June, 24th 2023
This post was automatically generated
Chess For the Day
Record: 5-0-3
Net Elo Change: +12
Games Played
- KoenDePaauw - WIN
- naptime99 - WIN
- benzo20k - WIN
- adolfoblues55 - LOSS
- irlab - LOSS
- TheFryingDutchmanYo - WIN
- RameshSM - LOSS
- azhamazhar - WIN
Blog Posts On This Day
- 2022-06-24 (8 posts)
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