The railroad strike has been averted at the last second:
Freight rail companies and unions representing tens of thousands of workers reached a tentative agreement to avoid what would have been an economically damaging strike, a relief for businesses and consumers and a win for President Biden, whose administration helped broker the deal.
The breakthrough came just hours before a critical deadline that would have allowed workers to strike and followed all-night talks with unions and industry leaders that were brokered by Mr. Biden’s labor secretary, Martin J. Walsh.
Hmmm. Maybe my cynicism gene has suddenly ruptured, but this sure has played out in a way perfectly suited to make Biden look like a great statesman. Think about it: there's no progress for months; panic sets in during the final week; and then with one day to go Biden steps in and brokers a routine compromise that looks to me like it could have been reached at pretty much any old time.
Not that there's anything wrong with that! If it really went down this way, it's just good politics. But it kind of makes you wonder if unions were doing Joe a little dramatic favor here.
Wow. I'm surprised the NYT came straight out and called it a "win" for Biden. Though I'm sure tomorrow there will be a think piece about how Dems are in danger of seeming "too good" at deal-making. Kevin's already given them the lede right here.
+1
> Dems are in danger of seeming "too good"
Remember when gas prices falling "too fast" was creating a problem?
If this actually was kayfabe, then Joe is even better than I thought he was. I doubt it; for Republican fabulists, narrative building is literally a lifestyle - they invest way more in horseshit production.
But big if true.
To make progressives and Kevin Drum happy, the Biden administration shouldn't have brokered a deal. Biden should have let the unions strike, damaging the economy. He should, in other words, have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
The New York Times called the railroad workers labor deal a win for joebiden. Here's why that's bad news for joebiden.
You mean like this bizarre article on Tuesday about inflation rest coming in at 8.3% a a .2% drop in inflation from they July rate of 8.5% which was down from June’s 9.1% rate. The article included a graph that went back to 1965 making the recent drop in the inflation rate so visually small it was hardly noticeable.
“ US Inflation Rose 8.3 Percent in August”
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/09/13/business/inflation-cpi-report
I get that the drop was a lot less than hoped but this article was clearly trying to convince people who haven’t paid that much attention that inflation had actually gone up in August. In addition it did not mention the Europe and other countries also had high inflation — higher than the US.
Labor strife, like a lot of litigation, frequently is resolved at the last minute. The classic way to phrase it in litigation is that cases settle on the courthouse steps. Same thing with labor strife ... let's call it, settling things just before the stroke of midnight. Who knows if they really needed intervention to get this done, but frequently that's what it takes.
You make a good point. It is possible if Biden didn't do anything it would have turned out the same way and it was more like Macron calling Putin. But maybe not. The key sticking point was allowing "workers with the ability to take days off for sick leave and medical emergencies". For whatever reason, many companies these days really, really do not want workers to go to the doctor. I guess the current systems is that they are not payed if they go to the doctor (or the hospital) AND are then penalized further further when they get reviewed for taking time off.
There is a hidden factor relating to doctors, and to medicine in general.
My company had a "Cadillac plan" with BC/BS. And we paid 100% of the premium for our employees and their families. Every year BC/BS recalculated our rate based on our prior year's experience. Lower costs one year resulted in lower premiums the next year.
We were a small (200 employee) computer consulting company. Our employees were well paid and well taken care of. They were our really valuable assets, priceless compared to the relatively trivial amount it cost to give them each a nice computer and such. We sought them out, lured them to come to work for us, and treated them like the special people they were.
The railroads, on the other hand, have LOTS of employees, many of whom are simply interchangeable fungible assets. The managers and stockholders of railroads likely have a much less paternalistic attitude towards their employees.
You are right that the railroads aren’t paternalistic or even humane when it comes to workers — a big part of the negotiations was about the fact that employees were getting fired for taking time off for things like going to doctors appointments or to family funerals which is despicable. Those kinds of employers are a big reason we need unions. From what Buttigieg said yesterday there will also be a significant pay raise but that will be a gradual increase.
Thank you. Exactly.
