After Biden Blocked Their Strike, Railroad Workers Weigh the Lesser of Two Evils

Panelists include: Hugh Sawyer, a veteran locomotive engineer with 36 years of experience, a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen Division 316, and a founding member and acting treasurer of Railroad Workers United; Mark Burrows, a retired locomotive engineer with 37 years of experience, who has served as co-chair and organizer for Railroad Workers United, where he still edits RWU’s quarterly newsletter ​“The Highball”; Ron Kaminkow, a recently retired former brakeman, conductor, and engineer who worked for many years in freight rail before working 20 years as a passenger engineer at Amtrak, a founding member of RWU and delegate in the Northern Nevada Central Labor Council.

TRANSCRIPT

HUGH SAWYER: My name is Hugh Sawyer. I’m a working locomotive engineer in Atlanta, Georgia, and I’m completing my 36^th year. I’ve been a locomotive engineer practically my whole career and I’m a proud member of the Teamsters. I belong to Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen Division 316 in Atlanta, and I’m also a founding member of Railroad Workers United and the current treasurer of that organization. We’re an organization of rank-and-file rail members from all the crafts working together to make a better work environment and better contracts in the future for the rail members that are left in the industry.

MARK BURROWS: My name is Mark Burrows. I’m a retired locomotive engineer. I started railroading in 1974 at the Chicago Northwestern. I spent 12 years there and then 25 years at the Canadian Pacific from ​’91 to the end of 2015. In my latter years, I was a delegate for the UTU, the Smart Transportation Division for our 2011 and 2014 conventions. I’ve been a long-time member of Railroad Workers United since 2011, and am currently the editor of our quarterly newsletter, ​“The Highball.”

RON KAMINKOW: My name is Ron Kaminkow. I’m recently retired from the railroad as of last year. I hired out with Conrail in Chicago in ​’96, was taken over by Norfolk Southern in ​’99, and worked for the NS until 2004. Then, I left the Norfolk Southern and came to Amtrak, which is the railroad I just retired from. I’ve worked on the railroad in nine different states, run trains over basically every major Class I carrier. Having been an Amtrak engineer out of Chicago in particular, and Milwaukee, we run on all these different railroads. I’m a founding member of Railroad Workers United, and served as the General Secretary for many years. I’m now serving in the capacity of a trustee for that organization. I’m still a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen honorary member Division 51, and I am still the delegate to our local Northern Nevada Central Labor Council.

MAXMILLIAN ALVAREZ: Alright. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and the Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor, and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor-focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network. Please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People, because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, your friends, and your family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you’ve got recommendations for working folks that you’d like us to talk to, or stories you’d like us to investigate. Please support the work that we do at The Real News by going to the​re​al​news​.com/​d​onate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the U.S. and across the world.

My name is Maximilian Alvarez and we’ve got a critical episode for y’all today. We are just days away from the U.S. elections, and America stands on the precipice of a dark and uncertain future. Polls are showing that the race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is incredibly close. We may not know which candidate legitimately won for days, if not weeks after November 5^th, but what we do know, because it’s already happening, is that there will be a tug-of-war over the legitimacy of the results. And I want to just give a note on that really quick. Trusting News, a research and training project that helps journalists demonstrate credibility and earn trust, writes:

“The United States doesn’t have a nationwide body that collects and releases election results. Instead, journalists gather data from local and state agencies that report election results publicly.

The Associated Press gathers this data and makes it available to the public and to other newsrooms to count the votes and then declare winners. They’ve been doing this in presidential elections since 1848. Elections in the U.S. are highly decentralized and complex. While uncontested or landslide races may be called right after polls close, competitive races may take days or even weeks to call, and while some states like Florida count most of the ballots on election day, other states like California can take weeks.”

So just take note of that and make sure that your family and your friends know how to interpret what is going to play out in front of us next week. Be critical, be watchful, be patient, and don’t let yourself become a tool of cynical actors who are trying to manipulate you and above all else, just go vote. Listen, we’ve talked for years on this show about how and why our political system sucks.

You’re not going to find any naive defenses of that system here. But every conversation that we’ve had with workers has also shown, in one way or another, that the results of national, state and local elections still shape the ground upon which we all live, work, and organize. History has shown us, for instance, that if you’ve got a hostile underfunded National Labor Relations Board run by bosses and corporate hacks, that’s going to drastically change the entire landscape of rank-and-file organizing around the country. Workers would face an even more daunting path to victory and getting a first contract. Many new union drives would be stifled and many existing unions may find themselves not going on strike, not expanding to organize new members, but instead defensively fighting for their right to exist. There would be more ballot measures like the infamous Prop 22 in California, which passed in 2020 and which we covered here on this show.

These things can legally cement a permanent underclass of workers who make less than minimum wage and have virtually no rights as employees. So take elections seriously, even if politicians and their elite donor class don’t take you seriously. And that’s really what we’re here to talk about today. As you guys know, two years ago when the potential for a national rail strike was building, we conducted many, many interviews on this podcast and over at the Rail News Network with railroad workers from across the industry. We talked to engineers, conductors, dispatchers, track workers and more. And through those interviews, we help educate the public on the long brewing crisis in the country’s supply chain, a crisis driven by the insatiable greed of massively profitable rail companies and their Wall Street shareholders, a crisis that is affecting all of us as consumers who depend on the rails way more than we realize, and a crisis that has been most acutely felt by workers who have been run into the ground, and trackside communities like East Palestine, Ohio.

