Earlier this year, the federal board charged with overseeing America’s rail network called a hearing to discuss widespread complaints about higher costs and poor service. Predictably enough, rail executives sought to blame the pandemic and labor shortages for the likes of gridlock and supply-chain breakdowns. But the dysfunction on America’s railroads is neither a product of COVID-19 nor the result of nebulous constructs like the so-called “Great Resignation.” As Matthew Buck explained earlier this year in an article for the American Prospect, the single biggest contributors have been corporate monopolism and financialization — both of which contributed to the horrendous working conditions at the center of the recent showdown in Congress.

Thanks in large part to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan–era deregulation, American rail has steadily become more consolidated — the number of major carriers shrinking from forty to just seven between 1980 and the present day. Unsurprisingly, there’s little evidence that this shift has made rail transport any more efficient. It has, however, made the rail business incredibly lucrative. In an effort to wring as much profit from railways as possible, company barons have in turn cut costs, laid off workers, and introduced a host of other changes ostensibly geared to improving the quality of service. Central to this project has been something called “precision scheduled railroading” (PSR), the brainchild of late executive Hunter Harrison. Under PSR, as Buck explains:

Railroad management’s job is to drive down the “operating ratio,” or operating expenses as a percentage of revenue. In other words, Wall Street judges railroads’ success based in part on spending less money running the railroad and more on stock buybacks or dividends. Theoretically, focusing on lowering operating ratios pushes railroads to be more efficient, to do more with less. But when railroads have the market power they have today, they can instead “do less with less,” as shippers and workers put it.