For Railworkers, It Was About More Than Sick Days
By ramming a contract down railworkers’ throats, Joe Biden reinforced a basic fact of American life: when you’re at work, you have no democratic rights.
A freight train stretches across the California desert. Railroad companies seeking to maximize their profits have gradually lengthened trains to up to three miles — but they remain staffed by crews of often just two people. Maintenance requires those workers to walk miles up and down the freight in inclement weather to make routine repairs, risking their lives in the process, as the tracks below are ill-equipped to handle trains of this length and weight.
On December 2, 2022, President Joe Biden signed legislation he had requested to block an impending strike of 115,000 railroad workers, imposing the terms of a contract that a majority of those workers had voted to reject after three years of negotiations. In so doing, he invoked the urgency of avoiding the economic catastrophe of […]
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