Is Biden Working on the Railroad Unions?

This includes a 14.1% wage increase immediately, bonuses totaling $5,000, and a 24% compounded wage increase from 2020-2024. This is the biggest wage increase railroad unions have negotiated in at least 40 years.

The two union holdouts represent the locomotive engineers and conductors who are fighting over what they call “quality of life” issues such as vacation, sick days and attendance. The unions want 15 paid sick days each year that they could use on demand for other reasons, which poses significant problems for railroad scheduling.

Workers already receive on average three weeks of paid vacation, and some senior workers get up to five weeks. Most rail employees also get a combination of up to 14 days of holiday and personal days. The Presidential Emergency Board has recommended an additional personal day and that attendance policies should be dealt with through binding arbitration rather than national collective bargaining. The union holdouts represent about half of all railroad workers, though the other unions have said they’ll go on strike if the others do.

A strike that shuts down the country’s 7,000 long-distance trains would do enormous economic damage. The Association of American Railroads pegs the cost at $2 billion a day in an economy with GDP of about $63 billion a day. The strike would cascade through the business supply chain, creating backlogs and shortages even as pandemic delays are finally easing. That has implications for prices that are still rising at the fastest pace in decades.

A strike would be a significant rebuke to Mr. Biden and the Democrats, and you can bet Mr. Walsh is making that point. Mr. Biden weighed in with phone calls earlier in the week. A strike in the runup to the midterm elections would create economic disruption at the worst time for Democrats who are trying (not very credibly) to persuade Americans that the U.S. economy is in terrific shape.

You’d think some $5 trillion in new spending by this Congress, much of which will fatten union bottom lines, would be enough to buy some labor peace. If not, Democrats on Capitol Hill have the power to impose another cooling off period so the two sides can negotiate without a strike. Let’s see if Democrats side with their Big Labor allies, or with the U.S. economy that needs the trains to run on time.