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How will railroad workers vote after Biden and Congress blocked their strike?

Two years ago, the US was on the cusp of seeing its first national rail strike in decades. Then, President Joe Biden, at the urging of the rail companies and with the help of both parties in Congress, preemptively blocked railroad workers from striking in December of 2022. Workers were forced to accept a contract that did not address the vast majority of issues that have been putting them, our communities, and our supply chain at hazard. How has this all shaped railroad workers’ attitudes and approaches to the upcoming elections? In this urgent panel discussion, we pose this question directly to three veteran railroaders, and we have an honest discussion about how working people should act strategically within and outside the electoral system to advance their interests. 

Panelists include: Hugh Sawyer, a veteran locomotive engineer with 36 years of experience, a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen Division 316, and a founding member and acting treasurer of Railroad Workers United; Mark Burrows, a retired locomotive engineer with 37 of experience, who has served as co-chair and organizer for Railroad Workers United, where he still edits RWU’s quarterly newsletter “The Highball”; Ron Kaminkow, a recently retired former brakeman, conductor, and engineer who worked for many years in freight rail before working 20 years as a passenger engineer at Amtrak, a founding member of RWU and delegate in the Northern Nevada Central Labor Council. 

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TRANSCRIPT

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A corrected version will be made available as soon as possible.

Hugh Sawyer: 

My name is Hugh Sawyer. I’m a working locomotive engineer in Atlanta, Georgia, and I’m completing my 36th year. I’ve been a locomotive engineer practically my whole career and I’m a proud member of the Teamsters as I belong to Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineer and Trainman Division three 16 in Atlanta, and I’m also a founding member of Railroad Workers United and the current treasurer of that organization, which we’re organization of rank and file rail members from all the crafts that are just working together to make a better, hopefully better work environment and better contracts in the future for the rail members that are left in the industry.

Mark Burrows: 

My name is Mark Burrows. I’m a retired locomotive engineer. I started railroading in 1974 at the Chicago Northwestern, 12 years there and then 25 years at the Canadian Pacific from 91 to the end of 2015. In my latter years I was a delegate for the UTU now, the Smart Transportation Division for our 2011 and 2014 conventions. I’ve been a long time member of Railroad Workers United since 2011 and am currently the editor of our quarterly newsletter, the Highball.

Ron Kaminkow:

My name is Ron Kaminkow, recently retired from the railroad as of last year. I hired out with Conrail in Chicago in 96, taken over by Norfolk Southern in 99, worked for the NS in 2004. I left the Norfolk Southern, came to Amtrak, which is the railroad I just retired from. I’ve worked on the railroad in nine different states, run trains over basically every rail carrier major class one carrier, having been an Amtrak engineer out of Chicago in particular, and Milwaukee, we run on all these different railroads. Founding member of Railroad workers, United served as the General secretary for many years also as the organizer and now serving in the capacity of a trustee for that organization. Still a member of Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen honorary member Division 51, and I am still the delegate to our local Northern Nevada Central Labor Council.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, your friends, and your family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you got recommendations for working folks that you’d like us to talk to or stories you’d like us to investigate and please support the work that we do at The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

My name is Maximilian Alvarez and we’ve got a critical episode for y’all today. We are just days away from the US elections and America stands on the precipice of a dark and uncertain future. Polls are showing that the race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is incredibly close and we may not know which candidate legitimately won for days, if not weeks after November 5th, but what we do know because it’s already happening is that there will be a tug of war over the legitimacy of the results. And I want to just give a note on that really quick because as researchers at Trusting News, a research and training project that helps journalists demonstrate credibility and earn trust, writes, 

“The United States doesn’t have a nationwide body that collects and releases election results. Instead, journalists gather data from local and state agencies that report election results publicly.

The Associated Press gathers this data and makes it available to the public and to other newsrooms to count the votes and then declare winners. They’ve been doing this in presidential elections since 1848. Elections in the US are highly decentralized and complex. While uncontested or landslide races may be called right after polls close, competitive races may take days or even weeks to call, and while some states like Florida count most of the ballots on election day, other states like California can take weeks.”

So just take note of that and make sure that your family and your friends know how to interpret what is going to play out in front of us next week. Be critical, be watchful, be patient, and don’t let yourself become a tool of cynical actors who are trying to manipulate you and above all else, just go vote. Listen, we’ve talked for years on this show about how and why our political system sucks.

I mean, we know that you’re not going to find any naive defenses of that system here, but every conversation that we’ve had with workers has also shown in one way or another that the results of national, state and local elections still shape the ground upon which we all live, work, and organize. History has shown us, for instance, that if you’ve got a hostile underfunded national Labor relations board run by bosses and corporate hacks, that’s going to drastically change the entire landscape of rank and file organizing around the country facing an even more daunting path to victory and are getting a first contract. Many new union drives would be stifled and many existing unions may find themselves not going on strike, not expanding to organize new members, but instead defensively fighting for their right to exist. Ballot measures like the infamous Prop 22 in California, which passed in 2020 and which we covered here on this show.

These things can legally cement a permanent underclass of workers who make less than minimum wage and have virtually no rights as employees. So take elections seriously, even if politicians and their elite donor class don’t take you seriously. And that’s really what we’re here to talk about today. As you guys know, two years ago when the potential for a national rail strike was building, we conducted many, many interviews on this podcast and over at the Rail News Network with railroad workers from across the industry. We talked to engineers, conductors, dispatchers, track workers and more. And through those interviews, we help educate the public on the long brewing crisis in the country’s supply chain, a crisis driven by the insatiable greed of massively profitable rail companies and their Wall Street shareholders, a crisis that is affecting all of us as consumers who depend on the rails way more than we realize, and a crisis that has been most acutely felt by workers who have been run into the ground and trackside communities like East Palestine, Ohio.