As you guys also know, at the request of President Joe Biden, with the urging of the rail companies themselves and with the help of both parties in Congress, the government preemptively blocked railroad workers from striking in December of 2022 and forced workers to accept a contract that did not address the vast majority of issues that have been putting them our communities and our supply chain at hazard. Then two months later in February of 2023, the Norfolk Southern train derailment and toxic chemical disaster happened in East Palestine. Now, a lot of folks have been asking us how this has all shaped railroad workers’ attitudes and approaches to the elections, and plenty of folks have even cited the blocking of the rail strike as a key factor in their decision regarding who to vote for, or whether to even vote at all. So as we always do here, rather than try to hypothesize or ventriloquize what we think workers might say, we’re going to go straight to the source and talk to workers themselves.

As you guys heard at the top of this episode, we’ve got an incredible panel of veteran railroaders here to help us navigate this. So let’s dive in…

Brothers Hugh, Mark, and Ron, it is so great to see you all and so great to be chatting with you all today. Thank you so, so much for making time for this. I really appreciate it and I’m really excited to talk to you guys about this today. As I mentioned in the introduction, a lot of folks really want to know what is being talked about on the rails, right? And we came together ourselves two, three years ago out of our reporting on the struggle of workers on the railroads that led us to connect with Railroad Workers United and so many great folks from across the different crafts, the different unions.

We’ve had Ron and Mark on different recordings on the Real News and Working People. Brother Hugh, it’s so great to have you on the show and to introduce you to our listeners. And I want to kind of just quickly start there because our listeners became, over time, so familiar with Railroad Workers United and some of you guys. I think it’s at least worth starting on a positive note that, since our recording of interviews, panels, and live streams during the last contract fight and potential railroad strike, brother Ron Kako has finally retired since then. And so, Brother Ron, folks just want to know, are you enjoying your well-deserved retirement?

KAMINKOW: Yeah, very much. I’m catching up on many, many years of deferred personal life, all sorts of hobbies and interests, but I also remain active in the labor movement. I definitely hope to remain active in Railroad Workers United for many years to come. So yeah, it’s a good thing. I highly recommend it.

ALVAREZ: Well congratulations from all of us here at Working People to you, brother Ron. Congratulations on making it to retirement, man. You deserve it. I hope that you’re enjoying every single second of it, and I know our listeners are sending nothing but love and solidarity to you and to Mark and brother Hugh. You’re going to be there soon, baby. Don’t worry. We’re pulling for you too sooner or later, sooner or later, man. And let’s kind of go back to that moment right when we all started connecting back in 2022. I mean, because as I mentioned in the introduction for this brief moment, during that contract fight as we were moving stage by stage through the Railway Labor Act provisions that were getting us closer to a potential national railroad strike, we were learning through interviews with rank-and-file railroad workers, just how big of a catastrophe has been brewing on the rails for many years. We were learning how damaging this has been to railroad workers themselves, to communities that have railroads running through them or terminals stationed near them, not just places like East Palestinian, Ohio, but places like South Baltimore here that lived next to the CSX terminal that we’ve also reported on.

So it was in the process of those conversations that we learned so much of what you and your fellow railroaders had to teach us about the kinds of conditions you’ve been working under for many, many years. And it felt like for a brief moment in 2022 and into 2023, a lot of folks around the country finally woke up to a lot of the realities that workers like yourselves were describing to us on this podcast. And then as we know, which we’ll get to in a minute, the potential rail strike was blocked by the Biden administration and both parties in Congress. The East Palestine derailment and poisoning of an entire region happened just a couple months later. People were paying more attention to the number of derailments happening around the country. And then as is the case with anything, whether it’s a war in Ukraine or East Palestine itself, the news fades from the headlines, people move on, the attention wanes. And so I wanted us to start back at that moment, since we’re heading into a new contract bargaining period in 2025. So I want to give our listeners an update before we dig into the upcoming election. Just give us an update on how things have changed or not changed for railroad workers and for the rail industry since the potential strike was blocked two years ago.

SAWYER: Well, I’ll jump in on that and just say that I worked for Norfolk Southern. So we had, as you’ve already mentioned, the East Palestine disaster. And there’s been a hedge fund group and COR that’s come in and tried to take over the board of directors. I think they’ve been successful, by the way, creating a situation in which they were able to oust the CEO, Alan Shaw. And so we have a new CEO and I’m sure that we’re going to see further action to get their people onto the board of directors. And the goal, of course, is to strip the railroad of its assets. I noticed in the third quarter results, they mentioned our 3.1 billion gross profit. They try to make the numbers look good, but if you read the fine print down there, there was close to half in land sales.

So we’re selling off our assets, and this does not bode well for the long-term health of the railroad. I’ve got to stress that this is my opinion, it’s not the opinion of Norfolk Southern. Of course, we defer maintenance on locomotives, we defer maintenance on rail. Maintenance is still going on out there, but not at the level that it used to. And I think we’re just kind of trying to strip out the good of the railroad and leave the husk there for the taxpayers ultimately to pick up. Railroad Workers United is involved in the push for public rail ownership. We own the highways, we own the waterways, the federal government regulates those things and runs them. Maybe they should run the railroad, the infrastructure of it, and just let anybody lease space on it, so to speak, and that way they can maintain the safe level of maintenance that I feel like we’re kind of stripping away over time.

