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President Biden signed the bill to avert a potentially crippling strike by railroad workers during the holiday season. “The consequences of a shutdown were just too great for working families all across the country,” Biden said in a statement. The president had pushed Congress to get involved and enforce a new agreement. However, Straight Arrow News contributor Larry Lindsey says the Biden rail labor deal fails to fix the biggest problem for workers – the lack of paid sick days.
If you can’t count on a worker showing up where they need to run the train, it’s very hard to run a nationwide rail service. On the other hand, it definitely seems unfair that a worker would have to give 48 hours notice to take a day off, even if they were sick, or if they had a family emergency. Well, with the election looming, the president did not want to have a strike.
So he formed something called a Presidential Emergency Board, which recommended a settlement. It was a fairly generous settlement, at least on on paper. It gave workers basically a 24% wage increase over four years. They got 14% immediately and 4.8% in the two remaining years of the contract. And the workers also got $1,000 bonuses for each year. Their back pay which they were owed under this contract, amounted to $11,000 on average, and they would get that on returning to work. Although it sounds generous, that’s not particularly above what’s happening in the labor market…basically a 5% a year pay hike. That’s about average for what’s been happening.
And the settlement to this problem – they were given one extra personal day that was paid. But they still had to give 48 hours notice to take that personal day. We predicted back in September when the Presidential Emergency Board proposed this, that it would be rejected by the workers. Still, it was enough to delay a strike until after Election Day, which was the president’s objective here. Now, it turned out four of the 12 unions that were involved in the contract rejected the contract. And they represented the majority of all the railroad workers.
But the president then faced a problem: The time had expired, these workers were free to go on strike on December 9. So he asked the Congress to impose a settlement. basically to pass a law forcing workers to work under the contract that his administration had put forward, even though the workers had rejected the contract. Now, this is a very awkward thing for someone who calls himself the most pro-union president in history to do. He’s basically voiding the collective bargaining process and making workers work on a deal that they had rejected. Seems unfair.