As you guys also know at the request of President Joe Biden, with the urging of the rail companies themselves and with the help of both parties in Congress, the government preemptively blocked railroad workers from striking in December of 2022 and forced workers to accept a contract that did not address the vast majority of issues that have been putting them our communities and our supply chain at Hazard. Then two months later in February of 2023, the Norfolk Southern train derailment and toxic chemical disaster happened in East Palestine. Now, a lot of folks have been asking us how this has all shaped railroad workers’ attitudes and approaches to the elections, and plenty of folks have even cited the blocking of the rail strike as a key factor in their decision regarding who to vote for or whether to even vote at all. So as we always do here, rather than try to hypothesize or ventriloquize what we think workers might say, we’re going to go straight to the source and talk to workers themselves.

As you guys heard at the top of this episode, we’ve got an incredible panel of veteran railroaders here to help us navigate this. So let’s dive in…

Brothers Hugh, Mark, and Ron, it is so great to see you all and so great to be chatting with you all today. Thank you so, so much for making time for this. I really appreciate it and I’m really excited to talk to you guys about this today because as I mentioned in the introduction, a lot of folks really want to know and really need to know what you think and what is being talked about on the rails, right? And we came together ourselves two, three years ago out of our reporting on the struggle of workers on the railroads that led us to connect with Railroad Workers United and so many great folks from across the different crafts, the different unions.

We’ve had Ron and Mark on different recordings on the Real News and working people. Brother Hugh, it’s so great to have you on the show and to introduce you to our listeners. And I want to kind of just quickly start there because since our listeners became over time, so familiar with Railroad Workers United and some of you guys, I mean, I think it’s at least worth starting on a positive note that since our intense recording interviews panels live streams during the last contract fight and potential railroad strike, brother Ron Kako has finally retired since then. And so, Brother Ron, folks just want to know, are you enjoying your well-deserved retirement?

Ron Kaminkow:

Yeah, very much. I’m catching up on many, many years of deferred personal life, all sorts of hobbies and interests, but also remain active in the labor movement. Definitely hope to remain active in Railroad Workers United for many years to come. So yeah, it’s a good thing. I highly recommend it.

Maximillian Alvarez :

Well congratulations from all of us here at Working People to you, brother Ron. Congratulations on making it to retirement, man. You deserve it. I hope that you’re enjoying every single second of it, and I know our listeners are sending nothing but love and solidarity to you and to Mark and brother Hugh. You’re going to be there soon, baby. Don’t worry. We we’re pulling for you too sooner or later, sooner or later, man. And let’s kind of go back to that moment right when we all started connecting back in 2022. I mean, because as I mentioned in the introduction for this brief moment, during that contract fight as we were moving stage by stage through the Railway Labor Act provisions that were getting us closer to a potential national rail striker rail lockout, we were learning through interviews with rank and file railroad workers, just how big of a catastrophe has been brewing on the rails for many years and how damaging this has been to railroad workers themselves, to communities that have railroads running through them or terminals stationed near them, not just places like East Palestinian, Ohio, but places like South Baltimore here that lived next to the CSX terminal that we’ve also reported on.

So it was in the process of those conversations that we learned so much of what you and your fellow railroaders had to teach us about the kinds of conditions you’ve been working under for many, many years. And it felt like for a brief moment in 2022 and into 2023, a lot of folks around the country finally woke up to a lot of the realities that workers like yourselves were describing to us on this podcast. And then as we know, which we’ll get to in a minute, the potential rail strike was blocked by the Biden administration and both parties in Congress, the East Palestine derailment and poisoning of an entire region happened in just a couple months later, people were paying more attention to the number of derailments happening around the country. And then as is the case with anything, whether it’s a war in Ukraine or East Palestine itself, like the news fades from the headlines, people move on, the attention wanes. And so I wanted us to start back at that moment and we’re heading into a new contract bargaining period in 2025. So I want to give our listeners an update before we dig into the upcoming election. Just give us an update on how things have changed or not changed for railroad workers and for the rail industry since the potential strike was blocked two years ago.

Hugh Sawyer:

Well, I’ll jump in on that and just say that I worked for Norfolk Southern. So we had, as you’ve already mentioned, the East Palestine disaster. And there’s been a hedge fund group and COR that’s come in and tried to take over the board of directors, and I think they’ve been successful by the way, and creating a situation in which they were able to oust the CEO Alan Shaw. And so we have a new CEO and I’m sure that we’re going to see further action to get their people onto the board of directors. And the goal, of course is to strip the railroad of its assets. I noticed in the third quarter results, they mentioned our 3.1 billion gross profit and what have they try to make the numbers look good, but if you read the fine print down there, there was close to half in land sales and what have you.

So we’re selling off our assets and what have you, and this is not bode well for the long-term health of the railroad. And we also, in my opinion, I got to stress that this is my opinion, it’s not the opinion of Norfolk Southern. Of course, we defer maintenance on locomotives, we defer maintenance on rail. Maintenance is still going on out there, but not at the level that it used to. And I think we’re just kind of trying to strip out the good of the railroad and leave the husk there for the taxpayers ultimately to pick up, which I should point out, the railroad Workers United is involved in trying to push to the public public rail ownership, that concept that we own the highways, we own the waterways, federal government regulates those things and runs them and maybe they should run the railroad, the infrastructure of it and just let anybody lease space it, so to speak, and that way they can maintain the safe level of maintenance and what have you that I feel like we’re kind of stripping away over time.