So with regards to the contract, when the Biden administration stepped in, they went through the steps and they had a public Presidential Emergency Board. Keep in mind, those are recommendations. President Biden could have sat there and thrown all those recommendations out or adjusted them to the degree that he wanted to present to Congress and he didn’t. His attitude was, ​“oh, we’re going to put a bunch of other union people out of work.” He just felt like he had to shove this down our throats. Now, we got a fairly good pay raise, but that really just got us from years where we had been going backwards. That got us up to the point that we needed to work from, but we got none of the working condition issues that we wanted. Now ultimately, we got some sick days, but I got to tell you, for your rank-and-file workers, yeah, we would like to have sick days like the rest of the country, but that was hardly the top priority for us.

We’re on call 24/7. I used to be on a car job that at least had a specific time that I went to work. I was on a schedule, I had scheduled off days. All that’s gone now. I’m back on a pool job where I was 20 years ago. And we just keep going backwards. We keep cutting off and they’ve cut a lot of yard jobs and what have you. Their goal is to have a great big happy extra board where you’re on call 24/7, 365 days a year. And despite any propaganda coming from Norfolk Southern, I just don’t think they really care about our lifestyle. They care about theirs, but they don’t want to give us a reasonable off time. I would think with 36 years of seniority, I’d be on a high-paying pool job with a good schedule. That’s where I would’ve been if this was 20 years ago,

BURROWS: I’ll just jump in and add on to Hugh’s point about the whole railway labor process. When the government decided to directly intervene, not only could Biden have made a proposal, but Congress itself could have crafted one, if there was one shred of sympathy for the just demands of rail workers, which contractually was mainly about quality of life issues. Everybody was spinning on extra boards and working on their rest and fatigued and potentially getting fired for taking time off for their daughter’s wedding or their kid’s T-ball game or whatever. And draconian attendance policies.

It’s worth noting that while fatigue is certainly in and of itself a major safety issue, all the other safety issues, the long and heavy trains, the deferred maintenance, many of the factors that contributed to the East Palestine disaster, those were not even on the table and being discussed. They’re not now in the current round. It was mainly about the quality of life issues. And so if there had been a shred of sympathy, Congress had the latitude, like Hugh said. The Presidential Emergency Board, they put out recommendations and that’s it. They could have crafted an agreement that could have addressed the most egregious working conditions, some of the basic just demands of the workers. As it is, the tentative agreement at the time was based upon the Presidential Emergency Board recommendations. They hid behind the time factor to say, ​“oh, we don’t have time to discuss any details. We’re just going to go with this.” It didn’t have to turn out that way. A lot of the scheduling issues were left in a TBD category to be determined and negotiated later, and that’s common. And then that seldom works out in workers’ favor. On some railroads, on some properties, there has been some minor, like, smoothing the roughest edges. Where many workers didn’t have any days off, just spinning on the 24-hour call extra board, going to work on two hours notice, there are some property agreements.

The average seems to be an 11 and four, so you’re on call 11 straight days, then maybe you get four days off. But those are not even four real days off. That’s at Canadian Pacific. When they sold an agreement to get two days off, it wasn’t two days off, it was 48 hours. The average person who works a 40-hour week gets off on Friday afternoon at four o’clock and goes back to work on Monday morning. That’s like 64 hours, if my math is correct. So a real conventional weekend is like 64 hours. Selling this 48 hours as a weekend is bullshit. With 11 and four, it’s the same thing, it’s not really four days off, it’s four times 24 at best. The first day is spent recovering from working like a dog, and then you’ve got less than three days to salvage what’s left. So smoothing off some of the roughest edges, but for the most part, it’s still extremely rough and intolerable, I would say.

KAMINKOW: I would just jump in and agree. I’m out of the industry now, but I keep my ear to the rail. For example, Norfolk Southern, the new leadership just came out with a report and nothing has changed. The idea was that things were going to change when the railroad was under the microscope due to the contract fight after East Palestine. Thanks to all the hard work of RWU and our media committee promoting all that’s wrong with the rail industry, the rail industry kind of got a black eye and they started to make nice. Just as an example, the rail industry said, ​“oh yeah, I guess the close call reporting thing that they have in the airlines, we’re under the microscope, so we’ll agree to do it.” And then, as soon as they’re out of the spotlight, they all just renege on that and go, ​“no, no, no, this close call reporting thing has got problems.”

“It’s not going to work with the way we run the railroad and we find it unsafe” and all this kind of thing. That’s just one example. Same thing with Norfolk Southern. After East Palestine, they said, ​“we’re going to make nice with the shippers, we’re going to make nice with our workers.” The report, if you all want to read it, it’s quite lengthy, but what Norfolk Southern is now saying is, ​“we’re going to strip the company down. We’re going to save a lot of money by cutting out the fat, which means doubling up, pushing on the workforce, requiring more work, less employees and the usual PSR stuff.” For a while there, precision scheduled railroading was getting a black eye. But time goes by and they sort of concede a little here and there, but the new leadership at Norfolk Southern is simply reasserting.