My thoughts, too. In addition, it seems that in many business negotiation, the party that makes the first move loses. This can, of course, lead to deadlock.
Which means that if a neutral party, in this case Biden, makes the first move, it breaks the deadlock.
Yup. I work in personal injury. There is one insurance company where we just assume that we will file suit, with the serious offer coming the day before trial.
This, this this. I was a paralegal in a personal injury firm for 10 years and half our cases, at least, were settled at the required pretrial settlement conference. Others settled at mediation. Sometimes a outsider is needed who can stop the parties from each getting high on their own separate supply.
Of course Faux just mentions “and RR workers get a 24% raise, watch your costs go up up up!” They fail to mention its over 5 years.
I think the minimum role that the Federal official plays is getting the two sides to keep negotiating. It would be a bad look for either labor or management to snub an invitation (from a Cabinet Secretary, no less) to come to the table. Left on their own, one party may be tempted to make a show of walking out.
It would have been a lockout, come to that.
Management were already cancelling trains, not accepting new consignments from shippers, etc.
Based on his early morning Twitter feed yesterday, I think Erick Erickson needed to consult a physician over the erection that hoped for supply chain disruption was giving him.
It looks good for (former Boston mayor) Maahty Walsh, too.
The things I read say that the big stickler wasn't the unions suddenly agreeing or dropping demands, but the industry caving to the one thing holding up an agreement:
"The agreement provides workers with the ability to take days off for sick leave and medical emergencies — the unions’ central demand in negotiations"
"Biden had grown animated in recent days about the lack of scheduling flexibility for workers, expressing a mixture of confusion and anger that management was refusing to budge on that point, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of private conversations with the president."
Come on Kevin. This looks like Biden being a good president and actually standing up for the workers of America. It may turn out the reports are all false - more likely we'll never hear about this again - but until I see an actual contrary report I'd say Kevin is flat out wrong.
Speaking as a railroad employee, this is closer to the correct take. Over the last few years, PSR (precision scheduled railroading) has utterly changed the landscape concerning the American railroads and it largely flew under the radar to the public. These changes essentially meant that to make a lot of profit, employees would need to be cut and the rest worked a lot harder. Those articles talking about 30% cuts industry-wide are being generous. It was more in most instances. At my own terminal, we lost more than half.
The byword for PSR is that they are transforming the railroads into a modern corporation. Since they haven't figured how to make a train more efficient, they make their money by 'reducing headcount' and pocketing those wages as profits.
We have terrible service now. There are no words for it. Biden did the best he could, but the upper management is absolutely heartless and would work a man to death if they could. In fact, they did during the pandemic. We were essential workers and some of us paid for that with our lives. Then they claimed to the PEB that labor had nothing to do with their record profits, that it was all 'management'.
The 24% raises that everyone in the media keeps touting is over 5 years. When its all said and done, it won't actually be a raise at all.
The "PSR" has been great for short term profits, but seems to be eating the railroad business. There are reports of deferred maintenance as well as dropping what amounts to "feeder" lines with lower ROI.
As coal dies, a large part of the railroad business will go away. Consolidation and fewer available cars means they are downsizing faster than loss of business, so can charge more and wring out profits. In the process they are ceding ground to trucking. Of course, some of these companies also own trucking companies.
Coal may be dying, but where I live we sure have a hell of lot of oil trains. Actually “mixed” trains, as the railroads mix in normal freight with the tank cars so that can say with a straight face they are not oil trains.
Transforming railroads into modern corporations? When I think of modern corporations I think of organizations (although the Supreme Court says they are people) who throw away the social contract and treat their employees and customers like shit so they can drive the stock price up and generate huge bonuses in the short term for their upper management. In the longer term they destroy the very corporation that is making them rich, but why would they care?
Thanks for this view from the inside. I've been watching the industry for quite a while, used to teach an intro course for our railroad engineering program, and this is what it looks like from the outside too-- like the point of PSR is to drive away all shippers except the ones that can't use anything else, and run the remaining traffic strictly according to the railroad's needs rather than the shippers'. Which of course means cutting staffing to the bone and beyond no matter how hard it is on the ones who are left. The purest expression of this, imho, is the push to run long trains with only one person in the cab, an utterly insane idea. Unless your only goal is to cut your operating ratio under 60 and keep cutting-- great for Wall Street and those executive salaries.
