Biden Signs Rail-Worker Deal, Ending Crisis He and His Allies Needlessly Prolonged
The president deserves credit for averting a strike — but also blame for letting the problem fester as long as it did.
The president deserves credit for averting a strike — but also blame for letting the problem fester as long as it did.
I n the end, President Biden did the right thing by calling for Congress to swiftly adopt a tentative agreement between railroads and rail-worker unions, preventing a strike. The House voted on Wednesday to adopt the tentative agreement with no modifications, as Biden suggested, and the Senate voted to adopt it yesterday. In both chambers, the deal passed with large, bipartisan majorities: 290–137 in the House and 80–15 in the Senate.
Biden signed the measure today, managing to finally do what he claimed to have done in September: avert a strike. Back then, Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh had brokered a deal between the unions and the railroads that both sides found acceptable. The press ate up Biden’s mission-accomplished claim at the time. But the deal was never done. It still had to go to union members for ratification votes. Though eight of the twelve unions involved — and a majority of all the workers who voted — voted to approve the deal, four unions held out. And since all twelve must ratify an agreement to avoid a nationwide shutdown — if even one union goes on strike, the other eleven won’t cross a picket line — it took Congress’s involvement to break the impasse.
Congress’s primary purpose in passing the Railway Labor Act of 1926 was “to avoid any interruption to commerce.” To that end, in accordance with Congress’s constitutional role as the regulator of interstate commerce, the RLA gives lawmakers the power to institute a labor agreement to prevent a rail strike once the law’s numerous other dispute-resolution mechanisms have failed to produce results. Over the past three years of negotiations, mediation, and independent recommendations, the two sides had had numerous chances to resolve their differences, and they couldn’t. Their deadlock pushed the economy to the brink of disaster. Congress was right to act as it did to prevent a strike.
Biden is trying to spin this as a huge win for his administration. He said in his remarks today that his team “did one heck of a job in averting what could have been a real disaster.” But the only reason Congress had to get involved in the first place was because his administration’s efforts to avert a strike back in September didn’t pan out, and his pro-labor stance likely emboldened labor to make the process more difficult than it had to be.
Unions attempted to play the RLA to their advantage. Because the primary purpose of the RLA is to avoid strikes, contracts negotiated under it do not expire. While a new contract is being negotiated, the status quo holds, and so long as it does, striking is illegal. The status quo can, theoretically, continue forever.
The law, however, contains ways of putting a time limit on the status quo, and unions used them. They requested mediation from the National Mediation Board, an independent federal agency, and then after only two months of mediation (a much shorter period than normal), they requested to be released. The three-member NMB voted 2–1 to grant that release. The two members who voted in favor were a former union president and a former Teamsters attorney, both nominated by Biden.
The NMB is not typically a partisan body, but as rail labor-relations expert Frank Wilner wrote at the time, the “early release” clearly benefitted the unions. It began a 30-day cooling-off period, at the conclusion of which Biden could appoint a board to make independent recommendations, which would have 30 days to write its report. Once its report was released, another 30-day cooling-off period would begin, concluding in mid September, right before a midterm election in which Democrats were expected to lose control of at least one chamber of Congress.
If you’re organized labor, and you know Congress could have the potential to write a labor contract for you, you’d much rather have that occur under unified Democratic control and before an election, rather than during a lame-duck session in which lawmakers are less predictable. At the very least, you want politicians to feel the pressure to deliver for you before Election Day rather than after.
Seeking to head off the possibility of a strike, Republican senators Richard Burr (N.C.) and Roger Wicker (Miss.) pushed a resolution to adopt a contract based on the independent recommendations of the Biden-appointed arbitrators — the same independent recommendations that formed the basis of the contract Biden ultimately put his signature on today. But Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) blocked the Burr–Wicker resolution, and said, repeatedly, “Rail workers have a right to strike.”
That was when Biden deputized Walsh to broker a deal, which Walsh did, handing unions an additional concession from railroads on the issue of sick leave. That was supposed to be a huge union win, and eight of twelve unions ratified it, but four held out. Finally, after three years of unions and progressives moving the goalposts, Biden put the general economic interests of the country ahead of special interests that donate to Democrats and called for Congress to implement the contract — i.e., the same approach that Burr and Wicker had advocated in September.
Doing the right thing in the end is better than not doing it at all, and we should all be grateful that large, bipartisan majorities in Congress acted quickly to prevent an economy-crippling strike. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that unions and left-wing politicians brought us to the brink of that disaster in the first place.
Unions and railroads could have stayed in mediation for longer and hashed out their differences there, but unions asked to be released from that process, and Democratic appointees obliged them. After mediation, the parties could have gone to binding arbitration, which the railroads accepted, but the unions rejected. They could have made agreements based on the independent recommendations of the Biden-appointed board, which the railroads agreed to do, but the unions did not. Congress could have put a stop to the madness in September, which Republicans wanted to do, but Democrats did not. Unions and railroads could have made agreements based on the deal Walsh brokered, which the railroads agreed to do, but the unions did not.
Throughout that entire process, the self-described “most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in American history” was giving speeches at the AFL-CIO’s national convention and using the bully pulpit to boost unionization efforts at Amazon. His executive-branch agencies were taking unions’ side in regulatory disputes and pushing California-style labor regulations that unions support. Biden’s message caught on, and the mainstream press was writing about the “union renaissance” and a surge in public support for organized labor. So it’s no wonder that the rail-worker unions were prepared to play hardball.
Biden did the right thing in the end, but only after an unnecessarily arduous process that was made so by unions and their Democratic allies, he himself very much included. He deserves credit for averting a strike — but also blame for letting the crisis fester as long as it did.