U.S. Rail Workers Have Final Say on Strike

For several days, the prospects for preventing a railroad strike or lockout rested with a handful of leaders from labor, industry, and government, whose marathon talks led to a tentative agreement Thursday. What happens next depends on more than 100,000 workers represented by a slew of different unions, who’ll have to decide whether to ratify their leaders’ deal or reject it, setting the stage for a massive work stoppage.

The tentative deal, the text of which hasn’t been publicly released, includes record wage increases and new protections, but it doesn’t include the paid sick days workers sought, according to union leaders. If approved, the agreement would mark the end of a saga that risked disruptions to the supply chain of the world’s largest economy. A strike could cost the U.S. economy as much as $2 billion per day, according to some estimates.

“There’s obviously no guarantees,” said Wilma Liebman, a former deputy director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service and former chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Union members are likely to weigh the viability of pulling off a successful strike and the political impact it could have before the midterm elections, as well as how much the tentative deal does to address their core concerns, she said.

“It depends on the degree of commitment, and the anger,” Liebman said. “It depends on how close this gets to addressing what they felt they needed and what motivated the underlying dispute in the first place.”

As part of the agreement, the cooling-off period in which work stoppages are prohibited has been extended to last several weeks past when workers vote to accept or reject its terms, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. A timeline for those votes has not been released.

One member of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers said the feedback they’d been hearing from fellow members was overall negative and skeptical. Another person familiar with the talks described the deal as not over by a long shot.

Still, union leaders have joined the White House and industry officials in hailing the deal, which followed 20 consecutive hours of negotiations. The presidents of SMART’s Transportation Division and of the Teamsters’ Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, the two major unions that had initially held out for a better deal, released a statement on Thursday praising the tentative agreement.

“We listened when our members told us that a final agreement would require improvements to our members’ quality of life as well as economic gains,” the two union presidents said in a joint statement. They said the pact includes a 24 percent pay increase over the five-year term of the agreement, prevents increases in insurance co-pays and deductibles, and loosens attendance policies to exempt certain medical situations.

The companies’ attendance policies have been a flashpoint in the talks, with unions decrying them as punitive and counterproductive rules under which some workers have been fired for getting sick or going to the doctor. (The companies have said workers already had paid time off that could be used for medical appointments.)

But the agreement comes with compromises that could rankle some members. Getting a deal required backing off of the union’s push for paid sick days, BLET’s president Dennis Pierce told reporters Thursday, instead settling for a system that will make it easier to take unpaid time away for medical appointments. While the deadline helped force a resolution, he said, “That doesn’t mean a lot of our employees didn’t want to strike, because they’re angry.

“Now our job is to get out there and explain to them what we were able to accomplish that can help improve their lives, help the families, and get this thing ratified.”

In the Hands of 125,000 Workers

The rail union contracts cover about 125,000 workers, about half of whom are represented by the two big engineers’ and conductors’ unions. A shutdown could cost as much as $2 billion a day, according to the Association of American Railroads.

In several prominent recent work stoppages, union members have rejected tentative deals inked by their leaders. Striking employees at Kellogg and Deere & Co. plants both voted last year to hold out for better deals, extending their work stoppages. A similar scenario nearly played out among film and TV workers, who only narrowly voted to accept a contract deal rather than walking off the job. The national wave of teacher strikes in 2018 began with West Virginia educators refusing a call by union leaders to end their work stoppage following an agreement with legislators.

Some rail workers have been eager to flex their power. The advocacy group Railroad Workers United, whose officers include members from various rail unions, adopted a resolution in January urging employees to consider a strike because of current leverage, including a labor shortage and a pro-union president, conditions that “have not existed for decades—if ever—and will not continue indefinitely.” The group, which has been selling “Will Strike If Provoked!” t-shirts on its website, sent members a message Thursday saying: “A full-blown strike is still a distinct possibility this fall.”

Larry Cohen, the former president of the Communications Workers of America, said he believes the White House’s attention to the dispute and the railroad companies’ difficulty retaining employees mean workers will still have leverage even if the deal is approved.

They’re likely to say, “we made some progress on our issues about our working life, and we’re getting a lot of money in exchange for the hardships of this job. And we want to show that we work with this government,” said Cohen, who now chairs the advocacy group Our Revolution, founded by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said Thursday he felt good about the deal’s prospects. “This is a democratic process,” he said on Fox Business, highlighting that each of the dozen railroad unions needs to vote on the agreement. “I think that, at the end of the day, the members will look and see the importance of this contract.”

Sanders said in a statement: “Now it’s up to the rank-and-file union members to evaluate this deal and determine whether it works for them, These workers have not had a raise in three years and continue to work incredibly long hours under brutal working conditions. I will respect and support whatever decision they make.”

—With assistance from Rebecca Rainey, Nancy Cook, Ian Kullgren, Katia Dmitrieva & Josh Wingrove.

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