[ Democrats were ready to throw railworkers to the wolves, letting
even Republicans outflank them on labor rights. But thanks to a
last-minute legislative push by Bernie Sanders and his allies today,
railworkers may be getting the sick leave they’re demanding.]
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DEMOCRATS WERE DITHERING ON RAILWORKERS’ RIGHTS. THE LEFT JUST
FORCED THEIR HAND.  
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Branko Marcetic
November 30, 2022
Jacobin
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_ Democrats were ready to throw railworkers to the wolves, letting
even Republicans outflank them on labor rights. But thanks to a
last-minute legislative push by Bernie Sanders and his allies today,
railworkers may be getting the sick leave they’re demanding. _

Senator Bernie Sanders has refused to impose a deal on railworkers
that doesn’t include their demand for seven days of paid sick
leave., (Jeff Swensen / Getty Images)

 

With the baby steps the Democratic Party’s taken toward a more
economically progressive, pro-working-class politics over the last two
years, it shouldn’t be forgotten that this is still a corrupt,
out-of-touch party divorced from any such tradition. And with his loss
in the 2020 Democratic primary, it’s easy to forget the value of
Bernie Sanders’s continuing presence in American political life,
especially the US Senate.

Yet the events of the past twenty-four hours should serve as reminders
of both.

For the past week or so, Congress has been consumed by the prospect of
a looming and potentially monumentally disruptive strike by
railworkers, who have spent three years negotiating
[[link removed]] with
rail carriers for a better contract, centered on their lack of rights
to take paid time off work if they fall ill. After four unions
representing more than half of the unionized rail workforce rejected a
deal put together by President Joe Biden’s White House and a panel
of experts that didn’t do enough to fix these grievances, labor
secretary Marty Walsh and, eventually, congressional leaders
themselves pushed for congressional intervention to end the stalemate,
effectively by forcing railworkers to accept the deal anyway ― in
the process, stripping the workers of leverage in negotiations. The
whole episode came to a head yesterday.

In a statement
[[link removed]] on
Monday calling for Congress to end the impasse, Biden ―
the self-proclaimed
[[link removed]] “most
pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in
American history” ― misleadingly hailed the White House–brokered
deal that cut the legs out from under railworkers as a grand victory
agreed to “by both sides.”

Casting himself as a “proud pro-labor president,” he stressed the
potential economic downsides of a rail strike to explain why he was
reluctantly overriding “the views of those who voted against the
agreement” ― meaning, striking railworkers ― and rejected
letting Congress modify the deal for workers’ sake, claiming “any
changes would risk delay and a debilitating shutdown,” even though
unions set the strike deadline for December 9, nearly two weeks after
he put out the statement. Ironically, the president has ended up to
the right of where he was in the 1990s, when the then senator Biden
was arguably at the terrible peak
[[link removed]] of
his neoliberal transformation yet nonetheless voted against
[[link removed]] letting
Congress end a major rail strike. Railworkers have
understandably savaged Biden
[[link removed]],
while big business groups have sung his praises
[[link removed]].

Outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put out a similarly
tone-deaf statement [[link removed]],
patting Biden and his labor secretary on the back as “proudly
pro-union” while hailing the contract they were forcing on
railworkers as having “secured important advances for workers.”
Pelosi lamely added some condemnation of railroad companies’
“obscene profits” for good measure, even as she made clear she was
intervening firmly on the side of helping the carriers maintain those
profits.

This was more
[[link removed]] or less
[[link removed]] the
position of other prominent Democrats: expressions of regret and even
condemnations of corporate greed meant to mask the fact that they were
intervening on the side of the corporate profiteers. The House’s
number two Democrat, Steny Hoyer, insisted he was “sympathetic to
the issue of sick leave” and thought “the labor unions make a very
valid case” as he lined up behind the White House. Even otherwise
pro-worker Democrats like Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, and Kirsten
Gillibrand ― who had rebranded herself as a progressive in order to
run for president in 2020 ― borrowed from this playbook
[[link removed]] as
they made clear they would go along with Biden’s plan.
Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, meanwhile, didn’t even
bother with this formality, simply saying
[[link removed]] it was
“vitally important” for the thing to pass due to the
“devastating impacts on our economy.”

A more common response was to do as the number three House Democrat,
Representative Jim Clyburn, did and simply ignore the matter entirely.
By yesterday late afternoon, prominent Democrats like Cory Booker, Ed
Markey, and ex–presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar ― who had seen
fit to tweet that afternoon about
[[link removed]] the
United States winning its soccer World Cup match and an elderly
retiree hiking
[[link removed]] the
Appalachian trail ― hadn’t said a single thing either way. The
ranks of Democrats staying silent on the situation unfortunately
included a number of high-profile progressives, including “Squad”
members Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley, and Illinois progressive Chuy
García.

