Joe Biden

[Red Phoenix]

45 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

Then by tomorrow your sources will let you know that Biden has nothing to do with it - he can't force anything, it is up to Congress.

They probably also will clue you into the fact that the deal that was forced was a 25% raise over the next 4 years - which is what the unions wanted.

 

Is the NY Times good enough? I'll link the entire thing so that a paywall doesn't block it for anyone else that might want to read (I haven't paid, it sometimes lets me read though and others I can't access articles.) It's clearly not what all of the unions wanted.

 

Republicans could vote it down but maybe it could've also waited a little bit longer and not been imposed to see if something better could have been worked out? I don't have the solution I'm just saying that there's clearly going to be pissed off workers if this doesn't work out.

 

 

Quote

Some Rail Workers, Seeking Sick Days, Say Biden Betrayed Them

 

The request for Congress to impose contract terms that several unions had rejected rankled rank-and-file members who had rallied behind the president.

 

By Noam Scheiber
Nov. 30, 2022 Updated 6:14 p.m. ET

 

As the legislative representative for his local union, Gabe Christenson, a longtime freight railroad conductor, worked hard to help elect Joe Biden president in 2020. “I have shirts from me campaigning — blue-collar Biden shirts,” he said. “I knocked on doors for him for weeks and weeks.”

 

But since Monday, when President Biden urged Congress to impose a labor agreement that his union had voted down, Mr. Christenson has been besieged by texts from furious co-workers whom he had encouraged to support the president. “I’m trying to calm them down,” he said.

 

Mr. Biden said he was urging action to avoid a nationwide strike that would threaten hundreds of thousands of jobs and that the industry estimates would cost the economy more than $2 billion per day. The House of Representatives took the first step on Wednesday toward carrying out his request, approving the plan on a vote of 290 to 137.

 

A White House statement earlier this week said that the president was “reluctant to override the ratification procedures and the views of those who voted against the agreement” but that he felt congressional action was urgent.

 

For many of the more than 100,000 freight rail workers whose unions have been negotiating a new labor contract since 2020, however, Mr. Biden’s intervention amounted to putting a thumb on the scale in favor of the industry.

 

They say the rail carriers have enormous market power to set wages and working conditions, power that is enhanced by a federal law that greatly restricts the workers’ right to strike compared with most private-sector employees. They complain that after waiting patiently through multiple procedural steps, including a presidential emergency board, they had a narrow window to improve their contract through a labor stoppage and that Mr. Biden has effectively closed that window.

 

“They should let the guys work it out for themselves,” said Rhonda Ewing, a signal maintainer in Chicago. “We know it’s holiday time, which is why it’s the perfect time to raise our voices. If Biden gets involved, he takes away our leverage.”

 

A narrower House vote on Wednesday, 221 to 207, authorized seven paid sick days for the workers, addressing a key demand. But it is unclear whether that provision can win Senate approval.

 

The agreement that Mr. Biden asked Congress to impose was brokered between union leaders and industry negotiators with help from his administration and announced in September, averting a potential strike before the midterm elections. The accord would raise pay nearly 25 percent between 2020, when the last contract expired, and 2024, and allow employees to miss work for routine medical appointments three times per year without risking disciplinary action. It would also grant them one additional day of paid personal leave.

 

It would not provide paid sick leave, however, which many workers argue is the bare minimum they can accept given their grueling work schedules, which often leave them on the road or on call for long stretches of time. Rail carriers say workers can attend to illnesses or medical appointments using paid vacation.

 

Four of the 12 unions that would be covered by the agreement voted it down, and several others approved it only narrowly.

 

Tony Cardwell, the president of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division — International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which voted down the agreement Mr. Biden has asked Congress to impose, said that simply asking Congress to include paid sick days in the agreement would have gone a long way toward satisfying his members. The proposal to do so in the House was initiated by progressive lawmakers.

 

“If he would have said, ‘I want this one thing,’ it would have changed the whole narrative,” Mr. Cardwell, whose union represents more than 20,000 workers affected by the contract, said in an interview on Wednesday.

