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‘Strike Madness’ Hits Germany While Its Economy Stumbles

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A wave of strikes by German workers, feeling the sting of inflation and stagnant growth, is the latest sign of the bleak outlook for Europe’s economic powerhouse.For those striking at the gates of the SRW scrap metal plant, just outside Germany’s eastern city of Leipzig, time can be counted not just in days — 136 so far — but in the thousands of card games played, the liters of coffee imbibed and the armfuls of firewood burned.Or it can be measured by the length of Jonny Bohne’s beard. He vows not to shave until he returns to the job he has held for two decades. Wearing his red union baseball cap and tending the blaze inside an oil drum, Mr. Bohne, 56, looks like a scruffy Santa Claus.The dozens of workers at the SRW recycling center say their strike has become the longest in postwar German history — a dubious honor in a nation with a history of harmonious labor relations. (The previous record, 114 days, was held by shipyard workers in the northern city of Kiel who struck in the 1950s.)Jonny Bohne has vowed not to shave while on strike. It’s been awhile.Ingmar Nolting for The New York TimesWhile monthslong strikes may be commonplace in some other European countries like Spain, Belgium or France, where workers’ protests are something of a national pastime, Germany has long prided itself on nondisruptive collective bargaining.A wave of strikes this year has Germans asking whether that is now changing. By some measures, the first three months of 2024 have had the most strikes in the country in 25 years.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    French Protesters Rally in Last Angry Push Before Pension Bill Vote

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    Many believe the legislation to raise the retirement age to 64 from 62 will pass Parliament, and they are looking beyond the vote to fight on.PARIS — Hundreds of thousands of French protesters on Wednesday swarmed cities across the country, and striking workers disrupted rail lines and closed schools to protest the government’s plan to raise the legal retirement age, in a final show of force before the contested bill comes to a vote on Thursday.The march — the eighth such national mobilization in two months — and strikes embodied the showdown between two apparently unyielding forces: President Emmanuel Macron, who has been unwavering in his resolve to overhaul pensions, and large crowds of protesters who have vowed to continue the fight even if the bill to raise the retirement age to 64 from 62 passes Parliament — which many believe it will.“Macron has not listened to us, and I’m no longer willing to listen to him,” said Patrick Agman, 59, who was marching in Paris on Wednesday. “I don’t see any other option than blocking the country now.”But it remains unclear what shape the protest movement will take from here, with plenty of room for it either to turn into the kind of unbridled social unrest that France has experienced before or to slowly die out.Even as throngs marched in cities from Le Havre in Normandy to Nice on the French Riviera on Wednesday, a joint committee of lawmakers from both houses of Parliament agreed on a joint version of the pension bill, sending it to a vote on Thursday.While it remained unclear if Mr. Macron had gathered enough support from outside his centrist political party to secure the vote, the prime minister could still use a special constitutional power to push the bill through without a ballot. It’s a tool the government used to pass a budget bill in the fall, but it risks exposing it to a no-confidence motion.Although many French people surveyed expect the bill to pass, opponents of the legislation signaled they intended to keep fighting.Laurent Cipriani/Associated PressIn a sense, the demonstrations on Wednesday were a last call to try to prevent the bill from becoming law. “It’s the last cry, to tell Parliament to not vote for this reform,” Laurent Berger, the head of the country’s largest union, the French Democratic Confederation of Labor, said at the march in Paris.Three-quarters of French people believe the bill will pass, according to a study released by the polling firm Ellabe on Wednesday. And many protesters were looking beyond the vote, convinced that a new wave of demonstrations could force the government to withdraw the law after it is passed.Some teachers said they had already given notice of another strike to their principals. Others said they had saved money in anticipation of future strike-related wage losses.“The goal is really to hold on as long as possible,” said Bénédicte Pelvet, 26, who was demonstrating while holding a cardboard box in which she was collecting money to support striking train workers.All along the march route in Paris, colorful signs, banners and graffiti echoed the determination to continue the fight regardless of the consequences. “Even if it’s with garbage, we’ll get out of this mess,” red graffiti on a wall read, a reference to the heaps of trash that have piled up throughout cities in France because garbage workers have gone on strike.Rémy Boulanger, 56, who has participated in all eight national demonstrations against the pension bill, said anger had grown among protesters toward a government that he said “has turned a deaf ear to our demands.”France relies on payroll taxes to fund the pension system. Mr. Macron has long argued that people must work longer to support retirees who are living longer. But his opponents say the plan will unfairly affect blue-collar workers, who have shorter life expectancies, and they point to other funding solutions, such as taxing the rich.A strike by garbage workers has led to a pileup of trash on French streets.Christophe Archambault/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAbout 70 percent of French people want the protests to continue, and four out of 10 say they should intensify, according to the Ellabe poll.Union leaders have hinted that the mobilization would not stop, but they have yet to reveal their plans. “It’s never too late to be in the street,” Philippe Martinez, the head of the far-left C.G.T union, said on Wednesday.France has a long history of street demonstrations as a means to win, or block, changes. Most recently, the Yellow Vest movement that was born in 2018 led to demonstrations that went on for months and forced the government to withdraw plans to raise fuel taxes. But the last time the French government bowed to demonstrators and withdrew a law that had already passed was in 2006, when a contested youth-jobs contract was repealed.“Redoing 2006 would be ideal,” Mr. Boulanger said. But he acknowledged that a sense of fatigue was spreading among protesters — Wednesday’s protests were smaller than those a week ago. He said he was instead looking to the next presidential election, more than four years away, to bring about change.Other protesters pointed to 1995, when strikes against another pension bill paralyzed France for weeks, forcing the government to abandon its plan to send the proposed law to a vote.Ms. Pelvet, another demonstrator, acknowledged that the unions’ vow to bring the country “to a standstill” last week had failed, with a fair number of trains and public services still operating.“Nobody wants to go home,” Ms. Pelvet said. “But the road ahead is not clear yet.”Catherine Porter More

