Economy U.S Rail Labor Kneecapped: Biden and Congress Illegalize Rail Union's Strike Against Unsafe Work Conditions

Arkain2K said:
Rail workers say Biden "turned his back on us" in deal to avert rail strike

Workers who voted no say they are frustrated and disappointed — especially with President Biden, who on Monday called on Congress to pass legislation to adopt the tentative agreement with no modifications in order to avoid a crippling rail strike.

"It feels like President Biden ushered this in a little too early," says Weaver. "He kind of cut us off at the knees on our ability to have some real negotiations or real change after voting no."

In Richmond, Virginia, roadway mechanic Reece Murtagh says it sets a bad precedent when even the most pro-labor of presidents will force an agreement rather than allow workers to strike.

"In future negotiations, the carriers are going to remember that and use it against us," says Murtagh. "It's going to be even harder for us to negotiate a fair contract because they realize when it comes down to it, there's not going to be a strike."

Murtagh says guys in his shop felt especially disillusioned thinking back on Biden's decades in the Senate, when he'd take Amtrak home to Delaware every night.

"Joe relied on us to get him home to his family," Murtagh says. "But when it was his turn to help us out... to better our life, he turned his back on us."

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140265413/rail-workers-biden-unions-freight-railroads-averted-strike
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Still vote blue no matter who!

Obviously whichever president was in office would have fucked these workers though.
 
I’ve read a bit on the Jones Act which basically makes it so that our internal waterways have to have ships owned, navigated, and staffed by Americans, and basically it has limited the amount of cargo we can move by river.

The reason I bring it up is because it seems like rail has an artificially high volume of cargo. I wonder what effects repealing the Jones Act would have on rail workers, it would certainly ease some of the load off their backs.
 
Yehudim said:
I’ve read a bit on the Jones Act which basically makes it so that our internal waterways have to have ships owned, navigated, and staffed by Americans, and basically it has limited the amount of cargo we can move by river.

The reason I bring it up is because it seems like rail has an artificially high volume of cargo. I wonder what effects repealing the Jones Act would have on rail workers, it would certainly ease some of the load off their backs.
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Our rivers (even the mighty Mississippi) are pretty lousy for interstate commerce because of the sereve lacking of infrastructure to handle cargo in the local ports along the way.

It works out pretty well for a handful of big cities, but for the rest it would cost billions to turn their dinky little ports designed for fishing boats and ferries into something that could handle/load/unload huge container cargo ships. So it's pretty much only good for international commerce (exporting cargo from certain states to other countries), not so much for interstate.

Then there's the major issue with how often our waterways drying up every year. Every single one of them, including the Mississippi. In fact, they're facing that problem right now and it got so bad that the cargo designated to go on water barges has to be loaded onto trains as we speak!

As it stand, the only real stable alternative of transporting cargos from state to state between the coasts are by trucking, and long hauls on the roads are exponentially more expensive and dangerous compare to the relative safety, affordability, and scalability of rail.

Here's some articles that you might find interesting:

Why Don’t We Move More Freight via Inland Waterways Like the Mississippi River?
APRIL 5, 2022

As U.S. companies continually adjust to the realities of logistics congestion, it’s natural to wonder if there might be some untapped resource to speed supply chains along—like inland waterways.

The U.S. has over 25,000 miles of navigable water, including rivers, canals, and coastal routes. The Mississippi River, in particular, moves a significant amount of US grain, oil and gas, and coal, but we aren’t taking full advantage of it for other types of cargo.

River transport is common in Asia and Europe, though. Could the Mississippi River be a solution to faster, more sustainable, and more cost-effective logistics in the U.S. too?

https://www.flexport.com/blog/why-d...ht-via-inland-waterways-like-the-mississippi/

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Shrunken Mississippi River Slows US Food Exports When World Needs Them Most
By David R. Baker, Kim Chipman, Brian K. Sullivan and Michael Hirtzer Green | November 9, 2022

1200x-1.jpg

The receding water levels have made parts of the Mississippi River impassable by boat.

The Mississippi River — the immense, quiet highway that courses down the middle of America, moving critical food, wood, coal and steel supplies to global markets — is shrinking from drought, forcing traffic to a crawl at the worst possible time.

