OMAHA, Neb. — The deadline for President Joe Biden to intervene and keep 115,000 railroad workers from going on strike and disrupting deliveries of cars, crops, containers of imported goods and countless other products and raw materials is looming.
Biden is widely expected to name a board of arbitrators to review the contract dispute and make recommendations on how to settle it before Monday’s deadline. Once he does that, any strike or lockout will be delayed 60 days under the federal law that governs railroad contract talks.
A White House official said the Biden administration is going through the standard process to decide whether to appoint this special board to intervene in the contract talks.
Businesses that rely on railroads have urged Biden to appoint that Presidential Emergency Board to try to bring the freight railroads and workers together to reach a deal. Groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and major trade groups of railroad shippers all wrote to Biden over the past month since the talks deadlocked and mediation officially ended to say a rail strike could cause catastrophic disruptions in the economy.
“Any strike is bad,” said Rob Benedict with the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers group that represents refineries and other chemical companies. “We want to avoid that at all costs especially when we are in a precarious situation like our nation is now in kind of our current supply chain crisis.”
Adding to the supply chain worries is a separate labor dispute involving 22,000 West Coast dockworkers at ports that handle roughly 40 percent of U.S. imports. Both sides in those negotiations have said they plan to keep cargo moving until a new agreement is reached even though their contract expired at the beginning of July. The ports rely on railroads to deliver many of the goods they handle.
The presidential board can only make nonbinding recommendations on the railroad contracts, but those will serve as the basis for a new round of negotiations that could yield a contract that has eluded the railroads since talks began more than two years ago.
Even if those efforts fail, Congress would likely intervene to prevent a strike. Lawmakers could impose terms on the railroads and their 12 unions at that point or take other action to keep the trains moving.
The National Carriers’ Conference Committee that represents Union Pacific, BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern, Kansas City Southern and other railroads said it believes the wage increases railroads are offering are fair based on other recent major labor agreements, but the unions say none of the offers so far do enough to offset inflation or reflect the current worker shortages. Plus, the railroads want workers to pay more of their health insurance costs, which the unions say would eat up most, if not all, of the proposed raises.
NCCC Chairman Brendan Branon said the railroads are disappointed a deal hasn’t been reached yet, but they’re hopeful the presidential board will help.
“It remains in the best interests of all parties – and the public – for the railroads and rail labor organizations to settle this bargaining round by entering mutually acceptable agreements that provide prompt pay increases to the nation’s hard working rail employees and prevent rail service disruptions,” Branon said in a statement.
The unions say a better contract would likely help ease the railroads’ struggles to hire more workers to reduce delays in deliveries and improve service in response to complaints from shippers and regulators.
