Fed up freight rail workers are ready to strike right now but Joe Biden won’t let them. He just signed an emergency order forcing a form of mediation. His stopgap solution won’t cure any of the underlying issues, only prevent the crews from calling an official strike until September.
Rail crews voted strike
When you can’t get time off for your wife’s funeral, something is seriously wrong. That’s what almost happened to one rail conductor. He didn’t get the time off but took it anyway. An engineer colleague “was put on a disciplinary path after having to stay home to fix a broken water heater.”
Over the past few years, what was once “one of the best-paying blue-collar jobs in the country” has collapsed into “one marred by misery and neglect.” It’s all because of “the industry’s on-call, 24/7 scheduling requirements.” Companies benefit at the expense of crew health problems and divorce.
Just because Joe Biden signed an Imperial Decree preventing a strike does not mean that freight rail crews will be operating at “optimum efficiency.” You can expect them to do all their tasks at a snail’s pace and botch the ones they can, which won’t actually get anybody killed. There is more than one way to score a point in the labor game.
If they did go on outright strike, the move would “further clog supply chain networks and amp up political heat on a White House already under the microscope for economic woes.” The woes are more like “disasters.”
Joe Biden unilaterally ordered a three-person commission to step in and try to broker a deal. Companies are throwing money at the problem but that’s not nearly enough.
Salary increases don’t mean as much to freight rail crews who are already “among the highest paid.” They want more time off and better working conditions but the companies won’t spend money on those. When the vote was taken, 99 percent favored a strike. That was about 11,000 votes in favor.
Years of tension
When the strike vote came in with such overwhelming results, it forced Biden’s hand. The emergency commission will “formally pause the bitter negotiations between workers, their unions and the companies and prevent workers from striking until September.” The crisis really came to a head at the peak of the pandemic. Years of tension had been building.
Rail workers who move “40 percent of long distance goods transported in the U.S.” are exploited by companies that cut labor costs to the bone while raising prices on their customers. “precision scheduled railroading” allows “longer trains with less workers — helping drive handsome profits.”
The problem is not enough crew members. Paying too much to a small staff is a whole lot cheaper than hiring more workers, and paying them benefits. They think the money will make the grueling hours in extreme heat and cold conditions acceptable to the rail crews. It doesn’t.
“These are the employees that worked everyday during a pandemic and helped these folks make record profits.”
“To go three years without a raise when inflation is running at 8 to 10 percent right now, and then force them to work more, because you can’t hire. The employees are angry. It’s a level of frustration amongst the workforce unlike any I have seen in the 45 years I’ve worked at the railroad.”
The stress on rail crews shows up in accident statistics, too. “Fatalities per 100,000 miles grew 60% from 2017 to 2021, according to the Federal Railroad Administration, although industry experts caution that those numbers represent more about the public — people who ignore or miss signs to avoid crossing trains — than the rails.” Accidents and incidents in general are up “9.4% during that same time period.“