So with regards to the contract, when the Biden administration stepped in, they went through the steps and they had a public presidential emergency board. Keep in mind those are recommendations. President Biden could have sat there and thrown all those recommendations out or adjusted them to the degree that he wanted to present to Congress and he didn’t. And his attitude, oh, we’re going to put a bunch of other union people out of work. And I mean, he said that and he just felt like he had to shove this down our throat. Now we got a fairly good pay raise, but that really just got us from years where we had been going backwards. That got us up to some point that we needed to work from, but we got none of the working condition issues that we wanted. Now ultimately, we got some sick days, but I got to tell you, for your rank and file workers, yeah, we would like to have sick days like the rest of the country, but that was hardly the top priority for us and getting some kind of a lifestyle a reasonable, we’re on call 24 7 and for me, I’ve sat here for the last two years.

I used to be on a car job that at least had a specific time that I went to work. I was on a schedule, I had scheduled off days, all that’s gone now I’m back on a pool job where I was 20 years ago. And we just keep going backwards. We keep cutting off and they’ve cut a lot of yard jobs and what have you. Their goal is to have a great big happy extra board where you’re on call 24 7, 365 days a year. And despite any propaganda coming from Norfolk Southern, I just don’t think they really care about our lifestyle. They care about theirs, but they don’t want to give us a reasonable off time. I would like to, I would think with 36 years of seniority, I’d be on a high paying pool job with a good schedule and what have you. That’s where I would’ve been if this was 20 years ago,

Mark Burrows :

I’ll just jump in and add on to Hugh’s point about the whole railway labor process when the government decided to directly intervene, and not only could Biden have made a proposal, but Congress itself could have crafted and if there was one shred of sympathy for the just demands of rail workers, which contractually was mainly about the quality of life issues, everybody spinning on extra boards and working on their rest and fatigued and no life and potentially getting fired to take off for your daughter’s wedding or your kid’s T-ball game or whatever. And draconian attendance policies.

A, it’s worth noting that the main, while fatigue is certainly in and of itself a safety issue, a major safety issue, but all the other safety issues which we regularly, the long and heavy trains, the deferred maintenance, many of the factors that contributed to the East Palestine disaster, those were not even on the table and being discussed and they’re not now in the current round, but it was mainly about the quality of life issues. And so if there had been a shred of sympathy, Congress had the latitude, like Hugh said, the Presidential Emergency Board, they put out recommendations and that’s it. They could have crafted an agreement that could have been addressed the most egregious working conditions, some of the basic just demands of the workers as it is, the tentative agreement at the time was based upon the Presidential Emergency Board recommendations and they hid behind the time factor to just say, oh, we don’t have time to discuss any details. We’re just going to go with this. So it didn’t have to turn out that way. Now there have been, and a lot of the scheduling issues were left in a TBD category to be determined and negotiated later, and that’s common. And then that seldom works out in workers’ favor. On some railroads, on some properties, there have been some minor like smoothing the roughest edges, whereas many workers didn’t have any days off just spinning on the 24 hour call extra board going to work on two hours notice there are some property agreements.

It seems like the average seems to be like an 11 and four, so you work 11 straight, you’re on call, 11 straight days, then maybe you get four days off, but those are not even four real days off. That’s at Canadian Pacific. When they sold an agreement to get two days off, it wasn’t two days off, it was 48 hours. The average person who works a 40 hour week their weekend when they get off from Friday afternoon at four o’clock in the afternoon and go back to work at Monday morning, that’s like 64 hours if my math is correct. So a real conventional weekend is like 64 hours. So selling this 48 hours as a weekend is bullshit. And so any of these 11 and four, it’s the same thing’s, not really four days off, it’s four times 24 at best, and the first day is spent recovering from working like a dog and then you got less than three days to salvage what’s left. So smoothing off some of the roughest edges, but for the most part it’s still extremely rough and intolerable. I would say.

Ron Kaminkow:

I would just jump in and agree, I’m out of the industry now, but I keep my ear to the rail. For example, Norfolk Southern, the new quote leadership just came out with a report and nothing has changed. And the idea that things were going to change when the railroad was under the microscope due to the contract fight due to East Palestine, due to all the hard work of RW and our media committee just beating the bushes and promoting all that’s wrong with the rail industry, rail industry kind of got a black eye and they started to make nice. And so just an example, rail industry said, oh yeah, I guess the close call reporting thing that they have in the airlines we’re under the microscope, so we’ll agree to do it. And then as soon as they’re out of the spotlight, they all just rele on that and go, no, no, no, this close call reporting thing got problems.

It’s not going to work with the way we run the railroad and we find it unsafe and all this kind of thing. And so it’s just one example. Same thing, Norfolk Southern after East Palestine, we’re going to make nice with the shippers, we’re going to make nice with our workers and the report, if you all want to read it, it’s quite lengthy, but what Norfolk Southern is now saying is, yeah, we’re going to strip the company down. We’re going to save a lot of money by cutting out the fat, which means doubling up, pushing on the workforce, requiring more work, less employees and the usual PSR stuff. And so for a while there, precision scheduled railroading was getting a black eye, but time goes by and they sort of concede a little here and there, but the new leadership at Norfolk Southern is simply reasserting.

