Rail Unions in the U.S. are in bad need of consolidation, democracy, and militancy
Great Railway Strike 1886 – E St Louis National Photo Company Collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Blaming Joe Biden diverts attention from the real problem
by CAREY DALL
In November 2019 – precipitously close to the Christmas holiday – Teamsters Canada shut down the Canadian National railroad. The Canadian Parliament has similar powers to the U.S. Congress to intervene in rail strikes. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came under incredible pressure from business groups to pass “back-to-work” legislation, but he refused. The strike plowed on for 9 days, and the workers largely won the struggle.
Why did Canadian rail workers get to strike in 2019 and U.S. rail workers not in 2022? It certainly isn’t because Trudeau is any more pro-worker than Joe Biden. It is because Trudeau and the Liberals feared the Canadian Labour Movement, whose militant willingness to expand strikes recently forced Ontario Premier Doug Ford into a dramatic policy reversal.
The 2022 Freight Rail beef in the United States has received incredible coverage. Everyone from Newsmax to the New York Times to The Onion produced stories warning of crippled supply chains already at the breaking point due to overreliance on Just-In-Time inventory management, skeletal staffing levels, and lack of infrastructural investment by the private sector. This attention is a good thing, specifically as a new generation of leftists are now realizing that transportation and logistics are vital vectors for societal change. However, an alarming number of commentators are grafting their ideological purity and baseless suspicions on the situation as they restate half-truths time and again: Joe Biden is in bed with corporations. The Democrats and Republicans screwed over rail workers by taking away their right to strike. And so on.
Obviously, Joe Biden and both parties are in hock to corporate elites. However, Biden’s performance in this case will surprise many.
When Sean O’Brien was seated as Teamster General President in March 2022, one of his first acts was to visit the White House and plead with Biden to release Rail Labor from Mediation and form a Presidential Emergency Board. The Teamsters Union includes two of the twelve rail unions – the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees [BMWED] and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers [BLET]. They are both totally autonomous from each other, and have a long history of not working together, to put it kindly. Each union has approximately 25,000 members – down alarmingly in the past 7 years as the industry has gone aggressively lean under the false moniker “Precision Scheduled Railroading” or PSR.
Biden’s administration, which includes O’Brien’s longtime Boston ally Marty Walsh, was nervous that ending Mediation would enable a national strike just before the 2022 midterms. But O’Brien’s legendary charm won the day – he even got the President to let Rail Labor name the majority of the PEB! Unfortunately, the Rail Labor leaders offered up the names of career arbitrators when what was called for were progressive social scientists, economists, or other labor leaders.
Arbitrators are infamous for splitting the baby. And that’s what the PEB 250 did. That’s not Biden’s fault, nor the fault of the two political parties. It’s Rail Labor leadership’s fault.
In truth, a railroad strike was never in the cards. Anyone with an appreciation of American Rail Labor History knows this. To back Congress off with their Constitutional right to intervene in anything that endangers interstate commerce, Rail Labor would have needed to wage a multi-year comprehensive contract campaign in advance of the round of bargaining, which began in January 2020. Comprehensive contract campaigns involve internal organizing, communications strategy, legislative strategy, regulatory strategy, legal strategy, and bargaining strategy – all in an intricately synchronized dynamic that puts the members, their escalating actions, and their stories at the center of the struggle.
If at the beginning of the round the union suspects that the negotiations will not go smoothly – and they never go smoothly these days – it is important to envision what amount of public support will be needed if striking becomes necessary. In the context of endangering the national transmission of life sustaining cargo, this requires intense communication and coalition development across society in an effort to help communities understand that the union is bargaining for the common good. The Nurses excel at this by forcing the issue of nurse-patient ratios at the table, and then positioning themselves as healthcare warriors in the public sphere.
Rail Labor has been unwilling to implement such a campaign centered on the members and the common good which is unfortunate given that the Railroads are actually sitting ducks: their safety record is so bad that inevitably a train with explosive or poisonous cargo will derail in or near a large population center unless strident re-regulation and re-staffing take place; their record of environmental destruction is on the scale of other mass industrial bad actors; their record of racist and misogynistic hiring practices is legendary; their price gouging is a key element behind the soaring inflation which has enraged Americans.