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.