UPDATE: See bottom of this post for NTSB hearings on East Palestine.
While wesmorgan1 has already covered this story, here’s more background on it and some discussion of how much more we could be doing with rail.
Some may remember that back in the fall of 2022 there was growing pressure from rail unions to call a national strike. With years of labor abuse by the major railroads, workforces slashed even as workloads grew, an industry focused on Wall Street not Main Street, and expired contracts with negotiations going nowhere, things looked grim.
For those who want the details, I wrote up several reports on what was looming in an industry which moves roughly 40% of the goods in this country. The National Rail Strike is Getting Closer - Updated - Latest Amtrak cancels long distance trains! and If you think the chances of a national rail strike are over, guess again. YOU can make a difference give the background and the stakes of the story.
The Biden administration engaged in marathon negotiations to avert a strike which would have been an economic disaster for the country. An impasse over sick leave proved to be the sticking point. Ultimately Congress imposed a settlement on the industry under the peculiar status the rail industry enjoys, via the 1926 Railway Labor Act. The agreement addressed pay issues, but did not address a key issue for workers: no paid sick leave. At the time the imposed settlement was characterized as:
“I negotiated a contract no one else could negotiate,” Biden said at a news briefing with French President Emmanuel Macron. “What was negotiated was so much better than anything they ever had.”
Critics say the contract that did not receive backing from enough union members lacked sufficient levels of paid sick leave for rail workers. Biden said he wants paid leave for “everybody” so that it wouldn’t have to be negotiated in employment contracts, but Republican lawmakers have blocked measures to require time off work for medical and family reasons. The president said Congress should impose the contract now to avoid a strike that he said could cause 750,000 job losses and a recession.
Railways say halting rail service would cause a devastating $2 billion-per-day hit to the economy. A freight rail strike also would have a big potential impact on passenger rail, with Amtrak and many commuter railroads relying on tracks owned by the freight railroads.
The rail companies and unions have been engaged in high-stakes negotiations. The Biden administration helped broker deals between the railroads and union leaders in September, but four of the unions rejected the deals. Eight others approved five-year deals and are getting back pay for their workers for the 24% raises that are retroactive to 2020.
While the Biden administration was able to head off a crippling blow to the economy, it left rail workers angry and feeling betrayed by the President who promised to be “the most pro-union president”. However, the story does not end there.
The administration has continued to apply pressure to the rail industry to provide workers with paid sick leave, and that combined with continuing pressure from rail unions has paid off. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, one of the major rail unions, has issued a statement on how the Big Four railroads (BNSF, UP, CSX, and NS) have reached agreement with their members:
After months of negotiations, the IBEW’s Railroad members at four of the largest U.S. freight carriers finally have what they’ve long sought but that many working people take for granted: paid sick days.
This is a big deal, said Railroad Department Director Al Russo, because the paid-sick-days issue, which nearly caused a nationwide shutdown of freight rail just before Christmas, had consistently been rejected by the carriers. It was not part of last December’s congressionally implemented update of the national collective bargaining agreement between the freight lines and the IBEW and 11 other railroad-related unions.
“We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.
“We know that many of our members weren’t happy with our original agreement,” Russo said, “but through it all, we had faith that our friends in the White House and Congress would keep up the pressure on our railroad employers to get us the sick day benefits we deserve. Until we negotiated these new individual agreements with these carriers, an IBEW member who called out sick was not compensated.”
While President Joe Biden was calling on Congress in November to pass legislation to implement the agreement, he stressed that he would continue to encourage the railroads to guarantee paid sick time for their employees.
“I share workers’ concern about the inability to take leave to recover from illness or care for a sick family member,” Biden said. “I have pressed legislation and proposals to advance the cause of paid leave in my two years in office and will continue to do so.”
That pressure, plus the IBEW’s ongoing efforts, is paying off at last. The IBEW and BNSF Railway reached an agreement April 20 to grant members four short-notice, paid sick days, with the ability to also convert up to three personal days to sick days. The union reached similar understandings with CSX and Union Pacificon March 22, and with Norfolk Southern on March 10. Unused sick time at the end of a year can be paid out or rolled into a worker’s 401(k) retirement account….
There’s more at the link. Other rail unions have either gotten their own agreements on sick leave or are still negotiating, but this is a major step for rail workers. More from IBEW:
...Biden, citing the potential economic impact of a national freight rail strike during the winter holidays, on Nov. 28 called on Congress to impose the emergency board’s agreement.
Since then, several other railroad-related unions have also seen success in negotiating for similar sick-day benefits. These 12 unions represent more than 105,000 railroad workers.