“Yeah, we’re going to have real PSR like Ancora was demanding and go for the jugular. We’re going for below a 0.6 operating ratio now.” All of us on the railroad know what that means. That means job cuts, that means shop consolidations, that means job eliminations, more pressure on workers to get the job done, to do more with less, this kind of thing. That’s what the code word is. And so to take up what Hugh Sawyer mentioned, Railroad Workers United is in favor of public ownership of the railroad because we just don’t see anything really changing. There are a few tweaks here and a few tweaks there. Amtrak is suing Norfolk Southern, and I believe Union Pacific, for failure to run the trains on time. So there’s a little bit of fluff, there’ll be a few concessions made, maybe a few court cases won, a few sick days granted here and there, but in essence, nothing has really changed Max, I think. If you asked any railroader today, are you happier today than you were back two years ago when that contract fight was on? I would hazard a guess that most are about the same level, if not less happy, than they were two years ago.

ALVAREZ: That’s really sad and sobering, but I think really important for people out there to hear, especially if they’re thinking that we won something and things have changed. Maybe they bought the PR machine spin that the contract was a huge gain. And don’t get me wrong, our listeners were rooting for railroad workers to get that pay bump all the way. But through our interviews with y’all, they understood, as you guys helped us understand, that the problem is so, so much bigger than a pay raise or a couple sick days. The sickness runs very, very deep. I would highly recommend that folks follow journalists like Josh Funk, who in March was already giving an update for AP. That, to make Ron’s point, is more of the same. I’m just going to read one sentence here.

This is from March 2024, quote, ​“BNSF laid off more than 360 mechanical employees this week, just days after Warren Buffet told shareholders of his Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate that owns the railroad, that he was disappointed in BNFs profits.” So again, more of the same, more cuts deeper to the bone, piling more work onto fewer workers, automating what they want to automate, making the trains longer and heavier to the hazard of workers themselves and the communities whose backyards these trains are bombing through. I definitely want us to do a deeper follow-up on this after the election. Regardless of the outcome of this election, the new contract bargaining period is coming in 2025. And so I want our listeners and viewers to be fully up to speed on that and to know what they should be looking for and how they can show support.

But I want to kind of build on this discussion and take us into the heart of darkness, as it were. We all know that we are days away from what may very well end up being the most consequential election in our lifetimes. We hear that every year, but it feels like it may be true this time. And as always, I want to be clear that as a 501(c)(3), The Real News is not in the business of telling anybody how to vote. We are here to give y’all the information and perspective that you need to act and to make an informed decision for yourself. But as the railroad workers were saying, you infamously had your potential strike blocked under the Biden-Harris administration in 2022. I would remind listeners that that was also with full bipartisan support from Republicans and Democrats in Congress. Some dissented symbolically. But by and large, this was a bipartisan effort, and it happened under the Biden-Harris administration.

And as we discussed in our reporting from that period, the rail industry was further deregulated under the Trump administration. Railroad workers specifically and union workers in general are not a monolith. I do not want to ask any of you guys to try to speak for the whole of rail labor, or your union, or even the company you work for, right? Again, just help us put our ears to the rail here. What insight can you give us right now into how all of this is shaping your and your fellow railroaders’ attitudes and approach to the current election? A lot of people on the left, and even people within the world of labor, have cited specifically the crushing of the rail strike as a reason not to vote for Harris. But what do railroaders themselves have to say? How are you guys navigating this moment and what are you hearing your fellow workers talking through as we head into November 5^th?

KAMINKOW: Well, Max, I’d say obviously it’s a mixed bag. It’s not a monolith. Whether you’re on the railroad or at UPS, or whether you’re a teacher or what have you, unionized labor has a myriad of different political opinions. But first of all, I think it’s important that railroad workers and all of us citizens understand that Biden didn’t break the strike alone. He asked Congress, and both Democrats and Republicans willingly provided the legislation to break the strike. So that’s the first thing. Secondly, we haven’t had a national rail strike in 30 years. The vote in 1992 to break the strike, I believe, was 400 to five. And so right off the bat, you know that it was complete bipartisanship, both Democrats and Republicans. So I have a little list here that I think it’s worth hearing, whether you’re a Democrat, Republican or whatever your political persuasion is.

The great railroad strike of 1877, the first general strike in this country, was one of the greatest labor uprisings to that point. That strike was largely broken by Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, and it didn’t take long. In 1894, just 17 years later, was the great Pullman strike, where Eugene Debs was sent to jail and so forth. The American Railway Union was destroyed. It was the great Democratic friend of labor, Grover Cleveland, who was president for that one. And then the shopmen strike in 1922 that lasted for months. That involved a half a million shopmen who maintained diesel or steam locomotives and so forth. Warren Harding, a Republican businessman, intervened in that strike. And then back in 1946, the miners, steelworkers and railroaders all went on strike. The great friend of labor, Harry Truman, a Democrat, threatened to draft every railroad worker into the military. That’s a pretty creative, innovative way to break a strike.

And then we had the 1985 National Strike under Reagan, and then in 1991, the CSX strike that developed into a national railroad strike under Bush the first. And so now here we are 30 years later with Biden, in effect, breaking that strike. It’s important for people to understand that, over the course of 150 years, whether they’re a Republican or a Democrat, their job is to protect the interests of capital. Railroads have historically been some of the most powerful capitalists in our country. And when they say dance, the government does so. I’m not excusing the Biden administration at all for its actions. In fact, he shot himself in the foot. He had the opportunity to very easily state that if there’s a national rail strike, the fault lays squarely at the doorstep of the Class I carriers who won’t even provide a single day of sick time for these hardworking railroaders, 85% who at that time did not have sick time.

