An amendment from Senator Dan Sullivan (R., Alaska) to the resolutions the House passed yesterday to prevent a rail strike, that would have extended the cooling-off period for two more months instead of adopting an agreement, has failed by a vote of 26–69.
Sullivan’s proposal may have seemed sensible in that it could have allowed the sides more time to make a deal. The problem is that neither side wanted one.
The Association of American Railroads, the industry’s trade group, is calling for the Senate to implement the tentative agreement that was brokered by Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh back in September. The House yesterday passed a resolution that would do so by a margin of 290–137, with overwhelmingly bipartisan support. The Senate will vote on it today.
The third-largest union, the BMWED, wrote to senators today urging them not to extend the cooling-0ff period. The union says that extending the status quo would be “based on a faulty premise — that with additional time for negotiations, the parties might come to an agreement.” It says the time for negotiation has passed. “The parties last met on November 22nd, for maybe 20 minutes, and mostly discussed when the status quo period would expire,” it says.
The unions are pushing Congress to accept the House’s other resolution, which passed 221–207 along narrower partisan lines, that would alter the deal by adding seven days of sick leave at the national level. It’s a sweetheart deal crafted by Democrats to reward their union allies. Sick benefits are currently negotiated locally, and that’s where independent recommendations from August said they should stay.
The BLET, the second-largest union, is urging its membership to contact legislators and ask them to adopt House Democrats’ deal. The largest union, SMART-TD, said in a statement yesterday that it urges “the House and the Senate to vote in favor of guaranteeing seven days of paid sick leave to rail workers.”
Each of these unions’ positions is contrary to President Biden’s, which is that Congress should pass the tentative agreement that his administration negotiated in September, without modifications.
Nobody — not the railroads, not the unions, and not the administration that brokered the deal currently at issue — wanted to extend the cooling-off period.