Biden Asks Congress to Implement the Railway Labor Act

At this point, this was the obvious next step.

I’m calling on Congress to pass legislation immediately to adopt the Tentative Agreement between railroad workers and operators.

Let me be clear: a rail shutdown would devastate our economy. Without freight rail, many U.S. industries would shut down.

— President Biden (@POTUS) November 29, 2022

As I said in The Conversation piece, there was no way that either the president or Congress was going to let a strike happen. Here’s an even shorter primer:

What is happening here:
1) The railroads are awful
2) Biden forced them to negotiate a slightly better contract on sick leave
3) The contract still sucks on this issue
4) The unions know that Congress will intervene
5) Workers would rather have it forced on them than vote for it https://t.co/XZ4xaahqO0

— Erik Loomis (@ErikLoomis) November 29, 2022

The highly Trumpy railroad workforce can even say that Biden sucks for a reason now.

I agree this isn’t an ideal situation. The sick leave issue is still very terrible. It’s not just a workplace rights issue, it’s a human rights issue. I’m only saying that after Biden forced the slight improvement over the sick leave issue, that was as far as it was going to go. Even if Biden didn’t ask Congress to intervene, Congress was going to intervene anyway. I don’t blame the workers for not accepting this. But they also know that Congress can make them accept it and they’ve known that from the very beginning. So it is better for them to at least be able to say that it was Washington’s fault.

Sometimes, you just don’t have the power to make things that much better. As anyone who has ever been involved in a union knows, this is actually almost all of the time.