On the menu today: The potential economic catastrophe of a freight-rail strike appears to have been averted; a reader lays out the gritty reality of working for a freight railroad, and how the freight-rail unions exacerbate the labor shortage that was a factor in this recent dispute; and people wonder where Pete Buttigieg was during all this, and whether he’s treating the job as secretary of transportation like a de facto presidential campaign..
U.S. Department of Labor: The Freight-Rail Strike Has Been Averted
At 5:08 a.m. this morning, Labor secretary Marty Walsh announced that the threat of a freight-rail strike appeared to have subsided:
Moments ago, following more than 20 consecutive hours of negotiations at [the U.S. Department of Labor], the rail companies and union negotiators came to a tentative agreement that balances the needs of workers, businesses, and our nation’s economy. The Biden Administration applauds all parties for reaching this hard-fought, mutually beneficial deal. Our rail system is integral to our supply chain, and a disruption would have had catastrophic impacts on industries, travelers and families across the country.
Cynics are likely to contend that this was a familiar story of brinksmanship, and that both sides always expected to reach a deal at the eleventh hour. But the steps taken in anticipation of a strike represented a burgeoning supply-chain disruption that the Biden administration wished to avoid. No business wanted its shipments stuck in transit when the strike or lockout started at midnight, so sensitive cargoes stopped earlier this week, Amtrak had canceled long routes, Norfolk Southern and BSNF Railway had stopped taking new shipments for intermodal routes at noon yesterday, and the Consumer Brands Association had reported that crop shipments were scheduled to stop today. Assuming that the tentative agreement holds, the supply-chain complications should work themselves out in short order.
A few readers griped that yesterday’s newsletter focused too much on the consequences of a strike and not enough on the disagreements separating labor and management. Luckily, I’m not the only writer at NR paying attention to this issue. Our Dominic Pino was following the brewing dispute way back in late July, gave us updates in mid and late August, and then yesterday, laid out the divide:
Carriers wanted a 17 percent raise, unions wanted a 31.3 percent raise, and the [Presidential Emergency Board] recommended a 24 percent raise. Carriers wanted to significantly restructure health benefits, which are very generous for rail workers; the PEB recommended largely keeping the benefits status quo. Unions requested three additional holidays; the PEB recommended against them, though it did recommend on additional personal day of paid leave.
The day after the report came out, carriers said they would accept deals that followed the PEB report’s recommendations. They have kept their word, and they have made agreements with nine of the twelve unions.
The agreements include the 24 percent pay increase (the largest in the history of national bargaining), maintaining the status quo on health benefits, the additional day of paid leave, and, in the case of maintenance-of-way workers, a more generous travel-expenses policy that the union president praised in glowing terms. Even unions that had previously voted to approve strikes, such as the American Train Dispatchers Association, saw the PEB’s recommendations as reasonable and made deals with the carriers based on them. But SMART-TD and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET), the two largest unions, are still unsatisfied.
The leave policies were a particularly thorny issue, because the labor shortage that has bedeviled so many other American industries has been a long-simmering and worsening problem in the rail industry. I have a reader who worked on the rails years ago, and his job still involves interacting with many figures in the railroad industry. He offered a portrait of the work’s challenges, and of how the unions can represent an obstacle to bringing in new workers:
Management isn’t the only determining factor in railroad employment. The ‘boards’ at any given railroad office are controlled by the union local. While management decides how many people to train and hire for a specific location, the union decides how many jobs there are at that location. And of course, the jobs are bid by seniority.
[Back when I worked in the railroad industry] BNSF hired me and about 20 other guys to work; we spent six weeks in training and another two months in on-the-job-training before we could ‘mark up’ at the yard office.
Sounds simple, right?
Well, the local union decided there was only enough work for about 15 of us. That left the bottom five guys left to go elsewhere in the district to find a job. If you couldn’t find a job, you were unemployed until a spot opened up.
I was the fourteenth guy in that group, so every time the board got cut, I had to go to another town where I outranked someone, and I could bump that person off that board. Let me tell you, doing that makes you really popular in a town you don’t live in.
Add to this the fact that the railroad job is 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. You go to work on about two hours’ notice, and you could be gone for three days or longer. You could go to work at two in the afternoon or two in the morning- and you could work a 12-hour shift. Yes, you earn vacation time. But if you want to take it, there must be enough people available to do your job while you’re out.
Not exactly a model workplace.
So, while the unions may complain about the number of people leaving railroad service all together, the unions are a big part of the problem they’re complaining about.
For the past two decades, the unions have been making it very hard for new guys and gals to hire on and stay on. I endured two years in northeastern Montana before I found myself standing in a field during a blizzard waiting for a train and wondering exactly what the hell I was doing there.
Railroading is a hard job. But it’s a good solid job and one this nation relies on.
Back to my point: Yes, management probably needs to make more than a few concessions to labor. But someone in the labor camp needs to realize they can’t spend decades making it nearly impossible to bring in new blood, and then blame management for the fact there’s nobody around to give them time off. The laws of supply and demand are vicious mistresses, and they don’t like being broken.
In my conversations with industry and government people — most who came from industry — I get the understanding the onboarding and retention problems haven’t improved much since I left.
One of the many problems with unions is that they represent and enforce a concept that is broadly appealing in the abstract — “experience should be rewarded” — but aren’t flexible enough to deal with more complicated realities. What if one of the newer guys is better at the job than others with more seniority? What if at least a handful of the newer hires are more ambitious and driven, and at least a handful of the old hands have grown complacent? Under systems that prioritize seniority, other good traits on the job get short shrift.
Where Was Mayor Pete?
Yesterday, I pointed out that it’s not just conservatives who are wondering why Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg had no discernable role in trying to avert the freight-rail strike. (So everyone knows: Buttigieg was touring the Detroit Auto Show while Walsh was running the negotiations in Washington.)
For what it’s worth, Biden’s statement this morning mentions Buttigieg:
I am grateful for the hard work that Secretaries Walsh, Buttigieg, and Vilsack, and NEC Director Deese put into reaching this tentative agreement. I especially want to thank Secretary Walsh for his tireless, around-the-clock efforts that delivered a win for the hard working people of the US rail industry: as a result, we will keep Americans on the job in all the industries in this country that are touched by this vital industry.
Andrew Boucher examined what else Buttigieg is doing lately: touting the Inflation Reduction Act alongside Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco, lamenting racial disparities in infrastructure on a trip to Oakland, praising California’s proposed ban on gas-powered cars by the year 2035, and appearing on late-night-television chat shows.
The Hill wrote an article speculating about him running for president in 2024, and it’s easy to see why; Buttigieg’s media and public appearances in the name of Biden’s transportation policies don’t look or feel all that different from his appearances during his 2020 presidential campaign. It’s not surprising that Ryan Grim — no right-wing conservative — argues that Buttigieg is basically using the job as Transportation secretary as a multi-year training camp to run for president again.
There are persistent claims that Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff really don’t like Buttigieg, and see him as attempting to elbow her out as Biden’s heir apparent — a claim Buttigieg denies. If Harris and others in the administration perceive Buttigieg as a man whose top priority is promoting Buttigieg . . . it’s not hard to see why.
ADDENDUM: Tuesday, Joe Biden on flew Air Force One up to Wilmington, Del., to vote in that state’s primary, and then flew back. The primary included one contested statewide race. Biden was on the ground there for one hour and 15 minutes. Yesterday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the round-trip flight was worth the expense and the carbon emissions because it allowed Biden to thank the poll workers in person.