 

The sense of betrayal is especially acute because Mr. Biden has long portrayed himself as friendly to organized labor, and many union leaders regard him as the most labor-friendly president of their lifetimes thanks to his appointments and his support for regulations and legislation that they favor.

 

Daniel Kindlon, an electrician who works at a rail yard near Albany, N.Y., and is the head of his local union, said that while he is not a huge supporter of the president, he was impressed when Mr. Biden spoke at the electrician union’s convention in Chicago this spring.

 

“It was the best 45 minutes I’ve heard him talk,” Mr. Kindlon said. Yet he said he struggled to understand why Mr. Biden couldn’t have pushed Congress to go further.

 

“You would think he would just try to get them to throw in a couple days of sick time; that’s really all the guys were asking for,” he said.

 

Several union members and local officials said they had urged co-workers who had previously supported Donald Trump to back Mr. Biden, arguing that he would be friendlier to labor. They said that these co-workers had reached out to complain about what they saw as Mr. Biden’s about-face since Monday, though it was unclear how many of these union members had voted for the current president.

 

“Many Trump voters calling me out for endorsing Biden,” said Matthew A. Weaver, a carpenter with rail maintenance employees union, said by text Tuesday night. Mr. Weaver previously worked as an official for his union in Ohio.

 

Many union members have long suspected that Congress would intervene to prevent them from striking. Mr. Kindlon said several members of his local union abstained from voting on the tentative contract this fall because they didn’t believe their vote mattered. Many took the view that “this is going to get jammed down our throat anyways; why do I care?” he said.

 

Many who placed their hopes in Mr. Biden assumed that they would not be allowed to strike for very long, but reasoned that even a brief strike lasting several hours, or the mere threat of one, would have been sufficient to extract more concessions from the rail carriers.

 

“I mean, that would have looked way better,” said Mr. Christenson, the longtime conductor. “Even if he had ulterior motives, let us have our day. He could show he was with us.”

 

Mr. Cardwell, of the maintenance workers union, said that “the fact that he did it so early” was surprising, given that there was still roughly a week or more to potentially extract concessions before a strike would have occurred.

 

Across the labor movement, prominent leaders have so far been silent or restrained in their response to Mr. Biden’s call for congressional action.

 

But at least one — Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters, which represents more than one million members — has hinted at criticism.

 

“Members of Congress have an opportunity to fight for their constituents by making sure rail workers get paid sick days,” Mr. O’Brien wrote Tuesday on Twitter. “Any politicians who don’t side with workers need to go on the record that they voted against workers.”

 

The same day, a group over 100 labor scholars circulated an open letter to Mr. Biden expressing alarm at his call for Congress to impose the agreement that some unions have voted down, and suggesting that the intervention could affect the labor movement for decades.

 

“History shows us that the special legal treatment of rail and other transportation strikes offers the federal government — and the executive branch in particular — a rare opportunity to directly shape the outcome of collective bargaining, for good or for ill,” the letter said. It added: “These dramatic interventions can set the tone for entire eras of subsequent history.”

 

While some rail workers have weighed in on social media with calls for illegal wildcat strikes should Congress impose the agreement, local union officials said that such strikes are unlikely, and they were not aware of any meaningful effort to organize them.

 

Much more likely, they said, is an accelerated flow of workers out of an industry that, according to federal regulators, has lost nearly 30 percent of its employees over the past six years.

 

They said that with the freight rail work force already lean, additional losses could compound the supply chain problems that Mr. Biden has sought to defuse.

 

Mr. Kindlon, the electrician in New York, said he had already accepted a job in another industry after more than 17 years of railroad work.

 

“I’m telling you now, as soon as Congress decides to jam this contract down the BMWED and BLET and SMART guys’ throats, you will see a mass exodus like no mass exodus from any industry ever,” he said, alluding to some of the unions involved.

 

“It’s going to be like having a strike without having a strike.”

