When President Joe Biden pushed through a bill last week forcing a contract on exhausted railworkers, he vowed to continue fighting for paid sick leave, a key demand in the years-long contract battle between the increasingly overworked workers and their profit-soaked employers. Department of Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg echoed that promise in a widely watched grilling by CNN’s Jake Tapper.

But after intervening on the side of the railroads, Biden and Buttigieg have yet to say just how they will try to secure sick days for 125,000 rail workers, who are among the 33 million US workers lacking access to a benefit that’s universal in other wealthy nations around the world.

In truth, the administration has several possible avenues it could pursue to try to deliver those protections. Biden could try to expand an executive order requiring federal contractors to provide sick leave, Buttigieg could robustly enforce existing rail safety laws to challenge harmful attendance policies, or the administration could use the last few weeks of Democrats’ control of Congress to push for the passage of a national paid sick leave bill languishing in committee after being reintroduced ten times in the last fifteen years.