Dave Stockton, Workers Power 399, London, December 2022<\/i><\/p>\n
As railworkers in Britain face Tory threats to make their strikes ineffective by \u2018minimum service\u2019 laws, 115,000 US freight railworkers have just had their strike vote for decent working conditions \u2018set aside\u2019 by Congress. And not under right wing Republicans, but by \u2018working class Joe\u2019 Biden and the Democrats, who pose as \u2018friends of labor\u2019 and take the unions\u2019 cash and members\u2019 support in elections.<\/p>\n
Banned<\/p>\n
On 2 December, Biden signed legislation that blocked railroad workers from launching a nationwide strike for better jobs and conditions. Biden, who has described himself as the \u2018most pro-labor president in American history\u2019, has quite simply taken away the right to strike from workers who have not had a raise for three years.<\/p>\n
They were fighting for 15 days a year paid sick leave and changes to scheduling and staffing so that workers are no longer forced to work gruelling hours. Currently, workers receive no sick days, and many have no time to spend with family or to adequately rest themselves.<\/p>\n
Acting under the powers of the anti-worker Railway Labor Act of 1926, when a nationwide railway shutdown became a possibility this summer, the administration rushed to the aid\u2026 of the bosses.<\/p>\n
Biden formed the Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) to track the negotiations and help broker a deal. The tentative agreement that Congress is now likely to enforce was brokered by the Biden administration in September.<\/p>\n
Eight of the 12 unions in the negotiations agreed to accept the contract; the other four, which represent 55 per cent of the workers, however, rejected it. With the mandatory cooling off period set to end, a strike could have begun on 9 December. Union leaders have been trying to persuade their membership of a deal negotiated between employers and the union with direct government mediation, but a group of cross-union rank and file activists, Railroad Workers United, has been campaigning for a no vote.<\/p>\n
Congress has now imposed a contract on workers without any paid sick time that will still mean working weeks that can be as long as 80 hours. Claiming the imposed contract included \u2018a historic 24% pay raise for rail workers\u2019 Biden\u2019s office did not mention the fact that the increase would be spread over five years: less than 5% per year at a time of escalating inflation.<\/p>\n
The Democrats claim credit for the fact that their Representatives and Senators also voted for rail workers to get seven days of paid sick leave. The truth is revealed by Biden\u2019s own statement that they will get them \u2018as soon as I can convince Republicans to see the light\u2019\u2014i.e. they will not get them. This is because Biden and Congressional Democrats put the seven days into a separate Bill from the ban on taking strike action and the enforced contract.<\/p>\n
Initially the White House had opposed any inclusion of paid sick days in the government imposed contract, but the left wing of the party in the House (the so-called Squad) and Senator Bernie Sanders had protested about this. So House Speaker Nancy Pelosi added a little camouflage to the betrayal by arranging that separate votes would be called: one imposing the draft agreement and another on a proposal for seven days\u2019 paid sick leave, itself less than half of what the unions were demanding.<\/p>\n
She knew full well the latter would never pass in the Senate. It duly fell by eight votes while legislation to impose the contract passed the Senate, 80 to 15. Thus the railroad workers were robbed of the right to strike and a deal favourable to bosses was imposed \u2018to avert a potentially crippling national rail shutdown\u2019.<\/p>\n
Since the economic threat of nationwide rail strike was the only force the workers had to put against their billionaire bosses, like Warren Buffet, Biden and Pelosi had disarmed them. The party and the President that claim to be \u2018friends of labor\u2019 had fairly and squarely answered the question of the famous Pete Seeger song, Which Side Are You On?\u2014not yours!<\/p>\n
\u2018Socialist\u2019 strikebreakers<\/p>\n
Even more revealing is that, with one exception, the five members of the left wing \u2018Squad\u2019\u2014Representatives Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC), Cori Bush, Ilahan Omar and Jamaal Bowman\u2014voted yes to the resolution which imposed the deal, as did \u2018socialist\u2019 Senator Bernie Sanders, despite recognising it was bad for workers. Of course they also voted for the resolution which included seven sick days. But they already knew this was a dud.<\/p>\n
The only Squad member to vote against was Representative Rashida Tlaib. Bush, Omar and AOC are also members of the Democratic Socialists of America. Its house magazine, Jacobin, tried to cover up this betrayal. Staff writer Branko Marcetic claimed that the vote by Bernie Sanders and the Squad for seven days sick leave \u2018has been another sign of the modest but significant political shift that\u2019s taken place in US political life thanks to both the larger prominence of Sanders and his progressive allies in Congress\u2019.<\/p>\n
Workers need to learn the harsh lesson that the Democratic Party fights for the capitalist not the working class. And the \u2018dirty break\u2019 advocated by the DSA majority leadership includes such \u2018dirt\u2019 as voting to deny workers\u2019 right to strike. DSA members should demand the organisation condemns the majority of the Squad\u2019s votes and begins the process of breaking from US imperialism\u2019s second party to form an independent party for all US workers and the socially and racially oppressed\u2014one that is anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-capitalist.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dave Stockton, Workers Power 399, London, December 2022 As railworkers in Britain face Tory threats to make their strikes ineffective by \u2018minimum service\u2019 laws, 115,000 US freight railworkers have just had their strike vote for decent working conditions \u2018set aside\u2019 by Congress. And not under right wing Republicans, but by \u2018working class Joe\u2019 Biden and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7724,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,1,17],"tags":[104,299,258,204],"class_list":["post-4134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-americas","category-uncategorized","category-working-class-fights","tag-archive","tag-biden","tag-trade-unions","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7724"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4134"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6402,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4134\/revisions\/6402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}