US Railway Strike Still Looms | Jonah Furman #MajorityReport

Sam and Emma host Jonah Furman of Labor Notes and author of the Who Gets The Bird? newsletter on SubStack to discuss the recent negotiations between rail workers, railroad companies, and the Biden administration. They jump right into the three-year leadup to last Thursday’s sudden climax of a potential rail strike in the US, walking through separate processes for labor organizing in the rail industry, the need for a 30-day cool-off period, and why Biden got involved, before parsing through the federal deal recommended and why it got so much pushback from the various railway unions. Next, he, Sam, and Emma explore how the rail industry came to be under different processes, with 19th Century unrest leading to the 1926 Railway Labor Act that works to keep the country’s infrastructure moving, and leading up to the conditions we see today, where workers are expected to constantly be on call with no right to call out for an emergency and the workforce getting cut more and more while production increases. After a brief conversation on the role of monopoly and the leverage that the federal government could hold in this situation, they wrap up by tackling the state of their strike fund, and where this action is likely to head next.

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Sam Seder Emma Vigeland on The Majority Report. It is a pleasure to Welcome to the program somebody who I've been reading for quite a while. I follow you on Twitter as well as Jonah Fuhrman of Labor Notes. He's the author of Who Gets the Bird? a newsletter on substack. If you want a sense of what's going on in terms of the labor movement in this country at the moment Jonah's Twitter feed is a great place to start. Anyways Jonah is welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. all right so will you just back up a little bit for us in terms of what's happened with this labor strike? there was a little bit of a blip I guess like 45 days ago or so where it hit the news in a sort of mainstream way. and then it punted for 30 days. just give us some background as to how we got to where we are today. you know maybe up to how we got to where we are last Thursday. on the with the railway strike. sure yeah so what people should understand is that in this country because of strikes in the 19th century railroads are covered under a different law. which uses the federal government a lot more. so there are all these different points where they'll be like okay 30-day cooling off kick it to the federal government. Advisory Board. mediators. all these things. so these negotiations actually are from 2019. The contract we're talking about is a 2019 contract. that has been delayed three years. Now the whole process involves bringing in mediators. bringing in recommendations. and the thing you're talking about 45 days ago in August was the presidential emergency board. so this is pretty rare in real negotiations. Usually, they'll have a deal before it gets to this level but there's part of the real negotiations involved the president appointing a board of mediators to say here's what we think the deal should be. you guys the unions and the railroad companies can't agree here's what it should be. so that report came out. and that's where you saw this basically proposed settlement that said you're going to get money. but you're not going to get more time off. is essentially the trade-off.