Yeah, we’re going to have real PSR like Ancora was demanding and go for the jugular. We’re going for a below a 0.6 operating ratio now. And all of us on the railroad knows what that means. That means job cuts, that means shop consolidations, that means job eliminations, more pressure on workers to get the job done, do more with less, this kind of thing. That’s what the code word is. And so to take up where Hughes Sawyer mentioned Railroad Workers United is in favor of public ownership of the railroad because we just don’t see anything really changing. There’s a few tweaks here and a few tweaks there. Amtrak is suing Norfolk Southern and I believe Union Pacific for failure to run the trains on time. So there’s a little bit of fluff, there’ll be a few concessions made, maybe a few court cases won a few sick days granted here and there, but at its essence, nothing has really changed Max, I think. And if you asked any railroader today, are you happier today than you were back two years ago when that contract fight was on? I would hazard a guess that most are about the same level if not less happy than they were two years ago.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, that’s really sad and sobering to hear, but I think really important for people out there to hear, especially if they’re thinking that we won something and that things have changed. Maybe they’ve bought the sort of PR machine trying to spin that contract as a huge gain. And don’t get me wrong, our listeners were rooting for railroad workers to get that pay bump all the way. But through our interviews with y’all, they understood as you guys helped us understand that the problem is so, so much bigger than a pay raise or a couple sick days. The sickness runs very, very deep. And for anyone continuing to follow it, I would highly recommend that folks follow journalists like Josh Funk who in March was already giving an update for AP. That, to make Ron’s point, is more of the same. I’m just going to read one sentence here.

This is from March, 2024, quote, “BNSF laid off more than 360 mechanical employees this week, just days after Warren Buffet told shareholders of his Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate that owns the railroad, that he was disappointed in BNFs profits.” So again, more of the same, more cuts deeper to the bone, piling more work onto fewer workers, automating what they want to automate, making the trains longer and heavier to the hazard of workers themselves and the communities whose backyards these trains are bombing through. I definitely want us to do a deeper follow up on this after the election because as we said, regardless of the outcome of this election, right, I mean the new contract bargaining period is coming in 2025. And so I want our listeners and viewers to be fully up to speed on that and to know what they should be looking for and how they can show support.

But I want to kind of build on this discussion and take us into the heart of darkness as it were. Like we all know that, that we are days away from what may very well end up being the most consequential election in our lifetimes. We hear that every year feels like it may be true this time. And as always, I want to be clear that as a 5 0 1 C3, the real news is not in the business of telling anybody how to vote. We are here to give y’all the information and perspective that you need to act and to make an informed decision for yourself. But as we discussed earlier today, like the railroad workers, as y’all were saying, infamously had your potential strike blocked under the Biden Harris administration in 2022. But I would remind listeners that that was also with full bipartisan support from Republicans and Democrats in Congress, some dissented symbolically, but importantly, but by and large, this was a bipartisan effort, but it happened under the Biden Harris administration.

And as we discussed in our reporting from that period, the industry, the rail industry itself was further deregulated under the Trump administration. And so we know that railroad workers specifically and union workers in general are not a monolith. And I do not want to ask any of you guys to try to speak for the whole of rail labor or your union or even the company you work for, right? Again, just help us put our ears to the rail here, and what insight can you give us right now into how all of this is shaping your and your fellow railroaders attitudes and approach to the current election. A lot of people on the left, and even people within the world of labor have cited specifically the crushing of the rail strike as a reason not to vote for Harris. But we want to know what do railroaders themselves have to say? How are you guys navigating this moment and what are you hearing your fellow workers talking through as they are navigating this moment as we head into November 5th?

Ron Kaminkow:

Well, max, I’d say obviously it’s a mixed bag. It’s not a monolith, whether you’re on the railroad or at UPS or whether you’re a teacher or what have you, a myriad of different political opinions. But first of all, I think it’s important that railroad workers and all us citizens understand that in Biden breaking that strike, he didn’t do it alone. He asked Congress and Congress willingly, both Democrats and Republicans provided the legislation to break the strike. So that’s the first thing. Secondly, we haven’t had a national rail strike in 30 years. The vote in 1992 to break the strike, I believe was 400 to five. And so right off the bat, you know that it was complete bipartisanship, both Democrats and Republicans. So I have a little list here that I think it’s worth everybody, whether you’re a Democrat, republican or what your political persuasion is.

The great railroad strike of 1877, which was the first general strike in this country, one of the greatest labor uprisings to that point, that strike was largely broken by a Republican Rutherford b Hayes, but it didn’t take long. In 1894, just 17 years later, the great Pullman strike where Eugene Debbs was sent to jail and so forth, and the American Railway Union was destroyed. That was the great Democrat friend of labor, Grover Cleveland, who was president for that one. And then the shaman strike in 1922 that lasted for months. That involved a half a million shaman who maintained diesel or steam locomotives and so forth. Warren Harding Republican businessman intervened in that strike. And then back to 1946, the miners, steelworkers and railroaders all went on strike. The great friend of labor, Harry Truman, Democrat, threatened to draft every railroad worker into the military as a way of breaking that strike.

Pretty creative, innovative way to break a strike. And then we had 1985 National Strike Reagan, and then 1991, the CSX that developed into a national railroad strike Bush the first. And so now here we are 30 years later or with Biden in effect, breaking that strike. And it’s important for people to understand this just because this bipartisanship of Democrats and Republicans over the course of 150 years, they are doing their job, they’re doing their bidding, whether they’re a Republican or a Democrat, their job is to protect the interests of capital. And railroads have historically been some of the most powerful capitalists in our country. And when they say dance, the government does so and so I think what I’m trying to point out here is I’m not excusing the Biden administration at all for its actions. In fact, he shot himself in the foot. He had the opportunity to very easily state that if there’s a national rail strike, the fault lays squarely at the doorstep of the Class one carriers who won’t even provide a single day of sick time for these hardworking railroaders, 85% who at that time did not have sick time.