“Biden deserves a lot of the credit for achieving this goal for us,” Russo said. “He and his team continued to work behind the scenes to get all of rail labor a fair agreement for paid sick leave.”
Russo said talks are continuing toward reaching a sick-days agreements with Canadian Pacific and Kansas City, recently designated a Class I rail carrier by the Surface Transportation Board.
Axios has more on how the administration continued to apply pressure to the rail industry over sick leave after the contract without it was imposed by Congress in December 2022. Senator Bernie Sanders had also been applying pressure from the Congressional side. The horrific derailment in East Palestine with the massive release of toxic chemicals was addressed by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg with a number of recommendations — including paid sick leave, because a healthy work force is a safer work force.
There’s still a number of ways in which the railroads could provide more equitable and humane employment for their workforce, but this is definitely progress. Spread the word. This is not the kind of news that the media will pay attention to; it’s a win for labor for one thing. It’s an illustration that the Biden administration can stay focused and work to advance its agenda even if it takes more time than the news cycle likes to handle.
Meanwhile…
The state of the rail industry in the United States is light-years away from where it could be, in terms of serving the public interest. Driven by hedge funds with the demand to keep extracting shareholder value, the major railroads have been failing to provide adequate service to customers, have adopted practices that make them a hazard to the public (like ever-longer trains and safety cuts leading to derailments), and have hindered efforts to expand passenger rail.
Instead of investing in infrastructure and service to attract freight business away from trucking, the industry is obsessed with the operating ratio, the quest to find how little service they can get away with to maximize the profit from every dollar spent.
Railroads are effectively monopolies — having been deregulated by the Staggers Act, they have become highly profitable at the expense of serving the larger public interest that used to justify their monopoly status. What happened in East Palestine shows that leaving railroads to their own devices is not a good idea.
Railroads could make a huge contribution to cutting carbon emissions and increasing resiliency in the face of increasing climate disruption — but that’s not for the immediate gain by shareholders so it isn’t happening and isn’t likely to under the current operating paradigms for the industry. (And the Big 4 railroads funded climate denial for years to protect their fossil fuel traffic.)
So, what to do?
Solutionary Rail has a conceptually simple plan for getting carbon out of transportation and making clean power available from coast to coast. Here’s the basics:
- Electrify America’s rail corridors with clean power from wind and solar energy.
- Upgrade them to make possible faster conventional rail for both freight and passenger service: more trains, better trains, faster trains.
- Improved rail service with electrification will revitalize trackside communities, unclog highways from truck traffic, and clean up the air for significant health benefits.
- Use rail corridor rights of way for the backbone of a national supergrid, so that clean power being generated anywhere can reach everywhere. The lack of adequate grid capacity is stalling clean power projects around the country.
This is not rocket science; the technology has been available for decades and is in wide use around the world. If countries as diverse as India and the Netherlands can electrify their rail systems, the U.S. has no excuse. Solutionary Rail’s Moonshot Modeshift details how shifting as much long-haul truck traffic to rail by 2030 would save massive amounts of fossil fuel emissions.
For the whole Solutionary Rail concept, download the book about it and use the code 4WRD2GTHR to get it for free.
The Climate Rail Alliance has come up with a proposal that would reshape the rail industry to make it competitive, encourage innovation, and better serve the public interest. The concept is called Toll Roads For Trains.
Toll Roads for Trains (TRT) is a plan for effective passenger and freight rail transportation in the US. The current system of integrated ownership of infrastructure and service creates local and regional monopolies that limit service, have a negative effect on rail safety, and encourage growth of highway transportation.
Although rail transportation can be an effective climate emergency response, the current business arrangement of rail transportation limits the effectiveness.
The supply chain is affected by the way that the railroad industry uses its regional and local monopoly position to limit rail traffic and encourage trucking.
TRT provides federal government control of the rail system without formal nationalization and acquisition of railroad property.
The TRT concept allows any qualified business to pursue rail transportation by purchasing schedules (reservations for time and route) and operating trains. Rail freight companies may be formed and operated as easily as trucking companies. New and improved rail passenger service may be implemented more easily and quickly than possible in the current arrangement.
The 17 page pdf explaining it can be downloaded for free. (See link at the bottom of the web page.)
One of the frustrating things about U.S. plans to deal with climate is the way both the media and policy makers appear to be ignoring rail. Both politicians and the press tend to ignore the rail industry unless it’s about a disaster, a strike, or High Speed Rail. The massive size and political clout of the rail industry makes it a hard target for policy makers to tackle, but its potential to provide the infrastructure we desperately need in the face of increasing climate disruption means we need to do it sooner than later.
Let’s make it happen.
UPDATE: NTSB Hearings
www.youtube.com/…