A Time for Labor Militancy
Despite Congress' Betrayal of Rail Workers, the Window Is Still Open for Union Activism
Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown appeared on CNN on Sunday and defended what many of us in the labor movement see as the indefensible: the Democrats’ vote to impose a contract on rail workers and prevent a looming strike.
Brown, a Democrat, told Jake Tapper that,1
“If there had been a strike, that, literally, hundreds of thousands, maybe more, workers would have been out of work for a lengthy period of time. We have to look at the whole economy, but I will never lose my focus on those workers who didn’t get as good a deal as we’d like to have had.”
All but four Democratic senators and eight Democratic House members voted to impose the agreement negotiated by President Biden, an agreement nixed by unions representing 55% or rail workers (eight supported it). The sticking points for most of the unions were the linked issues of scheduling and sick time, which remain unaddressed.
Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, called the vote “an absolutely outrageous way to treat your workers.”
“My point here is that forcing people to have no sick time and you fire them if they don’t show up is like an 18th century French coal mine,” Merkley told The Hill.
Merkley is right. But it’s unclear whether the public agrees. While Gallup found in August that public support for union was at its highest level since 1965, a poll commissioned by the Association of American Railroads recorded overwhelming opposition to a rail strike (this should be taken with a grain of salt).2
But the AAP poll is consistent with the conventional wisdom and flows from the news coverage leading up to the Congressional vote. TV coverage focused almost completely on the impact on the economy, focusing on the threat to supply chains and the impact a strike would have on the availability of goods and the likelihood of rising prices. Little coverage was given to working conditions of rail workers, the lack of control they have over their work lives, or their lack of paid sick leave.
With the needs of the rail workers removed from the equation, it made it easier for even the most economically progressive elected officials to place their collective thumb on the scale in favor of rail management, and demonstrated why labor cannot rely purely on the political process to rebuild and make gains for workers. This made me wonder if we were at an inflection point in which a more militant rank and file was butting up against and the natural conservatism of the political process.
William Brucher, assistant teaching professor in the Labor Studies and Employment Relations Department at Rutgers University, where I teach journalism, told me via email that it may be too soon to describe what we are as “an inflection point for labor militancy.”
“The action by congress and Biden to impose the rail contract is a reminder that that the Railway Labor Act (and to a somewhat lesser degree, the National Labor Relations Act and public sector labor laws) can be used to undermine worker militancy,” he writes. “The discourse around preventing the strike for the greater good of the economy does foster divides between workers.”
He thinks the “outpouring of union organizing and worker militancy” of the last few years will continue, because “many workers are fed up with their wages and working conditions and are angry.”
Brucher’s LSER colleague Todd Vachon, director of the Labor Education Action Research Network, added that virtually “all of the worker militancy we've been seeing over the past 18 months, a good amount of it has been due to rank-and-file militancy — workers are voting down contracts and sending their bargaining teams back to the table.”
This happened at John Deere, Kellogg’s, and now with the four rail unions who balked at the mediated pact, and it is happening in academia where University of California and The New School are on strike and others have threatened to walk.
“The contracts they are shooting down,” Vachon said, “have for the most part included decent wage increases, but the sticking issues have been about much more than that. Work-life balance, scheduling, staffing, elimination of two-tier systems — these kinds of demands reveal an increased displeasure among workers with their working conditions and a real desire to make bad jobs into better jobs (or OK jobs into good jobs).”
It is unclear at the moment what impact the railroad impasse — and Congress’ action — will have on unions going forward. For now, labor should remain militant, applying pressure, using the handful of tools we have — protests, boycotts, work slowdowns, strikes — to force management to listen.
Union organizing is key, of course. The Frederick Douglass quotation, “Power concise nothing without a demand,”3 has grown cliche, but it remains true. The rail companies, in this case, are not going to concede to the scheduling or health care demands of the union without a credible threat of a strike. Biden and the Democrats put their thumb on the scale and now they proclaim that all will be well, that they saved us from economic calamity. It’s a point that cannot be disputed, if only because you cannot disprove a negative.
“Unions,” Brucher said, “do need to take advantage of the current mood and put more resources into new member organizing, wage aggressive contract fights, and engage with strikes and job actions. The political and legal environment for organizing can get worse (and has gotten worse as a whole for the past 40-plus years), but hopefully unions can adapt to be proactive instead of defensive.
“Labor should absolutely continue to take advantage of this moment,” Vachon said. “Winning breads more winning. And labor is long overdue for some wins.”
I’m quoting from The Huffington Post, because the CNN’s story inexplicably leaves out the discussion of the rail vote, and spends most of its time on electoral questions and Crypto currency — an example of just how little mainstream media seems to care about union issues.
Polls commissioned by stakeholders in an issue are inherently unreliable, because their goal is rarely to provide a fair overview of public opinion. They are sales tools designed to sway public opinion.
Douglass, Frederick. “Frederick Douglass Declares There Is ‘No Progress Without Struggle.’” SHEC: Resources for Teachers, n.d., https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1245. accessed December 5, 2022,