He could have emerged as a hero. And I think that the National Carriers Conference Committee would’ve simply collapsed and agreed, but no. Not only was it offensive, it was just downright stupid politics, basically. But hey, he owns it and he has to live with it. But I think it’s important that railroad workers understand and everybody understands that this has been a bipartisan effort of 150 years of breaking our strikes. And so railroad workers are not happy, as a general rule, with Republicans or Democrats. I was at the founding of the U.S. Labor Party back in Cleveland. I think it was 1995 or 1996. One of the rail unions actually said, ​“enough is enough. We’re tired of seeing our strikes broken.” And so the brotherhood and maintenance away employees was present at the founding conventional Labor Party. And it’s just an example of railroad worker frustration that we do not have a party that represents our interests. And I’ll just leave it at that.

ALVAREZ: Can I follow up on just one quick point there? I’m so appreciative, Ron, that you gave us that deeper historical perspective, because Lord knows we need it right now, when we’re in this hyper-digitalized, fast-paced news cycle. We all have the long-term memories of goldfish, and that’s a dangerous place to be. We need to remember history to know how to forge our way ahead into the future. But you said something that I know will really perk our listeners’ ears up, right, about the political stupidity of Biden asking Congress to break the strike in ​’22 and how he could have played it differently, which he did when the International Longshoremen Association went on strike just a couple of weeks ago. And so I have to ask the question that’s on my mind and I know is on listeners’ minds. I am not pitting unions against each other. I’m just saying explicitly in a case where Biden handled two consequential strikes very differently, were you guys watching that and thinking, how would your contract potentially have ended up differently if he had approached the rail strike that way, the way that he vocalized support for the ILA?

KAMINKOW: Yeah, I don’t want to hog the show, but I got to answer this. It’s fascinating. And I think a couple things. Biden, I think, learned a lesson when Shawn Fain told him directly, publicly, ​“stay the hell out of our bargaining. Do not mess with us.” Unfortunately, in the rail industry, we did not have a union leadership. First of all, we didn’t have a railroad workers union. We had 13 divided, largely impotent, little sections, craft-by-craft, that couldn’t speak collectively. They all took separate votes on separate contracts. And so there was no voice of unity to tell Biden to bug out. And hey, between us, I’m convinced that since the rail union leadership did not speak out publicly, not a single one of ​’em made a statement that Biden and Congress should stay the hell out of this strike. We did hear that from Shawn Fain and the auto workers. We did hear this from ILA.

Had we actually had some real leadership that could have spoken with a unified voice, that could have been militant and told the U.S. government, ​“stay the hell out of our strike, we got this, let us settle this,” they may not have been so quick to intervene and order us back to work. So one could easily postulate that Biden was taking his cues from the rail union leadership. I mean, I hate to say it, but we did not hear a squeak from a single rail union leader asking the government to stay out.

BURROWS: While we’re on the subject, I want to back up. First of all, as far as railroad workers’ reaction to Biden saying, ​“oh, I respect the collective bargaining process and I’m not going to invoke Taft-Hartley,” the vibe I’ve gotten from talking to workers, is that obviously there’s a lot of cynicism. Many rail workers see right through that. For those who are paying attention, that’s an obvious no-brainer. Ron mentioned this — I believe it was in ​’83, there was a BLE strike in ​’83 that lasted three days. We actually had that feeling of being out there and they weren’t trying to run without us. They were taking their beating like men, if I can say that without sounding sexist.

And then Reagan intervened after three days and imposed the Presidential Emergency Board recommendations. And I don’t have the exact totals, but I remember distinctly that it was basically like a nine-to-one ratio. I think the Senate vote was more than 90 to 10, and the House vote was something like 455 to 30 or something like that, but I mean easily a nine-to-one ratio. Then the next year, in the ​’84 elections, the UTU news comes out with its recommendations for their preferred candidates, and most of them are Democrats, some of them are Republicans, but they have the check mark incumbent. And the vast majority of their recommendations were for incumbent senators and representatives who had voted to break this strike back in ​’83. Like Ron was saying, no repercussions, no calling out. This is just like SMART-TD President Ferguson right before Biden, when he was employing his membership to ratify the contract, or Biden or the government will. He just said, ​“well, we’ve reached the end of the process, so this is it. We’ve done all we could.” And I would argue, no, you haven’t done all you could without challenging challenging their moral and ethical legitimacy to do this. The Railway Labor Act came into being in the first place for this very reason, to curb railroad militancy.

And then also, I think it was 2011, the BLE was about to go on strike. I was working the afternoon shift and we were ready to get off our engines at the stroke of midnight. And then Obama, great friend of labor, he issued a presidential back-to-work order. Now, the only reason that didn’t turn into a big government intervention was because then the BLE implored its membership, ​“you might as well ratify this or they’ll ram it down your throat.” They always use this threat. If it’s not the best contract, whether it’s a tentative agreement, ratify before government intervention, ratify it because it could always be worse, which is true. Just as the government could make a more favorable contract than the Presidential Emergency Board recommendations, the government can always make it worse. So that threat has merit to it.

And then of course they wield it like a 20-pound sledgehammer. And so after Obama did that last minute, I think he invoked a cooling-off period. It had gotten to the point where the last cooling-off period was over. And so he invoked one more and then the membership ratified it. So that was another example of, if not direct government intervention, what I always call ​“the gun to the head threat of government intervention.” And now both the operating craft unions are just shamelessly encouraging their membership to support Harris as if 2022 didn’t even happen in the same way that the union leadership did back in ​’84, after busting the strike back then. So yeah, the history. I think Einstein said, ​“continuing to do the same thing while expecting different results is the definition of insanity.” So there you have it. Take it away.