And he could have emerged as a hero. And I think that the National Carriers Conference Committee would’ve simply collapsed and agreed, but no Biden, not only was it offensive, it was just downright stupid politics basically. But hey, he owns it and he has to live with it. But I think it’s important that railroad workers understand. And like I say, everybody understands this has been a bipartisan effort of 150 years of breaking our strikes. And so railroad workers are not happy as a general role with Republicans or Democrats. I was at the founding of US Labor Party back in Cleveland. I think it was 1995 or six. One of the rail unions actually said, enough is enough. We’re tired of seeing our strikes broken. And so the brotherhood and maintenance away employees was present at the founding conventional Labor Party. And it’s just an example of railroad worker frustration that we do not have a party that represents our interests. And I’ll just leave it at that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Can I follow up on just one quick point there? And I think so appreciative, Ron, that you gave us that deeper historical perspective because Lord knows we need it right now when we’re in this sort of hyper digitalized, fast-paced news cycle where we all have the long-term memories of goldfish, that’s a dangerous place to be. We need to remember history to know how to forge our way ahead into the future. But you said something that I know will really perk our listeners’ ears up, right about the political stupidity of Biden, like asking Congress to break the strike in 22 and how he could have played it differently, which he did when the International Longshoremen Association went on strike just a couple of weeks ago. And so I have to ask the question that’s on my mind I know is on listeners’ minds, and I am not pitting unions against each other. I’m just saying explicitly in a case where Biden handled two consequential strikes very differently, were you guys watching that and thinking, how would your contract potentially have ended up differently if he had approached the rail, strike that way, the way that he vocalized support for the ILA?

Ron Kaminkow:

Yeah, I don’t want to hog the show, but I got to answer this. It’s fascinating. And I think a couple things. Biden I think learned a lesson, especially when Sean Fein told him directly, publicly, stay the hell out of our bargaining. Do not mess with us. Unfortunately, in the rail industry, we did not have a union leadership. First of all, we didn’t have a railroad workers union. We had 13 divided largely impotent little sections, but craft by craft that couldn’t speak collectively. That all took separate votes on separate contracts. And so there was no voice of unity to tell Biden to bug out. And hey, between us, I’m convinced that since the rail union leadership did not speak out publicly, not a single one of ’em made a statement that Biden and Congress should stay the hell out of this strike. We did hear that from Sean Fe in the auto workers.

We did hear this from ILA, had we actually had some real leadership that could have spoke with a unified voice, that could have been militant and told the US government, stay the hell out of our strike. We got this. Let us settle this. They may not have been so quick to intervene and order us back to work. So one could easily postulate that Biden was taking his cues from the rail union leadership. I mean, I hate to say it, but we did not hear a squeak from not a single rail union leader asking the government to stay out. So anyway,

Mark Burrows:

I’d like to chime in and then definitely want to hear what Hugh has to say, but while we’re on the subject, I want to back up. First of all, as far as railroad workers’ reaction to Biden saying, oh, I respect the collective bargaining process and I’m not going to invoke Taft Tarley, or whatever the vibe I’ve gotten from talking to workers as well as just online posts. Obviously there’s a lot of cynicism. Many rail workers see right through that. That’s kind of like those who are paying attention. That’s an obvious no brainer. Ron mentioned this, I believe it was 83, there was a BLE strike in 83 that lasted actually three days. We actually had that feeling of being out there and they weren’t trying to run without us. They were taking their beating like men, if I can say that without being out sounding sexist.

And then Reagan intervened after three days and imposed the presidential Emergency Board recommendations. And I don’t have the exact totals, but I remember distinctly that it was basically like a nine to one ratio. I think the Senate vote was more than 90 to 10, and the house vote was something like 4 55 to 30 or something like that, but I mean easily a nine to one ratio. And so then the next year, the 84 elections, so now the UTU news comes out with its recommendations for their preferred candidates, and most of them are Democrats, some of them are Republicans, but they have the check mark incumbent. And the vast majority of their recommendations were for incumbent senators and representatives who had voted to break this strike back in 83 in the same way they did in so no repercussions. Like Ron was saying, no repercussions, no calling out. This is just like smart TD President Ferguson right before Biden when he was employing his membership to ratify the contract or Biden or the government will. He just said, well, we’ve reached the end of the process, so this is it. We’ve done all we could. And I would argue, no, you haven’t done all you could without challenging, challenging their right, challenging the moral and ethical legitimacy to do this. There’s a whole history of how the Railway Labor Act came into being in the first place was for this very reason to curb railroad militancy.

And then also, I think it was 2011, the BLE was about to go on strike. I was working the afternoon shift and we were ready to get off our engines at the stroke of midnight. And then Obama, great friend of labor, he issued a presidential back to work order. Now, the only reason that didn’t turn into a big government intervention was because then the BLE just kind of implored its membership to here. You might as well ratify this or they’ll ram it down your throat. And they always hold this threat, ratify this. It’s not the best contract, whether it’s a tentative agreement or ratify before government intervention, I suggest you ratify it because it could always be worse, which is true, just as the government could make a more favorable contract to the Presidential Emergency Board recommendations, the government can always make it worse. So that threat has merit to it.

And then of course they wield it like a 20 pound sledgehammer. And so after Obama did the last minute, I think he invoked a cooling off period. It had gotten to the point where the last cooling off period was over. And so he invoked one more and then the membership ratified it. But so that was another example of if not direct government intervention, what I always call the gun to the head threat of government intervention. And now both the operating craft unions are just shamelessly encouraging their membership to support Harris thousand as if 2022 didn’t even happen in the same way that the union leadership did back in 84 as if busting the strike back then. So yeah, the history, I think Einstein said continuing to do the same thing while hoping expecting different results is the definition of insanity. So there you have it. Take it away.