With water levels at record lows, barges have run aground, causing traffic jams as boats wait for the US Army Corps of Engineers to dredge a path through the shallows. The problem has been building for months. Summer brought meager rain to much of the Plains and Midwest. Now it’s harvest time, when farmers bring in their grains and other crops, send them to market, and lay down fertilizer before the winter snows. The shriveled Mississippi has forced them to seek alternatives, all of them more expensive, like moving soybeans by rail to the Gulf Coast or shipping everything through distant West Coast ports.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-mississippi-river-drought-global-impact/?leadSource=uverify wall
 
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skysolo said:
Fraud Squad back again
Check it wreck workers rights, let's begin

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They are fraudulent when it come to them supposedly being anti-war as well. The good news is that their own voters are now publicly criticizing them about supporting the war in Ukraine.
 
I wouldn't be surprised if the "squad" starts saying that the unions are hotbeds of racism, transphobia and cishetnormativity. And that their strike breaking is a way to decolonize them.
 


The former Secretary of Labor forgot to include that a typical cargo train has also tripled in length to 3 miles long. Some rail companies are already increasing theirs to 4 miles long.

That's the distance the 2 workers assigned to it have to walk to inspect and work on the cars. Every car.
 
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Rob Battisti said:
Anyone else find it rich how much emphasis is on paid family leave from a political standpoint(which benefits mostly women) but a overwhelmingly male employee population can’t even get a few sick days off.
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That's why all our jobs are going to India & China.
Congress wants to dehumanize us as much as possible.
 
I can't quite remember but something happened the last few years that involved mandatory isolation for 10 days. As a result the "I'll go to work even if I'm dying" fucktarded work culture is finally dying out. And good riddance.

If you can't cover the inevitability of guys calling in sick you're running a skeleton crew and so are a shit strategist or a leech. Employers operating like that shouldn't be protected by the government, especially not when they're plenty profitable enough to hire a lot more staff.

Yeah, shipping is vital industry but the government stepping in to help a flourishing industry maximize their profits is pure bullshit. And this is 100% corporatocracy in action.
 
Arkain2K said:
Sept 7, 2020:

Dec 1, 2022:


Rail Workers Say Biden Betrayed Them
By Noam Scheiber | Nov. 30, 2022

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As the legislative representative for his local union, Gabe Christenson, a longtime freight railroad conductor, worked hard to help elect Joe Biden president in 2020. “I have shirts from me campaigning — blue-collar Biden shirts,” he said. “I knocked on doors for him for weeks and weeks.”

But since Monday, when President Biden urged Congress to impose a labor agreement that his union had voted down, Mr. Christenson has been besieged by texts from furious co-workers whom he had encouraged to support the president. “I’m trying to calm them down,” he said.

Mr. Biden said he was urging action to avoid a nationwide strike that would threaten hundreds of thousands of jobs and that the industry estimates would cost the economy more than $2 billion per day. The House of Representatives took the first step on Wednesday toward carrying out his request, approving the plan on a vote of 290 to 137.

A White House statement earlier this week said that the president was “reluctant to override the ratification procedures and the views of those who voted against the agreement” but that he felt congressional action was urgent.

For many of the more than 100,000 freight rail workers whose unions have been negotiating a new labor contract since 2020, however, Mr. Biden’s intervention amounted to putting a thumb on the scale in favor of the industry.

They say the rail carriers have enormous market power to set wages and working conditions, power that is enhanced by a federal law that greatly restricts the workers’ right to strike compared with most private-sector employees. They complain that after waiting patiently through multiple procedural steps, including a presidential emergency board, they had a narrow window to improve their contract through a labor stoppage and that Mr. Biden has effectively closed that window.

“They should let the guys work it out for themselves,” said Rhonda Ewing, a signal maintainer in Chicago. “We know it’s holiday time, which is why it’s the perfect time to raise our voices. If Biden gets involved, he takes away our leverage.”

A narrower House vote on Wednesday, 221 to 207, authorized seven paid sick days for the workers, addressing a key demand. But it is unclear whether that provision can win Senate approval.

The agreement that Mr. Biden asked Congress to impose was brokered between union leaders and industry negotiators with help from his administration and announced in September, averting a potential strike before the midterm elections. The accord would raise pay nearly 25 percent between 2020, when the last contract expired, and 2024, and allow employees to miss work for routine medical appointments three times per year without risking disciplinary action. It would also grant them one additional day of paid personal leave.

