Thread by @WorkingPod

2 things everyone needs to understand: 1) It is BECAUSE they always counted on Biden/Congress forcing a deal down workers' throats that rail carriers saw no reason to bargain in good faith for 2+ yrs or to change the profit-maximizing practices that have blown up the supply chain

https://twitter.com/JonahFurman/status/1597372088868024322

So, if you just started caring about the crisis on the railroads & were hand wringing about striking workers hurting the supply chain, I got news for you: Biden just gave a big thumbs up to the people who have already run the supply chain into the ground.

You're already paying for their corporate malfeasance. Demolishing their workforce, making trains longer/more dangerous, risking more derailments, price gouging shippers (lot of businesses have no choice but to use rail, & no one's out here building new rail lines so...

The rail carriers can do whatever they want. They have essentially formed a non-competitive oligopolistic cartel.) They're making more money than ever and you're paying the costs passed onto consumers while workers' lives are obliterated & people quit in record numbers.

You just never cared about it till now. Personally, as someone who's covered this story all year by talking to workers, I think it’s because our media have failed to cover this accurately (or at all) for years.

The second thing to understand: 2) this whole process has been a dismal example of workers having their voices silenced. Again, railroaders have gone 3 years without a new contract & the carriers never bargained seriously w/ unions cuz they expected this result would save them

So, all of the pain, all of the frustration, all of the concern & expertise that workers brought to the bargaining table were basically ignored by the companies. Then they were largely ignored by Biden's Presidential Emergency Board in August. Then they were ignored again when

A deal was hashed out behind closed doors just before the strike deadline in September. Biden & Co. took a victory lap before many workers ever even saw the tentative agreement. The media followed suit and moved on.

Now that rank-and-file workers have had a real say & a number of unions voted the TA down, the empire strikes back, the "most pro-union administration" has told workers to shut the fuck up, stripped their right to fight, & the carriers make out like the bandits they are.

This is @maximillian_alv btw. As I mentioned, we've been covering this story all year by talking to workers at length. Here's a thread from September with a lot of that coverage if you want to make sense of all this:

https://twitter.com/maximillian_alv/status/1569689851318145031?t=rgpcXb20nYsG8fVZL4-xyg&s=19