President Joe Biden will travel to Michigan on Tuesday and walk the picket line with members of the United Auto Workers union, he announced Friday, a trip that comes after the president faced political pressure to ramp up his public support for the union members.
Thanks for posting this. I’ve been badmouthing Biden ever since he blocked the railroad strike, but that quote from a union leader — “Biden deserves a lot of the credit for achieving this goal for us. He and his team continued to work behind the scenes to get all of rail labor a fair agreement for paid sick leave" — finally cools my steam.
When he shows up and carries a UAW picket, I am ready to be honestly impressed.
The Union leader praising Biden for his later work voted to accept the original contract without sick days. They weren’t the ones that were blocked from a wanted strike. They were happy with the original provisional agreement.
Eh. The union had far more demands than sick days. They wanted 15 I think?
Congress tried to give them a week and failed. Biden got them 5.
There were also other major demands like the end of Precision Scheduled Railroading that never got met.
Sounds like Biden got them more than zero.
Progress comes in steps, and I expect leaders to take steps, not cast miracles
Strike action may well have gotten a far larger step.
If he couldn’t get at LEAST as much as the workers could’ve gotten themselves, the federal government should have stayed out of it.
“the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” paraphrasing Spock
The fact that Biden even stepped on at all, should tell you how bad the situation was. Also he’s not talking absolutely all the credit for this. Biden wasn’t there to make demands, he acted as a mediator to try and resolve this issue before it could hurt the country he was responsible for.
The government cannot just force a company to make drastic financial policy changes. I do wish they’d dictate CEO wage limitations, but that is a different discussion.
You’d rather have a massive impact to every citizens life occur, than guaranteed sick days?
Yes, we need to have an impact to draw attention to the fact that ANY worker has to fight for something as basic as SICK DAYS. That shouldn’t be a question, let alone for workers supposedly so important to the economy.
The system is broken, either the government doesn’t want to give workers basic protections or isn’t able to stand up to the rail conglomerates. Either way, shit’s broken. It’s gonna take some disruption to make progress.
And anyway, such strikes aren’t uncommon around the world. We would survive just fine.
You’re seeing the results that occured. Apparently it helped or else they would have asked them away and kept to their own efforts.
They were never gonna get 15. I assume 15 was the high ball with something in the middle being an acceptable target.
Perhaps, but again there were other demands as well. And 5 is quite low. I have a hard time seeing the federal government stepping in, keeping the workers from demonstrating their power, and then getting them a few crumbs of what they wanted as a good thing.
The big winner in that whole debacle was still the rail companies.
If that’s the best the federal government can get from the rail companies, and they won’t nationalize them, then the workers needed to strike anyway. Short term economic disruption be damned.
The government should step in the stop the rail companies, not the unions.