It would not provide paid sick leave, however, which many workers argue is the bare minimum they can accept given their grueling work schedules, which often leave them on the road or on call for long stretches of time. Rail carriers say workers can attend to illnesses or medical appointments using paid vacation.

Four of the 12 unions that would be covered by the agreement voted it down, and several others approved it only narrowly.

Tony Cardwell, the president of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division — International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which voted down the agreement Mr. Biden has asked Congress to impose, said that simply asking Congress to include paid sick days in the agreement would have gone a long way toward satisfying his members. The proposal to do so in the House was initiated by progressive lawmakers.

“If he would have said, ‘I want this one thing,’ it would have changed the whole narrative,” Mr. Cardwell, whose union represents more than 20,000 workers affected by the contract, said in an interview on Wednesday.

The sense of betrayal is especially acute because Mr. Biden has long portrayed himself as friendly to organized labor, and many union leaders regard him as the most labor-friendly president of their lifetimes thanks to his appointments and his support for regulations and legislation that they favor.

Daniel Kindlon, an electrician who works at a rail yard near Albany, N.Y., and is the head of his local union, said that while he is not a huge supporter of the president, he was impressed when Mr. Biden spoke at the electrician union’s convention in Chicago this spring.

“It was the best 45 minutes I’ve heard him talk,” Mr. Kindlon said. Yet he said he struggled to understand why Mr. Biden couldn’t have pushed Congress to go further.

“You would think he would just try to get them to throw in a couple days of sick time; that’s really all the guys were asking for,” he said.

Several union members and local officials said they had urged co-workers who had previously supported Donald Trump to back Mr. Biden, arguing that he would be friendlier to labor. They said that these co-workers had reached out to complain about what they saw as Mr. Biden’s about-face since Monday, though it was unclear how many of these union members had voted for the current president.

“Many Trump voters calling me out for endorsing Biden,” Matthew A. Weaver, a carpenter with rail maintenance employees union, said by text Tuesday night. Mr. Weaver previously worked as an official for his union in Ohio.

Many union members have long suspected that Congress would intervene to prevent them from striking. Mr. Kindlon said several members of his local union abstained from voting on the tentative contract this fall because they didn’t believe their vote mattered. Many took the view that “this is going to get jammed down our throat anyways; why do I care?” he said.

Many who placed their hopes in Mr. Biden assumed that they would not be allowed to strike for very long, but reasoned that even a brief strike lasting several hours, or the mere threat of one, would have been sufficient to extract more concessions from the rail carriers.

“I mean, that would have looked way better,” said Mr. Christenson, the longtime conductor. “Even if he had ulterior motives, let us have our day. He could show he was with us.”

Mr. Cardwell, of the maintenance workers union, said that “the fact that he did it so early” was surprising, given that there was still roughly a week or more to potentially extract concessions before a strike would have occurred.

Across the labor movement, prominent leaders have so far been silent or restrained in their response to Mr. Biden’s call for congressional action.

But at least one — Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters, which represents more than one million members — has hinted at criticism.

“Members of Congress have an opportunity to fight for their constituents by making sure rail workers get paid sick days,” Mr. O’Brien wrote Tuesday on Twitter. “Any politicians who don’t side with workers need to go on the record that they voted against workers.”

The same day, a group over 100 labor scholars circulated an open letter to Mr. Biden expressing alarm at his call for Congress to impose the agreement that some unions have voted down, and suggesting that the intervention could affect the labor movement for decades.

“History shows us that the special legal treatment of rail and other transportation strikes offers the federal government — and the executive branch in particular — a rare opportunity to directly shape the outcome of collective bargaining, for good or for ill,” the letter said. It added: “These dramatic interventions can set the tone for entire eras of subsequent history.”

While some rail workers have weighed in on social media with calls for illegal wildcat strikes should Congress impose the agreement, local union officials said that such strikes are unlikely, and they were not aware of any meaningful effort to organize them.

Much more likely, they said, is an accelerated flow of workers out of an industry that, according to federal regulators, has lost nearly 30 percent of its employees over the past six years.

They said that with the freight rail work force already lean, additional losses could compound the supply chain problems that Mr. Biden has sought to defuse.

Mr. Kindlon, the electrician in New York, said he had already accepted a job in another industry after more than 17 years of railroad work.