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/business/freight-rail-labor-union.html

 

[Red Phoenix]

The vote for paid sick leave failed, largely thanks to Republicans of course. Wondering if the rail workers will do a wildcat strike now.

 

 

[TheHowieLama]

@Red PhoenixDo you think the UK rail workers will get a 25% bump in wage over the next 4 years?

[polymerpunkah]

 

One opinion re Biden and unions:

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/biden-railroad-labor-unions-deal-erik-loomis/671445/

 

 

[TheHowieLama]

1 hour ago, polymerpunkah said:

 

One opinion re Biden and unions:

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/biden-railroad-labor-unions-deal-erik-loomis/671445/

 

 

 

Behind a paywall, typical union tactics.

[TheHowieLama]

On 30/11/2022 at 12:43, TheHowieLama said:

What is their stance on the UK rail strike?

 

21 hours ago, TheHowieLama said:

Do you think the UK will agree to a 25% bump over the next 4 years?

 

1 hour ago, TheHowieLama said:

@Red PhoenixDo you think the UK rail workers will get a 25% bump in wage over the next 4 years?

 

 

[RedKnight]

On 30/11/2022 at 16:53, TheHowieLama said:

Just for giggles @Red Phoenix seeing as you are not an American so you can't really back any US party who do you support at a local and national level in your country?

 

Doesn't vote or talks about being an anarchist. Anarchist in this instance is stand-in for arsehole.

[polymerpunkah]

37 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

 

Behind a paywall, typical union tactics.

From "The Atlantic Sept 22, 2022

Quote

For now, the country’s railroads will continue to run. A national strike—which would’ve started at midnight tonight and disrupted both freight and passenger rail—was averted by a tentative deal between union leaders and railroad management. That deal still needs to be ratified by the union members themselves.

President Joe Biden praised the agreement as “a big win for America.” The president “basically twisted the arm of the rail companies,” Erik Loomis, a professor at the University of Rhode Island who specializes in U.S. labor history, told me. Biden’s rationale may have been partly political, Loomis said: A shutdown of freight deliveries could worsen inflation at a delicate moment for his approval rating. But another element of it, he said, could be linked to his Scranton identity and his upbringing in “one of these ultimate working-class industrial towns.”

Though Loomis warns that it is still early, he believes Biden might turn out to be the country’s most pro-union president. At the very least, he argues, the current president ranks well ahead of any recent Democratic president.

I caught up with Loomis by phone to discuss this morning’s news and Biden’s place in the arc of presidential labor history.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

---

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Is it normal for the president and the Labor secretary to play intermediary between the railroad unions and management?

 

Erik Loomis: Yes and no. Certainly when you’re talking about transportation strikes—and you’re talking about the kind of labor action that could really shut down a large section of the economy—then, sure, yeah.

Where President Biden differs from previous presidents—both Democratic and Republican—is that he is really determined to not use his power to hurt unions. Whereas other past presidents may have put a lot of the pressure on the union leaders, President Biden is using his power to put pressure on the companies.

 

 

 

Nyce: Where does Biden rank, if you’ve got a scale from “hard on unions” to “pro-union”? Where would you put him in presidential history?

 

Loomis: Very close to the top of being pro-union. There really are not a lot of cases in American history, even in the peak period of union power and New Deal liberalism, in which a president was so openly pro-labor. You saw this going back to President Biden’s speech before the 2021 vote at the Amazon facility in Alabama. Even though that union effort failed, Biden urges workers to vote their conscience, reminding them that they have every right to join a union if they want to.

 

Presidents really haven’t done that before. Even FDR did not get that directly involved in individual union efforts. And at times, even Roosevelt would act against what unions wanted. While the labor movement did succeed more under FDR, that had much more to do with the conditions of the era and gargantuan Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate than it did, per se, with FDR himself.

You really have to put Biden at the very top, even above other Democratic presidents of the last 80 or 90 years—certainly much more pro-labor than any recent Democratic president, including Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, or Jimmy Carter.

 

Nyce: Do you think he could be the most pro-union president we’ve ever had?

