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SEPTEMBER 15, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

Amtrak Joe Averts a Lockout (and a Huge Political Headache)

Now, railroad employees won't be docked when they see a
doctor-though they won't be paid, either.

The term "robber baron" was coined to describe America's first
railroad owners, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould in particular. From
the end of the Civil War through the first decades of the 20th century,
the men who owned the railroads had a relatively free hand to soak the
goods producers (chiefly, farmers) who depended on the rails to take
their goods to market, and to exploit the workers who built and ran the
tracks and trains. As the rails, in those pre-auto, pre-aircraft years,
were the only way to move people and things across the country, their
business practices were a matter of huge public concern. Their abuse of
farmers gave rise to the populist movements of the 1880s and '90s,
while their abuse of their employees gave rise to the first nationwide
strikes.

As the nation's first, and for a long time, only interstate, and in
some instances nationwide, businesses, their conduct also was a concern
for the federal government. The first two federal interventions in rail
matters consisted of sending in the Army to break the nearly nationwide
strikes of desperate and underpaid rail workers in 1877 and 1894. Since
then, the federal response has been more nuanced. In the most recent
instance of a strike and lockout, in 1992, Congress voted to ban both
and ordered mandatory arbitration to settle matters. A smattering of
pro-labor senators and representatives opposed the measure, saying it
was unfair to the rail workers. Among those dissenters was "Amtrak Joe"
Biden, who wanted the government to take a more pro-worker stance.

Amtrak Joe was in a position to craft his own solution this week, with
the assistance of Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, onetime leader of
Boston's building trades. Facing a strike deadline of tomorrow, and
cutbacks in services that the rail corporations had already begun, all
in the midst of historic supply chain glitches that could boost prices
and with a midterm election looming, the administration was determined
to reach a settlement between the companies and the engineers' and
conductors' unions.

In recent years, the rail corporations' emphasis on maximizing
shareholder payouts has created a neo­-robber baron ethos in their
employment practices. The original robber barons, like Gould, were Wall
Street guys whose business model was to extract as much profit from the
railroads as they could, farmers and workers be damned. Today, the rail
companies are owned by investment conglomerates like Warren Buffett's
Berkshire Hathaway, where shareholder returns clearly trump other
considerations. In consequence, the railroads have been busy reducing
the number of employees working for them to a bare minimum, requiring
those workers to be ever on call and to work crazy hours. They
instituted policies penalizing workers who take days off, even for
medical reasons.

The most serious attempt to cut labor costs-and it's been
underreported-has been the companies' efforts to reduce the number
of engineers driving a train from two to one-despite what would happen
if the engineer of a mile-long freight train keeled over and there was
no one to take his or her place. This is not a concern that has entered
public consciousness, but imagine the public reaction if the airlines
eliminated the position of copilot, who is basically there to forestall
the possibility of a pilot-less plane. Fortunately, keeping two workers
in the cab was an issue that the rail unions prevailed on before the
Biden administration stepped in to resolve the others.

The resolution that Biden announced this morning does enable workers to
visit a doctor without being penalized by the companies, though this
isn't paid medical leave: Their time spent receiving a medical
procedure won't be compensated. I suspect that means there's no
guarantee that the rail workers will vote, over the next several weeks,
to approve the settlement, in this age of worker militancy. Still, by
the admittedly not-very-high standards of every previous administration,
the Biden effort stands out as the most pro-worker government-mediated
rail settlement we've seen. In a better world, key modes of
transportation wouldn't be subjected to the tyranny of shareholder
value, but that would require a more fundamental reshaping of American
capitalism than is currently on the table. We're not in that better
world, of course, and within those limitations, Amtrak Joe, doing his
bit to help the workers, chugs along.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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