“I’m telling you now, as soon as Congress decides to jam this contract down the BMWED and BLET and SMART guys’ throats, you will see a mass exodus like no mass exodus from any industry ever,” he said, alluding to some of the unions involved.

“It’s going to be like having a strike without having a strike.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/business/freight-rail-labor-union.html
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Arkain2K said:
Rail Workers Say Biden Betrayed Them
By Noam Scheiber | Nov. 30, 2022


As the legislative representative for his local union, Gabe Christenson, a longtime freight railroad conductor, worked hard to help elect Joe Biden president in 2020. “I have shirts from me campaigning — blue-collar Biden shirts,” he said. “I knocked on doors for him for weeks and weeks.”

But since Monday, when President Biden urged Congress to impose a labor agreement that his union had voted down, Mr. Christenson has been besieged by texts from furious co-workers whom he had encouraged to support the president. “I’m trying to calm them down,” he said.
Click to expand...

And he'll do the same thing next election - the same way all the unions endorsed Hillary despite her support of TPP.
 
So Fresh said:
Ia this the same thing as where Biden said they could get one sick day leave a year?

Man they really hate workers in the US don’t they..

All hail capitalism.
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At least it's not socialism. What's your counter argument to that?

Oops he got banned
 
A non-corrupt congress would force the Railroad barons to hire more workers, but I guess that makes too much sense and doesn't benefit billionaires in any way.

RR Company: Hey Congress, these plebs are threatening to strike! DO SOMETHING!!

Congress: SURE THING!!! Passes bill forcing RR companies to hire more workers

RR Company: NOOooOoOOOOOO NOT LIKE THAT!!!!

Arkain2K said:
The 4 extra sick days isn't even the biggest point of contention. It's the fact that the highly-profitable rail companies reduced their workforce by 30% to cut cost and put the remaining employees on grueling work schedules to cover all the shifts previously done by the 45,000 workers who are no longer there.

None of that has been addressed at all in these Congressional votes to force the workers to accept the deal, and I bet it's significantly more important to the people who's been worked like cattle than the 7 sick days a year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/business/economy/railroad-workers-strike.html
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Interesting turn of event: the shareholders realize that it might not be a good idea for the railroad companies they invested in to treat their employees like cattle to save 1.5% to 2% in earnings, especially when profits are currently in the tens of billions.

U.S. railroad investor resolutions urge paid sick leave for workers
By Ross Kerber | Dec 2, 2022

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Dec 5 (Reuters) - Investors have proposed shareholder resolutions at two U.S. railroads calling for paid sick leave for workers, an issue that nearly caused a national rail strike, and they could go to an advisory vote at shareholder meetings in the spring.

On Friday President Joe Biden signed legislation to block a rail shutdown that could have devastated the American economy. But the deal he approved did not include paid sick days for workers, a key sticking point for unions in contract talks with five major U.S. railroads.

Proposals seen by Reuters filed by activist investors ask Norfolk Southern Corp (NSC.N) and Union Pacific Corp (UNP.N) to offer "a reasonable amount" of paid sick time, determined by company directors. If accepted each resolution would appear as a ballot item at the railroads' springtime shareholder meetings.

Kate Monahan, a director at Trillium Asset Management, the socially minded investor that filed the resolution at Union Pacific, said more flexible sick time would have broader benefits like reducing workforce turnover.

"There’s a clear business case that makes sense to us as investors," she said.

A Union Pacific representative did not comment on the resolution, but referred to a trade group statement that industry employees already receive substantial time and leave for longer-term illnesses.

A Norfolk Southern representative declined to comment.

Resolutions about worker welfare have drawn more support at corporate annual meetings in recent years amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Voting on the resolutions would not be binding.

Railroads worry implementing paid sick leave would require more employees at a time when many have cut their workforces dramatically. Had sick time been included in recent federal legislation it would cut U.S. rail earnings 1.5% to 2%, Susquehanna analyst Bascome Majors wrote in a Nov. 30 investor note.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us...ions-urge-paid-sick-leave-workers-2022-12-05/
 
How did the Longshoreman get their sweet deal where data entry clerks make 6 figures and thrhese unions get slave labor?
 
Is Paul Ryan an advisor to the Biden Admin? Just wondering.
 
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