SAWYER: Right now we’re in an election. I don’t think what Biden did to us in 2022 is even a thought, hardly, at this stage of the game. Because the threat from, in my opinion, Donald Trump and Project 2025 and what have you, forget about our pathetic problems in the rail industry. I mean, we’re talking about the theoretical dismantling of this country if Donald Trump gets elected. So I think we’re beyond that. Having said that, I feel like a lot of my fellow workers down here in the South, rail workers think this is the WWE or something. That it’s some kind of entertainment industry. Down here, we’re like sheep. We run around in herds, and depending on where you live, I now live way out in the country where I grew up in the city.

They’ve all convinced each other that they’re going to vote for Donald Trump. They’re voting against their own interests, but they’ve convinced themselves that he’s the man and they don’t want that horrible person Kamala Harris up there who’s Black and female, let’s be honest. And I’m living in the South. So I want to go back and say something about the rail industry. Ron went through the history of strikes and how they’re broken. What everybody needs to understand is how important we are to the economy. When we go on strike, the economy comes to a halt. I mean, the stock market is affected on day one. I don’t know if this is still true, but they used to tell us in New York City, 24 hours after the rail industry shuts down, that you’ve got food shortages. So this is why I think Democrats and Republicans are so anxious to prevent a strike and prevent that economic blow. My thing about Joe Biden and breaking our strike is, he could have imposed a lot of what we asked for by the way of work-related rules and off time and that sort of thing. He could have imposed a good agreement for the workers and chose not to.

But in fairness, he’s surrounded by people. I just think he was told, ​“hey, we give them a 25% pay increase, that solves all the problems.” And he went with it, because he was desperate not to have an economic slowdown. By the way, I’m going to go back to public rail ownership. The amount of freight that we’re moving in this country has been going down for years as a percentage of the freight. That’s ridiculous. These railroads are not operating in a patriotic mode, like, ​“hey, we’re the basic part of the economy that we keep the whole capitalistic system going.” A lot of the inflation I think is brought on by the cost of the logistics network. Those cost increases are due to the railroad jacking up their prices and performing less for that money.

And so people need to look at things from a bigger scale than just the rail workers. You could pay all of us a million dollars a year. What few railroad workers are left? It would still be a pimple on the amount of profits the railroads are making. But the greed, I mean, you’re talking about going to a 50% operating ratio, would you give me a break? We were making money hand over fist, and it was at 80%, what have you. The American public needs to take back the ownership. We gave the railroads, the rails, the land, everything. And in exchange for a common carry, they would carry the goods for everybody. Rural America, the cities, everybody. They have violated their part of that agreement since almost day one, and it’s time to hold them responsible. We need to go in a different direction for the health of the American economy.

ALVAREZ: I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put, man. And I want us end this conversation with, let’s get real, let’s talk strategy here. Let’s talk about how working people of conscience who are trying to do the right thing for themselves, their families, their communities, their country, what words can we offer them about how to navigate this election and whatever’s coming after it? But I want to ask two clarifying questions here because again, these are questions that I’m seeing come up a lot online in the news. Would you say it’s fair that, by and large, the majority of railroad workers who are planning to vote for Trump, that they’re not primarily motivated by a feeling of betrayal from the Biden-Harris administration?

That’s one clarifying question I wanted to pose to you guys. And then the other is, do you think a lot of folks on the rails are thinking of their votes as a rail worker? What is going to be good for me and my union and the industry? It sounds like what you guys are saying is that the folks who are planning to vote for Trump, they’re not thinking with that side of their brain. They’re thinking more in these WWE terms, as you were saying, Hugh. So I wanted to ask if you guys could just comment on both of those before we make the final turn here.

SAWYER: Well, I’ll jump in and just say, I don’t think the screwing that we got in 2022 — and that’s what it was — is a factor today. Everybody’s caught up in the news cycle of what’s going on today. And they definitely are not looking at it from a union perspective — does this really benefit me as a rail worker? — down in the South. I don’t think they’re thinking that at all. We’re right back to the demoralized place we were two years ago, before people got excited and said, ​“wow, we’re going to go on strike and we’re going to really achieve something.” Now they’re just back to their hangdog, make another day, sort of thing. So that’s my feeling. What happened back two years ago is not a factor today in how people are voting. And I don’t think they’re voting in their own interest. I can’t imagine any worker voting for Donald Trump in that bunch. I mean, really, we’re going to add another 8.2 trillion in debt, which was added under our glorious leader Donald Trump, when he gave that big tax cut to the rich. I mean, when will anybody get it that somebody’s got to pay taxes in this country? It’d be amusing to me if everybody paid taxes, including the rich. So I don’t know.

A lot of union people are going to vote against their best interests, but I am hopeful that we’re going to eke it out as we did four years ago. It’s a lesser of two evils, and we can do more to change the Democratic party, I think than we’ll ever be able to with the Republicans, who are led by people who are out to create Nazi Germany. In my opinion.

