[ If he wanted to, Joe Biden could give railworkers the sick days
they’re seeking without any need for Senate approval. He is choosing
not to.]
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BIDEN IS STILL REFUSING TO GIVE RAILWORKERS PAID SICK LEAVE  
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Luke Savage
December 14, 2022
Jacobin
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_ If he wanted to, Joe Biden could give railworkers the sick days
they’re seeking without any need for Senate approval. He is choosing
not to. _

Long Island Railroad Workers on the Tracks, Jamaica, Queens , Steven
Pisano

 

This past month’s wrangling over a looming strike on America’s
railways saw Democratic leaders toe an extremely strange, and
characteristically incoherent, line. Any strike, as statements from
the likes of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi made explicitly clear, was to
be avoided at all costs — even if that meant imposing a contract on
railworkers that failed to address their key demand for paid sick
days. At the same time, and often in the same breath,
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likes of Biden, Pelosi, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg
insisted that workers deserved the very thing their own chosen course
was leaving them without.

In the wake of recent events, the official position
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the Biden White House continues to be that railworkers should indeed
be afforded the paid sick time they had been set to strike for.
That’s notable because, as commentators like the _American
Prospect_’s David Dayen
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as of last Friday, numerous members
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the House and Senate as well) have pointed out, a clear avenue for
doing exactly that remains open — one that bypasses the arcane rules
of the Senate entirely. As an open letter
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by Bernie Sanders and some seventy-one other representatives points
out, Biden has at his disposal the power to issue an executive order
mandating federal contractors to provide their workers with paid sick
days.

Such an action, though almost certain to be challenged in court, would
have both precedent and democratic legitimacy on its side. Majorities
in both houses of Congress, after all, have actually voted for sick
days already. Moreover, a 2015 executive order
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by Barack Obama that extended them to roughly three hundred thousand
workers
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by federal contractors provides a clear template. That order,
as detailed
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Rebecca Burns, Julia Rock, and Matthew Cunningham-Cook, included
certain concessions demanded by various actors in the business lobby
and, as a result, railworkers (and a number of others) were
indefensibly excluded.

If he wanted to, Biden could act now to try and correct this omission.
As the letter
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by Sanders and other lawmakers points out, the total cost of providing
seven paid sick days to roughly 115,000 rail workers would be about
$321 million. If that sounds like a lot of money, it shouldn’t: as
the same letter observes, it actually constitutes less than 2 percent
of the industry’s annual profits. The self-interested arguments of
rail barons as to why workers in their own sector should be excluded
from existing federal sick time provisions, in other words, don’t
stand up to basic scrutiny. Rail companies have been
enjoying tremendous profits
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years and could easily fund them if compelled to do so.

It’s a big if, of course, because the triangulating rhetoric of the
Biden White House to date doesn’t inspire much confidence.
Throughout this whole affair, the administration has clearly
prioritized
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a strike at all costs — and has both acquiesced to the Chamber of
Commerce and strong-armed workers in order to do so. Nevertheless, if
Biden were interested in rebuilding his now thoroughly tarnished
reputation as a prolabor president, using the tremendous executive
authority at his disposal to confront the rail companies would be an
obvious place to start.

A confrontation with private industry is what would almost certainly
be required — not only because an executive order would be
challenged in the courts but because the Democratic Party has been all
too keen to cultivate ties
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leading rail barons like BNSF’s Warren Buffett.

Still, failure to pursue the most obvious and direct path to winning
more than one hundred thousand workers paid sick time would represent
yet another glaring — and revealing — case of Democratic leaders
refusing to act in the very manner their own outwardly prolabor
rhetoric demands.

_Luke Savage is a staff writer at Jacobin._

* railroad workers
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* Paid Sick Leave
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* executive orders
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* Joe Biden
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