The odds of a rail strike have risen after a major union voted down a labor agreement between workers and railroads seeking to end months of stalled negotiations about pay and working conditions.
SMART Transportation Division, which represents the country’s rail conductors, announced on Monday that its members declined to ratify the agreement. Workers at a dozen unions involved in the railroad negotiations have until Dec. 9 to approve the agreement, or the United States could face the prospect of economically devastating rail strikes.
The vote among the union’s members was extraordinarily close, with SMART-TD voting it down by just 50.9%.
“Honestly, this vote is about the frustration that the railroads have created with [their attendance policies] and the deterioration of quality of life as a result for our conductors,” said Jared Cassity, the national legislative director at SMART Transportation and a conductor. “It’s about attendance policies, sick time, fatigue, and the lack of family time. A lot of these things that cannot be seen but are felt by our membership. It’s destroying their livelihoods.”
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Meanwhile, BLET, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, announced on Monday that its members had greenlighted the agreement, although the union said that it would join SMART-TD in strikes if it ends up being unable to have its members agree before a Dec. 9 deadline. BLET’s members voted in favor of the agreement with 53.5%.
“We stood shoulder to shoulder with our brothers and sisters in SMART-TD and others in rail labor throughout this process and we will continue to stand in solidarity with them as we approach the finish line in this round of negotiations,” said BLET President Dennis Pierce.
SMART-TD and BLET combined represent 57,000 workers.
Even prior to the Monday news, the likelihood of a strike had risen. The tentative agreement in question, which would feature the biggest pay bumps in the last four decades, was already voted down by three of the dozen unions involved (and approved by seven).
The agreement must be approved by all of the involved unions for the deal to be finalized, meaning that workers at all of the unions need to vote in favor of the deal.
While the deadline is Dec. 9, the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees and the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen would be able to strike even sooner, just after midnight on Dec. 5, according to the Washington Post.
While the process of negotiations and voting has lasted for months, the renegade Railroad Workers United has emerged and encouraged the workers of the various unions to vote against the agreement in hopes of even more measures to improve working conditions, according to Politico.
Rail workers have complained about understaffing, especially given that, during the past six years alone, some 45,000 employees have been laid off.
In July, the White House approved the formation of an emergency board to help alleviate the dispute between railroads and the unions representing rail workers after contract negotiations came up short.
After the emergency board, a tentative agreement was reached with the unions in September. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh helped with the negotiations.
The agreement under consideration would provide workers with an immediate 14% pay bump and back pay for the past two years. The workers would also get $1,000 cash bonuses each year. The salary increases would total 24% through the five-year contract.
Still, a strike could be prevented by Congress even if an agreement isn’t reached by early December. Rail strikes differ from other strikes because labor relations are governed by the Railway Labor Act of 1926 rather than the National Labor Relations Act.
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That means that Congress can step in during airline or railway strikes and force the Presidential Emergency Board’s recommendations or extend the cooling-off period even further, pushing back the deadline for work stoppages or strikes.
Congress intervening would be bad optics for the Democrats and the Biden administration, though, given their commitment to supporting organized labor.