The political malpractice on display here became clear when several
Republicans used it as an opening to posture as pro-worker. Ted Cruz
called railworker demands for sick leave “quite reasonable,”
while, more significant, Marco Rubio put out a subtly
union-bashing statement
[[link removed]] calling
for both sides to “go back and negotiate a deal that the workers,
not just the union bosses, will accept” and affirming he would
“not vote to impose a deal that doesn’t have the support of the
rail workers.”

Likewise, Josh Hawley, who has moved to brand himself as a pro-worker
populist in advance of a planned 2024 run, stated
[[link removed]] that
workers “said no and then Congress is gonna force it down their
throats at the behest of this administration.” Even Colorado
Democrat John Hickenlooper, hardly a progressive firebrand, saw which
way the wind was blowing and affirmed
[[link removed]] that
“any bill should include the SEVEN days of sick leave rail workers
have asked for.”

In other words, several Republicans and a guy who drank fracking
fluid
[[link removed]] were
to the left of the “most pro-union president” in history.

Left-Wing Pushback

This abysmal state of affairs was injected with a modicum of hope
thanks to the small but significant presence of left-wing lawmakers in
Congress, whose pushback against the Democratic leadership’s move
was led by Sanders in the Senate.

Sanders had made clear
[[link removed]] for
months he would back whatever decision railworkers made and
had criticized
[[link removed]] billionaire
Warren Buffet ― who owns the parent company of BNSF Railway ―
earlier this week, pointing out that “in one day, Mr. Buffett made
twice as much money as it would cost to guarantee fifteen paid sick
days a year to every rail worker in America.” More important, while
Democrats got in line behind the president and party leadership,
Sanders ― who had withheld his support
[[link removed]] for
the president’s agreement for months and blocked
[[link removed]] Republicans’
earlier attempts to ram the inadequate deal through ― criticized the
plans and made clear
[[link removed]] he’d
block any such legislation until seven paid sick days for railworkers
were included.

He was joined by a number of other left-wing lawmakers, like
“Squad” member Jamaal Bowman, who called it
[[link removed]] “an
inhumane deal being pushed onto workers even after a majority voted it
down.” Fellow “Squad” members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
[[link removed]] (“If Congress
intervenes, it should be to have workers’ backs and secure their
demands in legislation”), Rashida Tlaib
[[link removed]] (“I
stand with rail workers”), and Cori Bush
[[link removed]] (“I will
not support a deal that does not provide our rail workers with the
paid sick leave they need and deserve”) also took the side of
workers.

Before long, Sanders made plans to introduce an amendment in the
Senate to the legislation mandating seven days’ worth of sick leave
for the railworkers, joined by Bowman doing the same
[[link removed]] in the
House, daring
[[link removed]] Republicans
to vote against it. “Look, you have a number of Republicans who
claim —_ claim_ — to be supporters of the working class,”
Sanders told Chris Hayes last night. “Well, if you are a supporter
of the working class, how are you going to vote against the proposal
which provides guaranteed paid sick leave to workers who have none
right now?”

These efforts rapidly rearranged the political terrain, with Pelosi
suddenly and subtly shifting her position late in the day and
announcing plans to allow lawmakers to vote today to add the seven
days of paid sick leave to the agreement. Previously silent lawmakers
like García expressed support for the move. It all culminated in the
House passing the seven-day sick leave amendment just now by a vote of
221-207, with all Democrats and only three Republicans voting in
favor.

Despite the dearth of House GOP support for the measure, Republican
senator John Cornyn had earlier predicted it could get the required
GOP support needed to reach sixty votes in the Senate, because
“there will be a lot of sympathy for providing sick leave for
workers.” In many ways, this is something of a repeat of events at
the close of 2020, when Sanders and other progressives in Congress,
with the belated aid of Hawley, forced the foot-dragging
then-president Donald Trump, president-elect Biden, and Democratic
leadership to all reluctantly back another round of stimulus checks.
But whether progressives will succeed here is an open question and one
that’ll largely depend on how many Republicans see it in their
political interest, as they did when they just voted to legalize
marriage equality, to move to the center, away from their
long-standing hostility to workers’ rights.

Whatever happens, this has been another sign of the modest but
significant political shift that’s taken place in US political life
thanks to both the larger prominence of Sanders and his progressive
allies in Congress, and the resurgence of labor militancy and an
organized socialist movement in recent years. Forty years ago, a
Republican president dealt a terrible blow to the union movement by
breaking an air traffic controllers’ strike. Decades later,
Republicans may force a Democratic administration into a more
pro-worker position by following the lead of an openly socialist
senator.

_Branko Marcetic [[link removed]] is
a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday's Man: The Case
Against Joe Biden [[link removed]]. He
lives in Chicago, Illinois._

* railroad workers
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* federal government
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* Anti-Unionism
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* Paid Sick Leave
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* Bernie Sanders
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* Left Strategies
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