Progressive Democrats Join Biden And Pelosi To Screw Over Railway Workers, Making It Illegal For Them To Strike And Forcing Them To Accept Management's Terms, Which They Had Previously Rejected
When it's time for action, the would-be socialists suddenly turn into ardent capitalists.
President Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and so-called progressive Democrats — all but eight members of the party, actually — came together to stab 115,000 railroad workers in the back this week, rendering it illegal for them to exercise their right to strike and forcing them to accept a contract they had already voted down.
The big issue in the protracted negotiations was sick days. Railroad workers wanted four sick days per year, as opposed to the zero days they have currently. Management refused to grant them even one sick day. Then the Democrats did what the Democrats do nearly every time: act as if they care about American workers before voting against anything that would help American workers and supporting the businesses and corporations which send them large donations.
During the 2020 campaign, Biden promised to fight for paid sick leave. He repeated that promise in his State of the Union address last January. But when it came time for Words to cede the stage to Action, Biden showed that his words were a lie. As the Guardian reported in 2019, throughout his lengthy political career, Biden has been wildly successful performing a “proletarian minstrel act”.
At no point in his career has Biden proven willing to take the slightest political risk on behalf of workers. His appearances in union halls occur when he needs something from labor. . . .
In fact, I can find reports of only two instances of Biden appearing on a picket line or otherwise supporting embattled workers at any point in his very long public life: once in Iowa, during his 1987 presidential campaign, and just this month [May 2019] in Boston. Now, his first major presidential fundraiser is being hosted by the founder of one of the country’s leading anti-union law firms. The man running to be labor’s champion is sponsored by someone who has made millions choking the life out of the labor movement.
Why is management so against the idea of granting its workers even one sick day? New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz explains:
The answer, in short, is “P.S.R.” — or precision-scheduled railroading.
P.S.R. is an operational strategy that aims to minimize the ratio between railroads’ operating costs and their revenues through various cost-cutting and (ostensibly) efficiency-increasing measures. The basic idea is to transport more freight using fewer workers and railcars.
One way to do this is to make trains longer: A single 100-car train requires less track space than two 50-car ones since you need to maintain some distance between the latter. More critically, one very long train requires fewer crew members to run than two medium ones.
Another way to get more with less is to streamline scheduling so that trains are running at full capacity as often as possible.
All this has worked out poorly for rail workers writ large. Over the past six years, America’s major freight carriers have shed 30 percent of their employees. To compensate for this lost staffing, remaining workers must tolerate irregular schedules and little time off since the railroads don’t have much spare labor capacity left. . . .
Already understaffed and underperforming, the railroads cannot allow unanticipated absences to become significantly more prevalent without either pulling back from P.S.R. or suffering even more frequent disruptions and customer complaints.
And the track to a more resilient (if less “precise”) operating system is blocked by the company’s shareholders.
Levitz’s entire article is worth reading. He also includes this lovely side point:
Unlike nearly 80 percent of U.S. laborers, railroad employees are not currently guaranteed a single paid sick day. Rather, if such workers wish to recuperate from an illness or make time to see a doctor about a nagging complaint, they need to use vacation time, which must be requested days in advance. In other words, if a worker wants to take time off to recover from the flu, they need to notify their employer of this days before actually catching the virus. Given that workers’ contracts do not include paid psychic benefits, this is a tall order.
For the most part, mainstream media (especially CNN) blamed the workers and their union
for the economic concerns of a looming strike. Reporting has often failed to include the context that railroad corporations held up contract negotiations for three years with their unwillingness to meet worker demands for paid sick leave and better time-off policies, directly leading to the current stand-off.
When it came time to stop talking and start acting, only eight Democrats voted against the strikebusting bill:
Rep. Norma Torres (CA-35)
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (MI-13)
Rep. Mary Peltola (AK-01)
Rep. Mark Pocan (WI-02)
Rep. Donald Norcross (NJ-01)
Rep. Jared Golden (ME-02)
Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (CA-11)
Rep. Judy Chu (CA-27)
According to this report, providing 15 days of paid sick leave would cost the industry roughly $688 million per year. Using simple division, which seems fine for my purposes, four sick days equals roughly $183 million. (I am assuming $688 million would be the cost if every single employee used all four days. If not all of the days were used, that number obviously would be lower.) BNSF, one of the largest railroad freight carriers, earned $6 billion in profits last year. $183 million is 3.05% of $6 billion. Instead of $6,000,000,000, BNSF’s profits would “drop” to $5,817,000,000.
