Obama Ordered Rail Workers Receive Seven Paid Sick Days. Biden Must Do the Same.
The most expedient, logical choice would be for Biden to issue an executive order, like former President Obama did on Labor Day 2015.
Photo by Hudson Thomas on Unsplash
Trains have a particularly sentimental place in our hearts.
There’s something idyllic about a by-gone era when the railroad was the most efficient and technological form of travel.
But with that romanticism comes a dark history of government time and again siding with the nation’s corporate railroad interests instead of the workers who literally keep the trains running.
In 1877, a West Virginia railroad strike protesting workers’ wage reduction ended when President Rutherford Hayes sicced federal troops on union activists.
Eugene Debs, the three-time Socialist presidential candidate, famously challenged the capitalist class when he organized a railroad strike in 1894 in response to the Pullman Company slashing workers’ wages while refusing to decrease rent on company housing or shares to stockholders.
The economic royalists’ response was predictable: activate the levers of power to crush Debs and the union.
Defying a court injunction, Debs and union leaders were arrested and jailed for six months without bail.
By the time the strike was over, 700 had been arrested, 30 killed, over 60 injured, and the Pullman Co. forbade further unionization through “yellow dog contracts” agreements.
As a US Senator, Joe Biden was one of 100 voices, many of whom were vociferous in their bias toward corporate interests over the country’s railroad workers.
Senator Joe Biden was not one of them.
In 1992, for example, he famously opposed legislation to end an active railroad strike and congressional interference in labor disputes.
His affection for rail workers is one reason he acquired the sobriquet “Amtrak Joe.” (Another was his custom of riding Amtrak home to Delaware from Washington, D.C. every night.)
Now as President of the United States, though, Joe Biden is one man who must serve as the voice and face of the country.
This means making dire decisions one wouldn’t have to make in any other situation.
Last Friday, President Biden had to contradict his traditional support for rail workers after signing a bill prohibiting a strike labor leaders were threatening after railroad management refused to allow workers a contract including seven days of paid sick leave.
Many have been asking this week why congressional Democrats — and “Amtrak Joe” specifically — would so blatantly stab 125,000 rail workers in the back after those same Democrats helped broker a tentative agreement earlier this year.
It’s easy to resort to reductive fallacies, but the dilemma is not an easy one to parse.
It’s also important to note congressional Democrats and Joe Biden are not the actual villains here, despite not having the votes to do what should have been done.
The real villains are the railroad behemoths who have hollowed out their workforce in favor of record profits.
But President Biden has vowed to persist in the fight for paid sick leave, and he has several options available to salvage what is left of rail workers’ dignity and support.
The most expedient and, at this point, logical choice would be for Biden to issue an executive order, like former President Obama did on Labor Day in 2015.
On Friday, Senate Budget Committee Chair, Vt. Sen. Bernie Sanders, along with 72 other Senate and House members, including NY Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Senate Banking Committee chair Sherrod Brown, Senate Finance chair Ron Wyden, railroad subcommittee chair Rep. Donald Payne, and Mass. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, sent a letter to President Biden urging him to do just that.
The letter states that despite Obama’s order not covering rail carriers, “The Federal Government has hundreds of contracts with freight rail carriers [Union Pacific, Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern Corp and Kansas City Southern]. You can and you must expand this executive order.”
Doing so would provide a temporary relief for railroad employees while buying Congress time to work on repealing the Railway Labor Act of 1926 that provides a contradictory option to strike while at the same time limiting unions’ power to do so.
An answer to the question why Democrats chose last week to side with management is more complicated than “business as usual.”
For starters, it’s the holiday season, and the economy is struggling with global inflation. Halting rail transportation, freight and passenger, would literally cripple the country, and ultimately make matters worse.
Food wouldn’t be shipped to markets; fuel and oil wouldn’t make their way to gas stations and American homes on the verge of winter; striking workers wouldn’t have the capital they need amidst all this at a time of increasing costs.
However, this is the very scenario that could provide rail unions the most leverage.
As John Nichols, reporter for The Nation, wrote:
Biden, Pelosi, and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer say that intervention is necessary to avert the economic instability that could result from an extended strike. But their argument neglects the basic premise of labor negotiations in a way that takes away the most vital bargaining chip that the rail unions have — the strike threat — at precisely the point when it is most likely to be effective.
He added:
The unions that have rejected the tentative agreement want to keep negotiating, and they make a compelling case against federal actions that would undermine their ability to get a better deal before strike deadlines on December 9.
Rebecca Burns, Julia Rock, Matthew Cunningham-Cook elaborate in their piece for The Lever titled “How Biden and Buttigieg Could Deliver Sick Leave To Rail Workers”:
The administration has several possible avenues it could pursue to try to deliver those [paid sick leave] protections. Biden could try to expand an executive order requiring federal contractors to provide sick leave, [Transportation Secretary Pete] Buttigieg could robustly enforce existing rail safety laws to challenge harmful attendance policies, or the administration could use the last few weeks of Democrats’ control of Congress to push for the passage of a national paid sick leave bill languishing in committee after being reintroduced 10 times in the last 15 years.
History has demonstrated the federal government’s precarious relationship with labor.
Yet, recent evidence suggets a unionization renaissance may be afoot.
In September, Sen. Elizabeth Warren re-introduced a bill from 2017 and 2020, the “Nationwide Right to Unionize Act,” that would repeal Section 14(b) of the National Labor Relations Act, and make illegal right-to-work-for-less laws that prohibit unions from collecting dues from non-union members covered under union contracts.
Amazon made history in April when Staten Island, NY Amazon employees voted to create the first unionized warehouse.
Microsoft entered into a neutrality agreement with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), stating if it purchases Activision, it will not interfere with Activision Blizzard workers’ union rights.
Ditto workers at Medieval Times in Lyndhurst, NJ.
After striking following an imposed 30% fee, internet retail marketplace Etsy is considering forming a union as well.
Workers at Apple, Chipotle, Trader Joe’s, Google, REI and Verizon have all won union elections in recent months.
The Guardian reported this past fall about the increase in worker walkouts amid this unionization spike in what some have deemed “Stroke-tober.”
One crucial piece of federal legislation, the “Protecting the Right to Organize” (PRO) Act, seeks to grow and strengthen union membership by:
“Introducing meaningful, enforceable penalties for companies and executives that violate workers’ rights;
“Expanding workers’ collective bargaining rights and closing loopholes that corporations use to exploit workers;
“Strengthening workers’ access to fair union elections and requiring corporations to respect the results.”
America has arrived at a crossroads, and the direction we take could plunge us deeper into neo-liberalism’s feudal tax cuts for the economic royalists, or again into an age where the wealthy pay their share of taxes and average workers producing the largess off which the wealthy profit will benefit from higher wages, better living standards, and democratic workplaces.
President Biden and congressional Democrats have arrived at a tipping point.
Executive orders aren’t laws; they are a semi-monarchical power granted presidents who must act on a matter with the celerity the legislative process does not often afford.
Congress did not have the votes last week to give railroad workers one simple provision: paid sick time.
That’s all they’re asking for.
The railroad barons won’t feel a pinch. Neither will their overlords, aka shareholders.
President Joe Biden —“Amtrak Joe” — must utilize his executive authority and follow his democratic predecessor for whom he served as vice president.
Congress must then get to work righting centuries of wrongs done to unions before the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) further undercuts already weakened unionization efforts as it did in 2018 in the Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) case.