 

Loomis: Well, it’s a little early. We will have to see. But yes, one can make the case.

The case against this is [that] in the 1930s, you have the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act—all of these laws that created the conditions for modern labor organizing. This is, of course, true.

But once again, the difference is that Biden is using real political capital in favor of unions in a deeply divided America. He’s spending his relatively limited amount of political capital as a president in a very divided nation and in a divided party, and he’s spending that on the labor movement. There’s no other president that’s done that.

 

Lyndon Johnson, for instance, had big labor legislation before the Senate, and it almost passed. And in other issues, Johnson used his pressure to get through civil rights and Medicare. He didn’t do that with the labor bill. And the labor bill failed. You see this over and over again with Democratic presidents.

 

So there is a case to be made that, given the context and the circumstances, Biden has been either the most pro-union president or one of the most pro-union presidents in American history. And perhaps that’s because the bar is tremendously low. But that is what it is.

 

Nyce: When other presidents have had to deal with major strike threats, how do those usually look?

 

Loomis: If you want to go way, way back, railroad strikes were among the most important strikes in American history, in part because they have such power to shut the economy down. Presidents would use the military to absolutely crush them. This is what President Hayes does with the great railroad strike in 1877. This is what President Cleveland does with the Pullman strike in 1894. And these are among the iconic moments of the violent American labor past.

There are also airplane and shipping strikes. Presidents have had a variety of tactics over these sorts of things. For instance, infamously, President Reagan fired the air traffic controllers.

Sometimes things you wouldn’t expect to happen do happen. In 2002, for instance, President George W. Bush—no friend of organized labor, to say the least—actually intervenes when the longshoremen go out on strike. Because of the threat to the economy, he helps the workers invoke the Taft-Hartley Act against the companies.

 

Nyce: Obviously this industry was already organized, but there’s been a lot of talk just in general about a post-COVID union boom. How are you thinking about this moment in labor history? Do you think Biden is sort of reading the tea leaves here?

 

Loomis: I think that Biden genuinely feels unions personally. His Scranton past is a very big part of his biography. That’s one of these ultimate working-class industrial towns.

I do think that right now, because you are seeing an uptick in organizing, that the president is trying to re-level the playing field in labor law, and the administration of that law, that has really been tilted toward the companies for the last 40-plus years now.

He’s reading the tea leaves in the sense that he is spending political capital to help labor, because labor is taking the initiative to help themselves to a certain extent. But it should also be said that the president’s power here is somewhat limited.

 

Nyce: We saw some stories in the early days of COVID suggesting that previous pandemics have led to greater strengthening of labor protections. Do you think that this is a unique moment in history?

 

Loomis: I wouldn’t want to overgeneralize there. If you look at the Black Death, there’s no question that those who survived had significantly more labor power than they did before. But that was a situation where 25 to 50 percent of the population was dead.

With COVID, because the government stepped in and gave people money to stay at home, it allowed people the time and space to rethink their place in the economy. A lot of Americans got the opportunity to sit back, to not have to work at their pretty crappy job that they hate day in and day out. And they got to take the time to think about what it is they really wanted to do. Many of them have acted on that by resigning, going on strike, forming unions, demanding to work at home. Whatever that may be, it has led to some shifts in the labor market.

 

Nyce: Did anything about the railway negotiation surprise you?

 

Loomis: I wouldn’t say surprise me, but I would say there are two points worth noting.

One is how strongly the companies were determined to hold the line on such a basic universal right as being able to take sick leave. This is an industry with record profits that has done tremendously well over the last several years. It’s not surprising to me that companies would seek to continue to increase profits at the expense of worker health and safety. But it’s something that, if it doesn’t surprise us, should shock us, and something that we should find totally unacceptable in our society, that workers can’t have sick leave.

The other point I would make again is just how really pro-labor President Biden has been—in some ways unprecedented. The easiest thing for him to have done in this case would have been to basically take his mediation force’s findings and run with them.