KAMINKOW: It is the lesser of two evils. This is the game that I personally feel that we’ve been playing my whole adult life when it comes to election time. I rarely have a candidate on the ballot that I’m excited about, because I don’t see them as really representing the interests of working people. They’re always beating around the bush, even when they sound pro-union, like Biden. Then he goes along with the corporations and breaks a strike. It’s the same old, it’s been happening ever since Jimmy Carter’s first election that I was party to 44 years ago. So we got our back against the wall, and we’re looking at a regime potentially that could assume power in January that has shown itself to be somewhat fascist in nature. Hugh alluded to that 2025 Project of the Heritage Foundation that Trump has now said he doesn’t know anything about, but of course he does.

And all of his big time supporters are very excited about implementing such a thing. But railroad workers, like many workers, aren’t necessarily in tune with what their interests are. And politics is complicated. And so yeah, we had this horrible guy, Ron Batory, who was head of the FRA, and he was all for single-person crews, and he was all for granting waivers to the industry and getting rid of long-term safety regulations during COVID on trumped up reasons. Ron Batory, lifelong CEO of rail corporations, was ready to give the industry everything it wanted. He was a Trump appointee. He could come back, and if not him, someone just as bad, if not worse. But people don’t necessarily connect these kind of dots, Max, it’s really a shame. Elaine Chao, head of the Department of Transportation comes out of a big billionaire shipping magnet family.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of Pete Buttigieg, but God dammit. I mean, at least the guy isn’t from some billionaire shipping company who’s obviously going to side with the interest of big shippers. Amit Bose, he is what he is at the FRA, but he’s a hell of a lot better than having a CEO. These are the people we bargain with. These are the people who have implemented precision scheduled railroading. These are the people who want to eliminate crews, eliminate jobs, combine shop facilities, get rid of all of us if they had their way and gave us precision scheduled railroading. We don’t want those people heading up these agencies. And of course, when you have a billionaire president who’s very favorably disposed to all of his wealthy friends, this is exactly what we’re going to get. I don’t think Amit Bose is great. I don’t think Pete Buttigieg is great as head of the DOT, and I could go on and on. But at times we have to look at the situation and just go, if you’re going to play the game, choose the one that’s going to hurt you the least. And right now that happens to be the Harris ticket.

BURROWS: In my observations and discussions and posts, there is an element, some rails do have an anti-Biden hatred. Trump and Musk want to fire all workers who strike, but from their perspective, at least he wouldn’t do what Biden did. So what’s going on there is what’s going on all over the country where workers are forced to make this choice. I mean, I go back to the first election I really paid attention to, like Ron was talking about 44 years ago with Reagan against Carter. And that’s when I came of age politically, and that’s when I became convinced of the need for an independent political party based on the organized militant trade union movement. And so I’ve been advocating for that for 44 years. But these last three election cycles have been Trump versus a lame Democrat. If they hadn’t stolen the nomination from Sanders, there’s a very good chance that Sanders could have beaten Trump, because so many of these workers who had voted for Obama and then got disillusioned about that, they voted for Trump.

Sanders, I believe, could have won some of those voters. So then four years later, after Trump and Biden, we now have Trump and Harris, who is just a female version of Biden. People held their nose to vote for Clinton, and people held their nose to vote for Biden. And now, people are going to hold their nose to vote for Harris, and some are so repulsed by her that they don’t even care about Trump. And then some will sit it out, and who knows where we land. But we cannot allow ourselves to continue this lesser evilism on steroids, maxed-out circuits, overblowing. I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that more of us are convinced of the need for an independent political party. How we get there, what form it takes, we have to figure it out.

But the more of us that are convinced of that, we can start collectively having that discussion. And then if our union leaders don’t support that and help push it along, then we have to find, develop, leaders from our own ranks to help make that happen. I’m not an expert on the history of Nazi Germany and fascism, but the basic common thread is that Hitler wasn’t taken seriously, and the social Democrats were too impotent to mount any challenge. And I don’t want to be, ​“fascism is around the corner,” but there’s a common thread, okay, that’s the direction they want to go. And the Democrats have proven themselves incapable of mounting any resistance, and we could end up with Trump, and who knows where that will take us. But whoever ends up in the White House, we need to organize and resist, organize, resist, and ultimately come together and form an independent political party, use our numerical majority and our economic power and figure it out. Because we can run this show a whole lot. I’ll leave it there.

ALVAREZ: Workers can run this shit way better than the billionaire class. Of that I am certain. And I appreciate as always your guys’ incredible insight and passion, and I just really hope that folks out there are taking everything that you say to heart. On a personal level, really appreciate the sober but principled analysis that I always get from you guys, because folks need that regardless of what sort of political tradition you’ve come out of and where in the country you are right now, right? We’ve got to look at this situation soberly and not, as Hugh was saying, get caught up in that herd mentality or the online rage-fueled manufactured consent. I mean, if you feel yourself getting unmoored from that and you feel yourself being led where the media wants you to follow and where these politicians want you to go, take a step back, center yourself, listen to your fellow workers, talk to the people around you, have these kinds of conversations now before it’s too late.

And in that vein, guys, I want to just sort of build on the great points that y’all were making and sort of look forward here. As we said, we’re going to have y’all back on, have more brothers and sisters from the rails on to talk about the contract fight coming up and where we can, as a working class, learn from our past mistakes, learn from 2022, so that we’re forging ahead into the future, having learned those lessons and being better prepared for what’s coming. I know our listeners feel that. I know you guys at RWU are always planning, organizing, mobilizing in that direction, and we’re going to talk about that in a future episode. But we’re recording this on October 30^th, and this is going to come out just days ahead of the election itself, which is taking place less than a week from now.