Hugh Sawyer:

Okay, and let’s see. I don’t know where to start, but right now we’re in an election that I don’t even think what Biden did to us in 2022 is even a thought hardly at this stage of the game because the threat from is my opinion, Donald Trump and the 2025 project and what have you, forget about our pathetic problems in the rail industry. I mean, we’re talking about theoretical dismantling of this country if Donald Trump gets elected. So I think we’re beyond that. Having said that, I feel like a lot of my fellow workers down here in the south rail workers think this is the WWF or something. It’s some kind of entertainment industry. And so a lot of them and down here we’re like sheep. We run around in herds and what have you, and depending on where you live, I now live way out in the country where I grew up in the city.

They all convinced each other that they’re going to vote for Donald Trump and they’re voting against their own interests, but they’ve convinced themselves that he’s the man and they don’t want that horrible person Kamala Harris up there who’s black and female, let’s be honest. And I’m living in the south. So I want to go back and say something about the rail industry. Ron went through the history of strikes and how they’re broken. What everybody needs to understand is how important we are to the economy when we go on strike, the economy comes to a halt. I mean, stock market is affected on day one. I don’t know if this is still true, but they used to tell us in New York City, 24 hours after the rail industry shuts down, that you’ve got food shortages and what have you. So this is why I think Democrat or Republicans are so anxious to prevent a strike and prevent that economic blow. My thing about Joe Biden and breaking our strike, you could have imposed a lot of what we asked for and the way of work related rules and so on and off time and that sort of thing. He could have imposed a good agreement for the workers and chose not to.

But in fairness, he’s surrounded by people around him. I just think he was told, Hey, we give him a 25% pay increase that solves all the problems. And he went with it, but he was desperate not to have an economic slowdown. By the way, I’m going to go back to public rail ownership. The amount of freight that we’re moving in this country has been going down for years as a percentage of the freight. That’s ridiculous. These railroads are not operating in a patriotic mode in a, Hey, we’re the basic part of the economy that we keep the whole capitalistic system going. And without that thought process in there, this country, and by the way, a lot of the inflation I think is brought on by the cost of the logistics network. A lot of which those costs increases are due to the railroad just jacking up their prices and performing less for that money.

And so people need to look at things from a bigger scale than just the rail workers. And really, you could pay all of us a million dollars a year. What few railroad workers are left? And it would still be a pimple on the amount of profits railroads are making. But the greed is, I mean really you’re talking about you want to go to a 50% operating ratio, would you give me a break? And we were making money hands over fist, and it was at 80% what have you. So at some point, that’s why the American public needs to take back the ownership. We gave the railroads, the rails, the land, everything. And in exchange for a common carry, they would carry the goods for everybody. Rural America, the cities, everybody. They have violated their part of that agreement since almost day one, and it’s time to hold them responsible and we need to go in a different direction for the health of the American economy.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put, man. And I want us to sort of end this conversation, right, with a kind of, let’s get real, let’s talk strategy here. Let’s talk about how working people of conscience who are trying to do the right thing for themselves, their families, their communities, their country, people who are trying to navigate this, what words can we have to offer them about how to navigate this election and whatever’s coming after it. But I want to just by way of getting there, just ask two clarifying questions here because again, these are questions that I’m seeing come up a lot online in the news. People ask me directly, and it feels like based on what you guys were saying, there are two key points here that I just wanted to ask for a little clarity on. So in one sense, would you say it’s fair that, by and large, the majority of railroad workers are not the majority of railroad who are thinking of voting for Trump or planning to vote for Trump, that they’re not primarily motivated by a feeling of betrayal from the Biden-Harris administration that’s driving them to Trump?

So that’s kind of just one clarifying question I wanted to pose to you guys. And then the other which, Hugh, it was kind of coming out in what you’re saying, is do you think a lot of folks on the rails are thinking of their votes as a rail worker? What is going to be good for me and my union and the industry? It sounds like what you guys are saying is that in terms of the folks who are planning to vote for Trump, they’re not thinking with that side of their brain. They’re thinking more in this WWE kind of terms that you were saying Hughes. So I wanted to ask if you guys could just comment on both of those before we kind of make the final turn here.

Hugh Sawyer:

Well, I’ll jump in and just say, I don’t think the screwing that we got in 2022, and that’s what it was, has any factor today. Everybody’s caught up in the news cycle that everybody’s caught up in on what’s going on today. And they definitely are not looking at it from a union, does this really benefit me as a rail worker and what have you, this may down in the south? I don’t think they’re thinking that at all. And we’re right back to the demoralized place we were two years ago before people got excited and said, wow, we’re going to go on strike and we’re going to really achieve something, and now they’re just back to their hang dog, make another day, and that sort of thing. So that’s my feeling that what happened back two years ago is not a factor today in how people are voting. And I don’t think they’re voting in their own interest. I can’t imagine any worker voting for Donald Trump in that bunch. I mean, really, we’re going to add another 8.2 trillion in debt, which was added under our glorious leader Donald Trump, when he gave that big tax cut to the rich. I mean, when will let anybody get it and somebody’s got to pay taxes in this country, it’d be amusing to me if everybody paid taxes, including the rich. So I don’t know.

A lot of union people are going to vote against their best interests, but I am hopeful that we’re going to eke it out as we did four years ago. It’s a lesser of two evils, and we can do more to change the Democrat party, I think than we’ll ever be able to with the Republicans who are led by people who are out to great Nazi Germany. In my opinion,

Mark Burrows:

My observations are,

Ron Kaminkow

Yeah, I’ll second that emotion.

Mark Burrows:

Go ahead. Go ahead.

