Since the pandemic, for obvious reasons, Americans have paid much more attention to their work conditions. etammykim recaps a year in labor movements.
On a Monday in late November, I had breakfast with Nick Wurst, a conductor on the C.S.X. railroad, at a diner in his home town of Worcester, Massachusetts. We met before dawn, and Wurst, a bearded twenty-six-year-old, was wearing a reflective Carhartt shirt and a knit hat for his 7:30, which represents railway conductors and engineers, had just voted down a proposed contract meant to resolve a three-year-long standoff over wages, scheduling, and benefits.
. The Administration had impanelled an emergency board, which whipped up a contract in less than a month to prevent a strike.’s no made a confrontation more likely. Yet, “Everyone knows the strike will be broken if it happens,” Wurst, who voted against the contract, told me. He believed that the threat of a strike was necessary to both send a message to the corporate carriers and pressure union leaders to more aggressively represent their members.
Railroad workers do not really have the right to strike. The Railway Labor Act, a law created in 1926 to block work stoppages, allows the federal government to not only make contract recommendations but to force a final labor agreement on both railway operators and unions. “It removes the most fundamental tool we have, that any union has: withholding our labor,” Wurst said.
Days after we spoke, Congress passed—and Biden signed—a bill imposing the contract that Wurst’s union had rejected. The Administration and corporate rail carriers, represented by the Association of American Railroads, said that the move was necessary to avert what would have been an economically devastating strike. But, to railroaders like Wurst and many other workers across the country, the forced agreement was proof of a larger, dismal trend.
Under the new railroad contract, workers received pay raises that began to help offset inflation, but they would still be subject to spur-of-the-moment scheduling and long hours; the Senate also failed to pass a related bill giving the workers a few paid sick days. Wurst was dismayed—at Biden, whose pro-labor oath seemed disingenuous, and at Marty Walsh, the Secretary of Labor, whose past work as a union president in Massachusetts made his betrayal all the more personal.
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