And as you guys have laid out in brutal detail, our political system sucks. And the system-wide change that we need as working people is not going to come from elections alone. We know that we need to understand that, but the results of elections still shape the ground upon which we live and work and organize. And so when it comes to addressing the ongoing crisis on the railroads, the crisis of democracy that we’re in, the corporate destruction of the supply chain, and all the threats that poses to workers and to our communities, like what role do electoral politics have to play in that struggle? And what would you guys say to your fellow workers out there listening to this about how working class folks need to proceed strategically within and outside of the electoral system to advance our interests?

KAMINKOW: Max, I think there’s a lot of examples from history, not just in this country, but in countries around the world where, without a social movement to propel the political, the electoral struggle forward, you’re kind of pissing up a rope. I mean, everyone says FDR changed the country and this and that, or Lyndon Johnson facilitated the Civil rights movement. But had there not been a movement on the ground in both instances in the thirties and in the fifties and sixties, nothing would’ve changed. And so if you put all your eggs in the basket of electoral change, I think you’re doomed to failure. By the same token within the unions, if you elect reformers. In my union, The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, we actually do have one member, one vote. Very few unions in this country have that, and we deposed a long-term President Dennis Pierce, and replaced him with somebody else. It looks good on paper, but without a movement in our union, a caucus that’s organized to pressure the new president and to make sure that he moves in a direction that’s more accountable to the members and starts to take creative action and break from this bureaucratic strait jacket that we’re in, you are just tweedle dee and tweedle dumb. 

And I think the same thing holds. One of the most unfortunate things that I’ve experienced in my life is that most people, unfortunately, are looking for a savior. And whether that savior is Jesus Christ or Muhammad, or whether that savior is a partner or that savior is a politician or a union leader, or a rich, wealthy person like Elon Musk or Donald Trump, unfortunately people don’t understand that the only way change is really going to come is when tens of millions of regular working class people take matters into our own hands. We’re not just going to go vote next week and everything’s going to be okay no matter what we believe and who we vote for. Everybody has to grow up, take responsibility, and understand that politics isn’t something you do every four years in a voting booth.

Politics is something you do every day. You wake up and you say, what do I do today to further the cause of my class, of my neighborhood, of the people that I’m in this world with, that I identify with? And so you go to your union meeting and you go to the picket, you go to the rally, you raise hell. And I don’t think we’re ever going to get out of the quagmire that we’re in unless and until a critical mass of tens of millions of common regular, everyday working people inside and outside of unions start to basically say, we are going to take action. This is what happened in the 1930s. Workers spontaneously started taking over factories and this is how the modern labor movement was born. The modern labor movement didn’t come about by a bunch of bureaucrats spending a bunch of money and calling elections. Literally millions of workers occupied factories and went on general strikes and built a solidarity and a momentum that literally changed the body politic of this country. And that’s what we need to do I think going forward, no matter who wins this election. That is our agenda as working-class people.

BURROWS: I just want to add on my personal hero, and I know I’m not alone. Eugene Debs, not only for his rail labor organizing, but his relentless fight to his dying day for social justice and for a better world of peace, justice and equality. And he fought and advocated tirelessly to build this kind of movement that Ron is talking about. And one of the things when he was trying to inspire people to build this kind of movement, he would say, don’t take my word for it. Go research it yourself. Go learn and study the facts yourself about how this system works, about how this all works and what’s really at play here. What’s really going on. And if you do that, then I’m confident that you’ll arrive at the same conclusions that I have. And so I mean, 44 years ago I was just a hotheaded rebel without a clue. But I had mentors to start opening my eyes about what was possible.

I had a lifetime of ideological brainwashing that I had to unlearn just like, well what about this? What about that? And back then I needed mentors and then books to learn and study to undo and unlearn what all the propaganda that, because these corporations that we talk about, they also control the mainstream media. They control the flow of information. Today we’re blessed with outlets like The Real News Network, Democracy Now, and others, where people who are beginning to question can go and learn the truth. Your series on the Middle East, ​“Under the Shadow,” has so much important information and education. And so Ron was talking about the responsibility. We have a responsibility to educate ourselves, because only then can we make informed decisions. If we’re just buying the boss’s propaganda, then this is what we’re left with, Trump against Harris. So there is a responsibility to think for ourselves and then we can act in an informed manner in our best interest. I’ll just leave it there.

SAWYER: Let’s just say at least something positive. We’re stuck with this two-party system and we can talk all we want about a third party and what have you. And I certainly advocate that. But right now there’s no reason why we can’t take, I believe, a portion of the Democratic Party and move it over to our way of thinking. We have to exist in the political system as it exists. Instead of just talking about it, we need to start putting forth candidates in the system that exists.

And I mean, you have some people like AOC. There’s nobody I agree with a hundred percent, but I appreciate people that are trying to lead us in a different direction and I have no problem throwing my support behind ​’em. And the issue for me is finding more candidates that support our positions who are workers or have been workers themselves and let’s start putting them in the office. I fully admire the Republican party in that they have gone out for years now on a grassroots campaign to take over school boards and on up. And now they’re able to impose the Supreme Court justices on the whole country because they put their mind to it. So we’ve got the example in front of us that a group of people can make a change. I don’t think theirs was a change we wanted to make, but for the interest of people. But we can respond to that. And the Democratic party has not been doing a good job in responding to it. But I think we can force ​’em to.

So I just want to say that it’s not hopeless. We can effect change in this country.