Ron Kaminkow:

Well, I was going to say it is the lesser of two evils. This is the game that I personally feel that we’ve been playing my whole adult life when it comes to election time. I rarely have a candidate on the ballot that I’m excited about because I don’t see them as really representing the interest of working people. They’re always beating around the bush, even when they sound pro-union like Biden. Then he does something like goes along with the corporations and breaks a strike. It’s the same old, it’s been happening ever since Jimmy Carter first election that I was party to 44 years ago or what have you. So we got our back against the wall, and we’re looking at a regime potentially that could assume power in January that has shown itself to be somewhat fascist in nature. The Hugh alluded to that 2025 project of the Heritage Foundation that Trump has now said he doesn’t know anything about, but of course he does.

And all of his big time supporters are very excited about implementing such a thing. But railroad workers, like many workers aren’t necessarily in tune with what their interests are. And politics is complicated. And so yeah, we had this horrible guy, Ron Bori, who was head of the FRA, and he was all for single person crews, and he was all for granting waivers to the industry and getting rid of long-term safety regulations during covid on trumped up reasons. Grant given by the carriers, RO Batory lifelong, CEO of rail corporations was ready to give the industry everything it wanted. He was a Trump appointee. He could come back and if not him, someone just as bad if not worse. But people don’t necessarily connect these kind of dots, max, it’s really a shame. Elaine Chow, head of the Department of Transportation comes out of a big billionaire shipping magnet family.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of Pete Buttigieg, but God damnit. I mean, at least the guy isn’t from some billionaire shipping company who’s obviously going to side with the interest of big shippers. And so same with Pori, CEO, Amit Bose, he is what he is at the FRA, but he’s a hell of a lot better than having a CEO. These are the people we bargain with. These are the people who have implemented precision scheduled railroading. These are the people who want to eliminate crews, eliminate jobs, combine shop facilities, get rid of all of us if they had their way and gave us precision scheduled railroading. We don’t want those people heading up these agencies. And of course, when you have a billionaire president who’s very favorably disposed to all of his wealthy friends, this is exactly what we’re going to get. I don’t think Emett Bowes is great. I don’t think Pete Buttigieg is great at head of the DOT, and I could go on and on. But at times we have to look at the situation and just go, if you’re going to play the game, choose the one that’s going to hurt you the least. And right now that happens to be the Harris ticket.

Mark Burrows:

I just want to chime in, in my observations and discussions and posts, there is an element, some rails do have an andi-Biden hatred, and I saw one discussion Trump’s talking to Trump. Trump and Musk want to fire all workers who strike, and then, oh, well, at least he wouldn’t do what Biden did or whatever. So what’s going on there is what’s going on all over the country where workers are forced to make this choice. I mean, I go back to the first election I really paid attention to, like Ron was talking about 44 years ago with Reagan against Carter. And that’s when I came of age politically, and that’s when I became convinced of the need for an independent political party based on it. I organized militant trade union movement. And so I’ve been advocating for that for 44 years. But these last three election cycles has been Trump versus a lame Democrat Clinton, who in my opinion, if they had not stolen the nomination from Sanders, there’s a very good chance that Sanders could have beat Trump because so many of these workers who had voted for Obama and then got disillusioned about that, they voted for Trump.

Sanders, I believe, could have won some of those voters. So then four years later, Trump and Biden, now Trump and Harris, just a female version of Biden. And so people held their nose to vote for Clinton, and people held their nose to vote for Biden. And now people, some are going to hold their nose to vote for Harris, and some are so repulsed by them that they don’t even care about Trump. And then some will sit it out and who knows where we land. But we cannot allow ourselves to continue this cycle of, I mean, this is lesser equalism on steroids, maxed out circuits, overblowing. I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that the more of us that are convinced of the need for an independent political party, how we get there, what form it takes, we have to figure it out.

But the more of us that are convinced of that, we can start collectively having that discussion. And then if our union leaders don’t support that and help push it along, then we have to find, develop leaders from our own ranks to help make that happen. But this, I’m not an expert on the history of Nazi Germany and fascism, but the basic common thread is Hitler wasn’t taken seriously until, and the social Democrats were too impotent to mount any challenge. And I don’t want to be, fascism is around the corner, but there’s a common thread, okay, that’s the direction they want to go. And the Democrats have proven themselves incapable of mounting any resistance, and we could end up with Trump, and who knows where that will take us. But whoever ends up, we need to organize and resist, organize, resist, and ultimately come together and form an independent political party, use our numerical majority and our economic power and figure it out. Because we can run this show a whole lot. I’ll leave it there

Maximillian Alvarez:

Workers can run this shit way better than the billionaire class. Of that I am certain. And I appreciate as always your guys’ incredible insight and passion, and I just really hope that folks out there are taking everything that you say to heart. And I just, yeah, on a personal level, just really appreciate the kind of sober but principled kind of analysis that I always get from you guys because folks need that regardless of what sort of political tradition you’ve come out of where in the country you are right now, right? We’ve got to look at this situation soberly and not as Hugh was saying, sort of get caught up in that kind of herd mentality or the kind of online rage fueled sort of manufactured consent. I mean, if you feel yourself getting unmoored from that and you feel yourself being led where the media wants you to follow and where these politicians want you to go, take a step back, center yourself, listen to your fellow workers, talk to the people around you, have these kinds of conversations now before it’s too late.

And in that vein, guys, I want to just sort of build on the great points that y’all were making and sort of look forward here. As we said, we’re going to have y’all back on, have more brothers and sisters from the rails on to talk about the contract fight coming up and where we can as a working class, kind of learn from our past mistakes, learn from 2022, so that we’re forging ahead into the future, having learned those lessons and being better prepared for what’s coming. I know our listeners feel that. I know you guys at RWU are always planning, organizing, mobilizing in that direction, and we’re going to talk about that in a future episode. But we’re recording this on October 30th, and this is going to come out just days ahead of the election itself, which is taking place less than a week from now.

