We just barely dodged America’s railroads grinding to a complete halt
That doesn't mean the risk is completely gone though
A railroad worker strike was narrowly avoided this past Thursday when the Biden administration helped broker a tentative deal between union leaders and rail carriers to stave off what would have been the first national freight railroad strike in 30 years. Workers were about to go on strike because railroad companies refuse to give them paid time off and sick leave.
Rail moves close to 40% of the US’s long-distance trade, including everything from coal for power plants, chemicals used in pharmaceuticals, to car components. A strike would have been absolutely devastating, with one estimate saying it could cost the US economy $2 billion a day. Factories could be forced to shut down, food shipments could be brought to a standstill, and many passenger train routes would just flat-out stop.
But workers have been pleading with the public for years to pay attention to how awful working conditions are in their industry.
Here’s how one railroad worker put the situation:
Working conditions for railroad workers have been absolutely brutal. At the center of the labor dispute between workers and railroad companies is an egregiously cruel attendance policy, which doesn’t allow workers to take any sick leave whatsoever and also forces them to be on-call 24/7.
Can you blame workers for fighting to get better working conditions?
Here’s one testimony Vice’s Motherboard printed from a locomotive engineer from Berkshire Hathaway owned BNSF Railway:
Understand that we do not have set days off a month like most all other jobs. We do not have weekends. We do not have a routine or accurate schedule. Every day is the same for us. We never know when we will be going to sleep on any given day or night. 40 hours a week does not apply to us.
That is why we are fighting back. That is why we want to strike. That is why we are asking Congress to NOT intervene in our legal process. This is why we need public support.
The US railroad industry’s workforce dropped from over 1 million workers in the 1950s to fewer than 150,000 in 2022. Cost-cutting measures over the past six years implemented by major railroads like BNSF, Union Pacific, CSX and Norfolk Southern have slashed their collective workforce by 29 percent, around 45,000 workers, leaving the industry chronically understaffed and putting extra strain on workers already burdened with long, irregular hours.
“We used to work under much more flexible attendance policies that we could self-select when we needed time off for ourselves or our families within reason, before these carriers…started clamping down on these attendance policies,” said Ross Grooters, an engineer and Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers & Trainmen (BLET) member based in Iowa.
Meanwhile, as rail carriers have enjoyed record profits, they have spent $183 billion between buying back their own stock and distributing dividends to shareholders, far more than the $138 billion they spent on infrastructure. Just imagine if the railroad companies had spent an additional $183 billion on improving the nation’s railroads instead of lighting that money on fire with wasteful stock buybacks and helping rich shareholders get richer with dividend payments.
Once the facts are laid out, it seems as though a strike was inevitable given how horrific the working conditions have been for years. This brings us back to this past Thursday, where that fate was seemingly avoided at the last second once a tentative deal was struck between union leaders and the railroad companies. The deal reportedly allows workers to take voluntary assigned days off and one additional paid personal day. With the way working conditions have been, workers have been unable to take time away from work to attend routine and preventative medical care, and have also not allowed exemptions from draconian attendance policies for hospitalizations and surgical procedures.
Rank-and-file rail workers have yet to vote on whether or not to approve the agreement reached. It could take weeks as the agreement is reviewed by the unions and then sent out to union membership for a ratification vote via mail. This could still easily blow up in everyone’s face.
Now imagine if we had a different administration
It’s important to draw a comparison between how the Biden administration handled this labor dispute and how Republican administrations have handled similar situations in the past. There is a long and chronicled history of the American government beating back labor into submission.
In 1992, there was a crippling two-day nationwide rail shutdown from a strike. In response, President H. W. Bush signed into law emergency legislation passed by the House and the Senate which legally forced strikers back to work. This was possible because the railway sector is very unique — Congress and the president have the ability to step in and stop a railroad workers’ strike through legislation, thanks to The Railway Labor Act of 1926. Back in 1981, President Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, dealing a serious blow to the American labor movement.
It’s very easy to imagine a world today where we have an American president that is far more vicious to labor than President Biden. He is by no means perfect — but a Republican administration would have been far worse.
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