Worried about a Railroad Strike

There doesn’t need to be one.

Several of our clients have approached us up in arms about this very topic.

The Railway Labor Act (RLA) was crafted after a set of violent strikes and significant commerce interruption occurred in the 1920’s. Our staff is intimately familiar with the law in that in the 1930’s it was extended to airlines. It’s a law which governs all contracting between management and labor in both airlines and railroads (as an aside fact there are MANY more railroad companies than airlines in our nation–on the order of 600 railroad companies). The RLA is an unusually well crafted document and forces management and labor to get together; objective being that the trains run while negotiations are compelled. It’s a strong incentive for both sides to give and take to come to an agreement and the law itself is genuinely balanced in facilitating this goal.

The RLA describes a specific process regarding negotiations and when and how ‘self help’ types of events — up to and including a strike–may occur. Compared to most legal documents, it’s not that long and relatively easy to read:

Click to access Railway-Labor-Act-amended-Feb-14-2012.pdf

Of particular note is at the end of the day–if a national emergency exists or excessive disruption of commerce or essential services might occur to ANY community–the NMB and the President have the authority to convene a Presidential Emergency Board and issue a directive for the trains (or airplanes) to keep running.

Has this been used in the past ? Of course. During the 1990s–specifically February 1997– even the “union friendly” Clinton administration ordered striking American Airlines Pilots back to work after about an hour on strike.

As such, there really is no looming crisis. One would think the “Mandate Happy” Biden regime would be exceptionally keen to mandate railroad workers go back to work. The regime had NO hesitation in forcing masks and vaxes on Pilots and the traveling public. But given its propensity for economic destruction, here at D-J we’re not so sure. One thing IS clear–if a widespread strike DOES occur, the blame for any economic destruction will lay squarely at the feet of the President. This IS a genuine Presidential responsibility which has been broadly used by Democrats in the past.