Biden Averts Catastrophic Railroad Strike
If you think the supply chain was bad during COVID, a RR Strike would have been so much worse.
The railroad system transports over a quarter of all our freight every year. Amtrak transports around 30 million people every year. And both Amtrak and Freight Rail have been horribly underfunded for decades. I can get into how ridiculous it is that the rest of the world has bullet trains and we’re still stuck with train engines that avg 80 MPH. To be fair, some areas have high-speed rail capacity with trains going around 150, but it varies greatly on track conditions and budget.
Biden knows all this, intimately, as he commuted back and forth from DC to Delaware consistently via train and he has always been a huge advocate for expanding the passenger train system in the US. Now, between the pandemic, a decrease in employees and consistent underfunding the rail workers have been stretched to their limits and threatened to go on strike as they had been embroiled in contract negotiations since 2020
which got so bad that the US Chamber of Commerce and Big Business asked, nay begged Biden for help..in JULY of 2022
The railroads and their unions have been embroiled in disagreements over a contract since January 2020, with wages and health care benefits being major sticking points. The NMB, an independent federal agency that mediates labor agreements for the railway and airline industries, stepped in earlier this year to mediate.
But with the NMB unable to make sufficient headway in the negotiations, major businesses represented by the U.S. Chamber are getting nervous, particularly given ongoing supply chain disruptions still being felt as a result of the pandemic
Note…Big Business is asking a liberal president to solve their problems…interesting.
If the railroad had gone on strike, it would have brought the country back to the supply chain nightmare we were dealing with during lockdown and 2020, Biden was not about to let that happen so he got his administration involved, and here we are, about 90 days later with a resolution that makes all sides happy.
After 20 consecutive hours of negotiations, the Biden team worked out a deal that made life a whole lot better for the RailRoad employees.
In remarks at the White House on Thursday, Mr. Biden hailed the agreement as a win for both workers and companies alike, reflecting his effort this week to remain impartial in the talks as he tried to push the sides toward agreement. While Mr. Biden has styled himself as the most pro-union president in history he avoided publicly taking sides and portrayed the tentative deal as an achievement for both unions and corporations.
“This agreement is a big win for America,” Mr. Biden said. “And this is a great deal for both sides, in my view.”
The deal now heads to union members for a ratification vote, which is a standard procedure in labor talks. While the vote is tallied, workers have agreed not to strike.
While the agreement included compromise by both sides, workers ultimately won several of the concessions they were seeking, including better pay and more flexible schedules, including time off for medical appointments. With rail unions making clear that their workers were prepared to walk off the job, pressure was building on freight carriers to avoid an economically devastating strike that was likely to hurt businesses, farmers and consumers by delaying the movement of critical goods.
In a sign of the compromise, the deal was praised by both freight companies and union leadership. It would increase worker wages by a total of 24 percent over five years, stretching back to 2020, including what industry groups said would be an average payout of $11,000 per worker upon ratification.
Crucially, unions won the right to take unpaid time off to attend medical appointments without penalty, one of several measures meant to ease the burdens of a scheduling system that workers said made it incredibly difficult for them to plan routine physician visits or vacations. Still, in a win for the companies, workers must take unpaid leave to attend those appointments. Workers also won an additional day off and a guarantee that their health insurance premiums would not rise after the contract expires and union leaders and management negotiate a new one.
The announcement had a swift effect for rail passengers. A day after canceling all long-distance passenger trains to avoid stranding people in the event of a freight rail strike, Amtrak said it was “working to quickly restore canceled trains and reaching out to impacted customers to accommodate on first available departures.” Many of Amtrak’s trains run on tracks operated and maintained by freight carriers.
So..let me get this straight.
A liberal President (aka for GOP people…a member of the party that destroys the economy and big business, hates capitalism, are commies, and do nothing but drive up inflation and destroy the deficit and the budget and make the US a socialist hellhole) was asked by the US CHAMBER OF COMMERCE aka the Big Business Lobby, to avert a strike that had its roots in issues that had been brewing since at least 2020 (who was President then?) so that they, Big Business the supposed archenemy of a liberal President, could continue to make money and prosper.
And did say liberal President act like a toddler by posting all over Twitter about how hard he’s going to have to work now to bail out those stupid conservatives/businesses who can’t seem to stay out of trouble? No.
Did he spend months wasting time doing ridiculous power plays or arm-twisting to try to get some sort of quid pro quo for his party or election chances? No.
What did he do? He sat down, got to work, and solved the damn problem by listening to what the people needed and working out a compromise where everyone was happier.
Almost like a leader of a country is supposed to do.
So…yet again I take this moment to point out a simple truth. GOP talking points about how Dems can’t get shit done to save jobs or the economy are utter bullshit.
It’s almost like they have no data or facts, or really anything to show us as to why we should vote for them. Other than lies and fear.
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