Losing coal is a big deal, don't get me wrong-- it fell off a cliff several years ago and won't come back-- and coal is what created and financed the business for 200 years. But PSR looks more like milking the last out of a dying industry than it does like a viable revamping for a changed era.
Intermodal is growing as fast as coal dies. It will continue to grow in the future. So no, without evidence, I highly doubt the rail lines are ceding to trucking companies. It's a lot cheaper to rail 200 boxes with 2 engines then 200 engines. Also, steel on steel is just more economical than rubber to asphalt.
I should have been more clear, sorry. IM is clearly where the advantage and growth are for the reasons you give, and there's been huge investment in upgrading systems and motive power to handle its volume and move it as fast as possible. It can be the reliable revenue-generator that coal had been (though over the long term I think profitability may tend to slip). But it's also accelerating the PSR-related move away from trying to expand the *kinds* of traffic that go by rail.
To me, it seems that the Class Is are trying very hard and actively to avoid cargoes and shippers that require handling time and effort at either end-- hiving them off to short lines or just avoiding them altogether. From what I can see they're also actively working hard to avoid traffic that requires switching. I don't see that as a recipe for getting more of our non-containerized total shipping burden off the roads and onto rails.
This is a major win that could pull back some white male blue collar voters.
Someone (Super PACs) has to contrast Biden's approach of finding common ground between business and unions to that of Reagan's firing of union workers (without mentioning Reagan).
If we could ever teach the Democratic campaign committee(s) how to advertise, we'd have a better chance of winning over the 70+% of the people who agree with our policies, but to a significant degree fail to correlate that with their voting.
Blue collar whites are never coming back. The culture war divide is too far at this point.
I did say some.
Lol, if that is why they vote "Republican" they need laid off permanently . There are 3rd party options idiot.
They would rather be openly disdained by Yalie J.D. ANTIVAXXX than see Tim Ryan (no #idpol stooge, himself) accrue benefits for not just white but all Ohians.
I am starting to think the white working class has a humiliation fetish, but due to wage stagnation since 1980, they don't have the financial wherewithal to go to a pro-domme s&m dungeon.
Is Biden too effective?
Political Art of the Deal? …
Will rank and file union RR workers vote for this contract just to save Democratic midterm election hopes? Some workers are already calling the agreement a sellout.
Every company should be partly owned by employees cause..."And don't you know that they would allow thousands and millions to die for want of breath, if they could not pay for air?" R. Ingersoll
Like +10. And your Igersoll quote sounds a lot like the complaint of the Belters in the Expanse. Anderson Station, anyone?
Ha! Best Scifi out there. Ingersoll was way ahead of his time.
It looks like another win for Dark Brandon!!
On the other hand, there will be the standard mainstream coverage: Since Americans as a whole felt no pain, then nothing actually happened. Just like 2000, a big nothingburger, as far as the public was concerned. Ho hum. No need to even report it.
If the strike had gone forward and then Biden's efforts halted it, then the news would be all about the momentary pain "we all felt", and wasn't it awful, and that just shows what happens when Democrats are in power. Also, how ineffective Biden was for permitting it to happen.
It's like the Laws of Thermodynamics: you can't win, and you can't break even.
Looks like joebiden is the Real President Deals, Drum.
Joe Gets Stuff Done!
You got a problem with that, Kevin?
Actually, yes, he does, since it makes it tougher sledding for Elizabeth Warren to primary the president in 2024.
I suspect that the Union didn’t want to be tagged with the huge recession that followed their strike…
They never stay on strike. The old fossil fuel economy is a chunk of the reason why the new deal coalition fell apart. It wasn't there before, it was that way until 1984. They don't vote Dem because of culture wars fool.
But their vote attracts land and nullifies suburbs. It's why Midwestern swing voters are so huge. It's why Biden is desperate to put the Obama coalition back together.