Two days before the vote, Biden said he was “proud” to be a “pro-labor President”. His self-description is as insane as Donald Trump saying he was proud to be history’s most consistent truth-telling president. You may hear some people claim the railroad industry is “too important” to allow workers the essential option of withholding their labour. Just as we saw during the worst months of the pandemic, the US’s default position is to treat its “important” workers (in that case, doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff charged with the not insignicant task of keeping sick people alive) like shit.
At the same time Biden forced 115,000 railroad workers to accept management’s terms, which included no paid sick leave, he made it a point to say “paid sick leave” is something “every worker in America deserves”.
A perfect example of the Democrats’ most recent inevitable betrayal of American workers: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, considered a progressive by most Democratic voters, tweeted her unquestioned support for the railroad workers on November 29 —
— before giving the middle finger to those same workers less than 24 hours later.
“Stay strong. We’ve got your back”? Haha, sucker. More like “Stay on the job. We’re going to stab you in the back.”
Jacob Seitz, The Daily Dot:
Users on Twitter were quick to criticize some progressive representatives who voted for the bill, turning their ire primarily against two beacons of the left-leaning branch of the Democratic Party: Omar and Ocasio-Cortez.
Democrats, including 'democratic socialists' AOC and Ilhan Omar, and Republicans voted together in Congress to bar rail worker unions from carrying out their strike. Biden and the DSA present a pro-union image to accomplish the toughest objectives of the American capitalist.“Ilhan Omar and AOC voted in favor of smashing the rail strike,” one user said.
Other liberal representatives were blamed for the vote and their betrayal of rail workers.
“AOC, Ilhan Omar, Ro Khanna, Jamaal Bowman, & Cori Bush ALL voted to impose the contract that rail workers rejected,” said Socialist Alternative, a leftist political party. “If the 7-sick-day resolution fails in the Senate, they’ll have done exactly what Biden did—betrayed workers in favor of the bosses.”
Other users called out AOC and members of her progressive “squad” for the performative nature of their leftism, given their history of falling in line with Democrats.
The performativeness of AOC/the Squad is very insidious, in that millions of her followers are seeing this post believing she actually stands with workers without realizing she just voted to crush the strike.The last time we stood with @Teamsters Local 202, we stared down a national food crisis over resistance to a $1 raise. Back then, railroad workers stood with us. They turned trains around to not cross a picket line. We won then, and we can win now. Let’s get these sick days 💪🏽 https://t.co/YAUFIKRawDAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC“Idk how AOC can ever show her face at a socialist event at this point,” they said.
“There’s no excuse for AOC and the like spending the last 2 days tweeting support for railroad workers in the face of legislation then voting to approve the contract against their will. None. Zero,” another user said.
Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch:
You can’t call the Democratic Party’s almost unanimous decision to back a strikebusting bill against railroad workers a “betrayal.” It’s more like the ultimate fulfillment of a project begun in 1985 with the birth of DLC [Democratic Leadership Council] designed to unshackle the party from its decades-long bond with organized labor so that it could free itself up to fill its campaign coffers with corporate cash.
The DLC was founded by the likes of Al Gore, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, after Mondale’s loss. The DLC cynically titled their “think tank” the Progressive Policy Institute, although the only thing “progressive” about it was how it progressively moved away from the New Deal political programs which had come to define the modern Democratic Party.
Justified as a reformation of the party to attract white working class voters (the so-called Reagan Democrats), the “free” trade policies of the DLC and the Clinton/Gore administration hit the working class harder than almost any policies of the Reagan/Bush era. As the job losses from NAFTA took hold, Clinton (with Biden’s support) slashed the social safety net that would have cushioned the blows.
Now, Biden himself stands forth as the latest Reagan, whose poll numbers soared after he busted the PATCO strikers, prepared to stomp on the very workers he claimed to represent but never has when push comes to shove. (For more on this history see our new book, An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents.)