 

Nyce: You’re a specialist in this area. What makes this story important to you? What are the big themes here that you think matter the most?

 

Loomis: One is that President Biden was going to do what he needed to do to make sure that this strike didn’t happen. Some of that is for political reasons, obviously. The last thing he needed, with already somewhat unfavorable political headwinds around his own approval rating, was a big strike to shut down the railroads and stressed supply chains that led to even more inflation.

The second big takeaway is President Biden’s really deep affiliation with the labor movement. In the 2020 presidential primaries, Biden was certainly not beloved by the left in many ways at all. Politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are very good at talking about the 99 percent, the issues around minimum wages, and other things. What President Biden has that none of them have are actual tight connections with the unions themselves. That really makes a difference.

 

Caroline Mimbs Nyce is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

TwitterEmail

 

[Red Phoenix]

3 hours ago, TheHowieLama said:

@Red PhoenixDo you think the UK rail workers will get a 25% bump in wage over the next 4 years?

 

Nope. 25% will get eaten into with inflation but still seems good. It still sucks that they couldn't get paid sick leave though, but from the little I've been reading of this so far it looks like Biden could issue an executive order to get this done instead. It could get rejected by courts but he could at least try it at some point if needed.

 

 

[TheHowieLama]

1 hour ago, Red Phoenix said:

 

Nope. 25% will get eaten into with inflation but still seems good. 

What?

So the UK won't get a 25 % bump because of inflation eating it? And that is good? 

 

[Red Phoenix]

19 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

What?

So the UK won't get a 25 % bump because of inflation eating it? And that is good? 

 

 

The 25% increase for US rail workers is good but inflation will lessen the effect of it as prices for things rise over the next four years as the increase takes place, that's all I meant. I'm not trying to say it's bad though.

[Red Phoenix]

I'm only posting a quick thing I saw earlier that could work out well for US rail workers :

 

Quote

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Major freight railroads are facing pressure to add sick days for their workers from a new front: An influential investment group says some of its members are now pushing the measure that Congress declined to as part of the contracts they imposed last week to avert a potentially devastating nationwide rail strike.

 

The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility said Monday that two investment managers it works with to help promote social change at companies had filed proposals at Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern railroads to give shareholders a vote on whether rail workers should get paid sick leave. Similar proposals are likely to be filed at CSX and at BNSF’s parent company of Berkshire Hathaway, but they haven’t been submitted yet. The ICCR represents 300 members with over $4 trillion in assets.

 

 

From here : Investors press railroads to add sick time for workers

 

 

[Bjornebye]

@Red Phoenix

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Red Phoenix]

3 hours ago, Bjornebye said:

@Red Phoenix

 

 

That's great, I didnt know anything about the benefit problems they had so have been reading up on it a bit, good to know Biden has done that and it's resolved for them.

[Gnasher]

I suppose we can put this relationship in the "still improvements to be made" category.

 

[sir roger]

Looking like his appearance on North Korea's ' The Biggest Loser ' wasn't a complete success

[TheHowieLama]

Everyday I'm shufflin'

 

[Bjornebye]

 

[TheHowieLama]

[Section_31]

Fuck me, he needs to do the right thing and make way for someone else to run.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65783589.amp

[TheHowieLama]

Should of stayed down for a minute writhing in pain then jumped to his feet waving an imaginary card.

[Kevin D]

If I was The Rock, I’d be announcing my candidacy tomorrow.

[Guest]

10 hours ago, Section_31 said:

Fuck me, he needs to do the right thing and make way for someone else to run.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65783589.amp

The most dangerous trip he's been on for years!

[Jairzinho]

8 hours ago, Kevin D said:

If I was The Rock, I’d be announcing my candidacy tomorrow.

 

He should have announced it by delivering the people's elbow on Biden after he'd fallen over. 

[Section_31]

9 hours ago, Kevin D said:

If I was The Rock, I’d be announcing my candidacy tomorrow.

I always thought Clooney or MATT, DAMON would have been in the market for a run at some point.