And as you guys have laid out in brutal detail, our political system sucks. And the system wide change that we need as working people is not going to come from elections alone. We know that we need to understand that, but the results of elections still shape the ground upon which we live and work and organize. And so when it comes to addressing the ongoing crisis on the railroads, the crisis of democracy that we’re in, the corporate destruction of the supply chain, and all the threats that poses to workers and to our communities, like what role do electoral politics have to play in that struggle? And what would you guys say to your fellow workers out there listening to this about how working class folks need to proceed strategically within and outside of the electoral system to advance our interests?

Ron Kaminkow:

Max, I think there’s a lot of examples from history, not just in this country, but in countries around the world where without a social movement to propel the political, the electoral struggle forward, you’re kind of pissing up a rope. I mean, everyone says FDR changed the country and this and that, or Lyndon Johnson facilitated the Civil rights movement. But had there not been a movement on the ground in both instances in the thirties and in the fifties and sixties, nothing would’ve changed. And so if you put all your eggs, the basket of electoral change, I think you’re doomed to failure. By the same token within the unions, if you elect reformers in my union, the brotherhood of locomotive engineers and trainmen, we actually do have one member, one vote. Very few unions in this country have that, and we deposed a long-term President Dennis Pierce, and replaced him with somebody else. It looks good on paper, but without a movement in our union that a caucus that’s organized to pressure the new president and to make sure that he moves in a direction that’s more accountable to the members and starts to take creative action and break from this bureaucratic srait jacket that we’re in.

You are just tweedle dee and tweedle dumb. And I think the same thing holds. One of the most unfortunate things that I’ve experienced in my life is that most people, unfortunately, are looking for a savior. And whether that savior is Jesus Christ or Muhammad, or whether that savior is a partner or that savior is a politician or a union leader, or a rich, wealthy person like Elon Musk or Donald Trump, unfortunately people don’t understand that the only way change is really going to come is, and when I say we, I mean tens of millions of regular working class people take matters into our own hands. We’re not just going to go vote next week and everything’s going to be okay no matter what we believe and who we vote for. Everybody has to sort of grow up and take responsibility and understand that politics isn’t something you do every four years in a voting booth.

Politics is something you do every day. You wake up and you say, what do I do today to further the cause of my class, of my neighborhood, of the people that I’m in this world with, that I identify with? And so you go to your union meeting and you go to the picket, you go to the rally, you raise hell. And I don’t think we’re ever going to get out of the quagmire that we’re in and less and until a critical mass of tens of millions of common regular, everyday working people inside and outside of unions start to basically say, we are going to take action. This is what happened in the 1930s. Workers spontaneously started taking over factories and this is how the modern labor movement was born. Modern labor movement didn’t come about by a bunch of bureaucrats spending a bunch of money and calling elections. Literally millions of workers occupied factories went on general strikes built a solidarity and a momentum that literally changed the body politic of this country. And that’s what we need to do I think going forward, no matter who wins this election that is on our agenda as working class people.

Mark Burrows:

I just want to add on my personal hero, and I know I’m not alone. Eugene Debs not only for his rail labor organizing, but his relentless fight to his dying day for social justice and for a better world of peace, justice inequality. And he fought and advocated tirelessly to build this kind of movement that Ron is talking about. And one of the things when he was trying to inspire people to build this kind of movement, he would say, don’t take my word for it. Go research it yourself. Go learn and study the facts yourself about how this system works, about how this all works and what’s really at play here. What’s really going on. And if you do that, then I’m confident that you’ll arrive at the same conclusions that I have. And so I mean 44 years ago I was just a hotheaded rebel without a clue. But I had mentors to start opening my eyes about what was possible.

I had a lifetime of ideological brainwashing that I had to unlearn just like, well what about this? What about that? And back then I needed mentors and then books to learn and study to undo and unlearn what all the propaganda that, because these corporations that we talk about, they also control the mainstream mean media. They control the flow of information. Today we’re blessed with outlets like with yourself, the Real News Network and others, democracy Now and others, where people who are beginning to question can go and learn the truth. Your series on the Middle East under the Shadow, so much important information and education. And so Ron was talking about the responsibility. We have a responsibility educate ourselves because only then can we make informed decisions. If we’re just buying the boss’s propaganda, then this is what we’re left with Trump against Harris. So there is a responsibility to think for ourselves and then we can act in an informed manner in our best interest. I’ll just leave it there.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Sorry, Hugh, I muted you one more time. I apologize.

Hugh Sawyer:

I don’t blame you for muting me, but well, let’s just say at least something positive. We’re stuck with this two party system and we can talk all we want about a third party and what have you. And I certainly advocate that. But right now there’s no reason why we can’t take, I believe, a portion of the Democrat Party and move it over to our way of thinking. And we have to exist in the political system as it exists and we need to, instead of just talking about it, we need to start putting forth candidates in the system that exists.

And I mean, you have some people like AOC and what have you. I mean there are people out there and I don’t necessarily agree with every, there’s nobody I agree with a hundred percent, but I appreciate people that are trying to lead us in a different direction and I have no problem throwing my support behind ’em. And the issue for me is finding more candidates that support our positions who are workers or have been workers themselves and let’s start putting them in the office. I fully admire the Republican party in that they have gone out for years now on a grassroots campaign to take over school boards and on up. And now they’re able to impose the Supreme Court justices on the whole country and what have you because they put their mind to it. So we’ve got the example in front of us that a group of people can make a change. I don’t think theirs was a change we wanted to make, but for the interest of people. But we can respond to that. And the Democrat party has not been doing a good job in responding to it. But I think we can force ’em to.

So I just want to say that it’s not hopeless. We can affect change in this country.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.