Democrats are always “pro-labor” until that crucial moment when labor asserts itself against the machinery of corporate profit-making. How the neoliberal Biden — the go-to senator for bankers, credit card companies, and the DuPonts — has gotten away w/ his Scranton Joe routine for 50 years is a mystery. The only unions he ever truly supported are the ones whose members are cops, firefighters and prison guards . . .
Kshama Sawant, Socialist Alternative:
When AOC and other members of the “Squad” were first elected, most of them did so as self-identified “democratic socialists.” They ran on working-class platforms that included Medicare for All and a federal $15 minimum wage, vowing they would be accountable to working class and oppressed people.
In the first year after Biden took office . . . Squad members abandoned the first two of these commitments, first refusing to force the vote on Medicare for All and then rejecting any sort of fight for the $15 minimum wage.
Now the third of these promises has been utterly shattered, as all but one of the “Squad” members crossed the picket line and voted with a majority of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress to break the rail workers’ strike . . . In doing so they took a clear side with the billionaire railroad bosses against rail workers who have suffered intolerable conditions over decades.
This is a profound betrayal of working-class people. . . .
The “Squad” and Congressional Progressive Caucus, including Rep. Pramila Jayapal, attempted to give themselves left cover by voting for a second bill that included the rail workers’ key demand for paid sick leave alongside the primary legislation to kill the strike.
This sleight of hand should fool no one, however, as it was widely recognized that the sick leave bill would face a sudden death in the Senate (which it did the following day), and all that would be left would be a broken strike. . . .
A win for rail workers would have been a win for workers all over the U.S. who are increasingly ground down by overwork, and by the knowledge that they are living to work, not working to live. . . .
On November 30, Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) national center posted a statement of support for the rail workers which included this sentence:
“Any member of Congress who votes yes on the tentative agreement is siding with billionaires and forcing a contract on rail workers that does not address their most pressing demand of paid sick days.” . . .
A socialist cannot be a strike breaker. This needs to be the end of any pretense by DSA that the “Squad” is socialist, and should result in their expulsion from the organization. Failing that, the Squad’s betrayal of the working class becomes DSA’s betrayal.
The danger inherent in this sellout, beyond the obvious quality-of-life damage to rail workers themselves, is that it will drive working people into the arms of the right wing who can posture as the working-class political alternative to the Democrats. The fact that more Republican senators voted against imposing the TA than Democrats is stunning proof of this.
When the right-wingers “posture as the working-class political alternative to the Democrats”, the Democrats will not complain — and pundit after pundit will state that the Democrats “don’t know how to fight”, they “seem unable to point out right-wing lies” or they “have a problem defining themselves to the average voter”. (I can state this without qualification because that is exactly what happened during the 2020 campaign (and most previous campaigns, as well).)
How is it possible that Democrats, who are more than savvy enough to win elections (and numerous re-elections), have not learned how to fight or point out right-wing lies for fifty years (at least)? How can two (or maybe three) generations of Democrats be utterly incapable of figuring out how to distinguish themselves from the other party?
Well, they haven’t and they can’t. No one is that stupid. Consider that when a political party makes the exact same mistakes election after election after election after election after election after election after election, it’s actually not an inability to realize it should try something different. It means its actions are deliberate. It’s acting the way it’s acting on purpose.
Maya Angelou’s statement — “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time” — has become popular among left-leaning Americans when it comes to the Republicans’ embrace of fascism. They should also consider the truth of that proverb when it comes to the party they support. The Democrats have shown us who they are roughly 759,042 times. It’s time to start believing them.
Maine CD2, Democrat Jared Golden's district (and mine!) (Jared has great initials--JG, who can argue that!) is a bastion of Trumpitude, but JG is on a winning streak at home, despite being (at best) a Susan Collins Democrat.
His big shtick seems to be to always play the contrarian card--if Nancy and Joe want something, he reflexively goes the other way. So, although he voted against the enforced contract, he is no Knight of Labor, no Debs/Reuther/Lewis/Chavez/Haywood/Hillman/Gompers.