 On November 30th, the US House of Representatives passed a bill that seeks to block a strike by rail workers in the country. These workers have been protesting for months against the cutting down of the workforce and seeking better scheduling and paid leave. Due to the prospect of a powerful strike, the Joe Biden administration was forced to intervene in September and a deal was struck between the employers and the unions. However, the membership of a number of unions rejected the deal, paving the way for a strike. If it was in this context that the House of Representatives intervened, the bill will now go to the Senate. Eugene Porir of Breakthrough News explains the nature of the railway industry in the US and the demands of the workers. Well, the rail strike, which is potentially looming here in the United States, the earliest it could happen would be December 9th after a cooling off period, is a huge, huge element of the labor struggle here in America. If people have a sense, almost everything moves by rail. So whether we're talking about food, fuel, medicine, everything, you know, good, bad or indifferent, including passenger rail, because most of the rail in America, the actual tracks are controlled by freight rail. So we're talking about the potentiality of a total shutdown of all of the freight railways and most of the passenger railways in the United States, which would bring the economy to a screeching halt. And the reason that is happening is because the Congress of the United States or at least the Democratic Party, which is running the lower house of Congress, we should say the House of Representatives, the White House has decided to side with these huge major giant companies, a handful of companies, four or five companies that control most of the freight rail in the United States. Those companies are completely denying the ability of workers to have access to adequate health care. And that's what this is really turning on. It's health and safety issues. So the big issue that is out there is the issue of paid sick days. The workers who are working on many of these railways oftentimes are away from their home for weeks at a time. Even when they are off, they are on call about 90 percent of the time. So it's the type of job that not only are there long extended hours, but it's also the type of job that you can be called in at any moment. And so it's a difficult job to handle things like health care, for instance, without paid time off, unless you want to lose money because scheduling appointments, doing follow-up appointments, if you have an emergency, if you just get sick. I mean, it's really one of the most difficult jobs scheduling wise to really be able to deal with those kind of up and downs. And the railway workers across the 12 unions that make up the broader sort of railway brotherhood, as they're traditionally called in the United States, have access to zero, zero paid sick days. They have no paid sick days. The deal that is on the table that will be imposed potentially by Congress, maybe, maybe not, we'll see, would give them access to three unpaid sick days. But again, that's just three days. They're unpaid and they'd have to be scheduled 30 days in advance. So what this is really coming down to is railroad workers want to have access to adequate health care. They want to be able to have a number, an adequate number of paid sick days. I mean, at one point they were attempting to get 15. They've said they're willing to settle for just four. They just don't want to have to schedule at 30 days in advance. So very reasonable demands by the workers. They also have been raising a number of issues around safety. The trains have become very long, sometimes miles long, but they've heavily reduced the workforce of the of the broader railway companies. So they're making about 85 percent more profits as opposed to the year 2000. But they're doing it with tens of thousands of thousands of fewer workers. So workers are working longer. They're working harder. The companies are making much more profits. But because they're working longer and harder, there are more opportunities for them to get hurt, to get sick or anything of that nature and they have access to no paid sick days. So this is what it's going to come down to. It would cost $688 million to provide 15 paid sick days for all the railway workers. The railroad industry made $20 billion in profits in 2020 and 2021 alone. So it's pure corporate greed. It's the pure desire of the railway companies to make the most amount of money possible, no matter what it costs the workers in terms of health and safety, family or whatever it may be. So that's the basic situation that we have here. The possibility of a total rail shutdown over the fact that workers are not granted one paid sick day off despite the fact that companies made $20 billion in profit in 2021. So the basic demands that the workers are presenting here are around their ability to essentially stay alive. Right now they have a situation where workers are and there's a lot of different types of workers. And that's an important thing to understand about these railway brotherhoods. The ones that are at stake, it's about four unions that represent the vast majority of railway workers, about 60,000 out of about 115,000. And one of the things that they're most concerned with is that since their schedule is so inflexible and so random that they're not able to actually access health care without having to take unpaid days off and thus lose income. So the main demands that they were putting forward were, you know, the normal demands that were out there in terms of people when people think of unions wage and hour demands. The contract did include a 24 percent increase over, I think it's a five year period, but the point in wages and a $5,000 bonus, but as the unions pointed out, that didn't even keep up to inflation. But the workers did not make that the sticking point issue, the issue of wages. They really made the issue of health care benefits and safety, the sticking point issues. So from a health care perspective, what workers want is access to paid sick days. They're willing to settle for about four paid sick days, although originally they were seeking 15 paid sick days. The company is only offering three unpaid. The companies are offering three unpaid sick days that have to be scheduled 30 days in advance. The Biden administration, Nancy Pelosi, and the Democrats in the House of Representatives are backing three unpaid days scheduled 30 days in advance. So back in the company's 100 percent workers are also have been raising in the alarm about the increase in safety hazards. The trains are getting significantly longer. They're working with fewer and fewer workers over time. The workforce has been dramatically cut on the rail. So even though profits are going up for the companies because they're able to ship more faster and pay people less and work the people they have longer and harder to do it. It's creating bigger concerns in terms of the checks on what's happening on the trains, the possibilities for derailments, the possibilities for workers to get hurt while they are doing the various work along the trains that was once done by multiple people, sometimes being done by one person in certain situations. So there's a lot of dangerous hazards that are there as well. And those are issues that they would want to be addressed. Those issues also totally unaddressed. And the bosses are claiming that there are no safety issues whatsoever with them making these trains longer and longer and having fewer and fewer people to look after them, despite wanting to also run them at faster speeds. So, you know, that's really what workers are laying forward. But they are willing to accept quite a bit. They're willing to accept wages that are below inflation in terms of their increases. They're willing to accept the fact that there's not going to be a 100 percent settlement in terms of the issues of safety that exist. All they're saying is just give us four paid sick days off that we don't have to schedule in advance because a lot of times the sick days, it's an emergency. And we're willing to go back to work here. But ultimately, the greed of the corporations is meaning that there is the possibility for a strike on December 9th after the so-called cooling off period.