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    U.K. Rail Strike May Scuttle Post-Holiday Plans to Return to Work

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    Public sympathy for striking nurses and other health workers is particularly strong, posing a challenge for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who has promised to confront trade unions.The winter holiday season across most of Britain ends on Tuesday, but the return to work for millions of Britons comes on the same day as yet another train strike, promising a commute as unpredictable as the country’s increasingly erratic rail network.Britain begins the new year just as it ended the old one, in the middle of a wave of labor unrest that has involved as many as 1.5 million workers so far, concentrated in the public sector and formerly state-owned businesses. Nurses in England, Northern Ireland and Wales walked out twice last month; ambulance crews have staged their largest work stoppage in decades; and border agents, postal staff and garbage collectors have taken similar action in a “winter of discontent.”With wages lagging galloping inflation, many, including nurses, plan to stop work again this month, leading some British news outlets to raise fears of a de facto general strike that could bring the country to a grinding halt.Yet while months of disruption have eroded some sympathy for rail workers, with the public roughly split over train strikes, support for health workers, whose tireless efforts during the coronavirus pandemic were widely lauded as heroic, remains buoyant.“January will be the test: Will the British public shift?” said Steven Fielding, an emeritus professor of political history at the University of Nottingham. He added that while further rail strikes might prompt a long-predicted backlash against the unions, “It’s remarkable how much it hasn’t happened.”Sympathy for strikes by nurses and ambulance workers has been stoked by a sense than Britain’s National Health Service is overwhelmed.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesThat is not for want of effort by Britain’s conservative tabloids. One newspaper nicknamed Mick Lynch, the combative leader of a rail union, “The Grinch,” accusing him of wrecking Christmas, spoiling office parties and hampering family reunions. In the city of Bristol, one pub canceled a rail workers’ Christmas party in retaliation for strikes thought to have hurt the hospitality trade.But in general, support for the strikers has stayed strong, according to a YouGov opinion poll last month, which showed 66 percent of respondents supported striking nurses and 28 percent opposed them, 58 favoring firefighters with 33 against, and 43 percent in favor of rail workers with 49 opposed. Another poll, by Savanta ComRes, found the same percentage in support of further rail strikes, but only 36 percent opposed.Even many Britons who support the governing Conservative Party say they believe that health workers have a case, a reflection both of the popularity of the country’s National Health Service and concerns about its ability to cope with huge pressures. And, underscoring a growing sense of malaise, another poll recorded a majority agreeing with the statement that “nothing in Britain works anymore.”That may pose a challenge for Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who insists that agreeing to raises could embed inflation, which he sees as the real enemy of working people. Instead, he promises new, and as yet unspecified, laws to restrict labor unrest, while critics of trade unions argue rail workers are risking their futures as commuters stay away from a network already suffering from the growth of working from home.“It’s difficult for everybody because inflation is where it is, and the best way to help them and everyone else in the country is for us to get a grip and reduce inflation as quickly as possible,” Mr. Sunak told a parliamentary committee in December, when asked about the plight of striking workers.Nurses striking in London last month. A poll last month found 66 percent of respondents in favor of the strike, with 28 percent opposed.Maja Smiejkowska/ReutersNews reports suggest that an agreement to end the rolling series of rail strikes could be close, but despite holding the purse strings over the employers of rail staff, the government has resisted direct involvement in negotiations.The wave of strikes comes amid Britain’s cost-of-living crisis and follows years of constrained public spending, and unions say they are responding to a decade of neglect of vital services.“I think the fact that this comes after 10 to 12 years of austerity has affected the public mood and is maybe what’s helping the unions and their members not to lose public support,” said Peter Kellner, a polling expert. “The evidence so far is that public opinion hasn’t materially shifted. I don’t see any particular reason why it should, especially with the health service,” he added.At King’s Cross Station in London last week, there were certainly signs of annoyance among commuters at the disrupted services.“Most of the time my train is canceled or delayed,” said Daisy Smith, an airline worker from London who was waiting to travel to York, about two hours north of the capital. “It is ridiculous that they are on strike.”King’s Cross Station in London last week. Britons have long found their train service unreliable.Hollie Adams/Getty ImagesBut Ms. Smith said she sympathized with the strikers, believed they deserved a pay rise and was frustrated by the standoff. “The government needs to do something about it,” she said, adding that the dispute had been allowed to fester for months.Andrew Allonby, a public-sector worker who was traveling home to Newcastle, in northeast England, said he, too, supported the strikers.“I know there is no money around, but there has got to be a line,” he said, referring to reports that some health workers were relying on donated groceries. “Nurses having to go to food banks is ridiculous.”Public sympathy is being driven by a widespread feeling that the health system is understaffed and overwhelmed. One senior doctor made headlines by warning that as many as 500 patients a week could be dying because of long delays in emergency rooms across the country. And on Monday the vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine said many emergency departments were in a state of crisis.Pay levels for nurses are recommended by an independent body whose suggestion of a 4.3 percent increase, issued before much of last year’s inflation was evident, had been accepted by the government.That is well short of the 19 percent demanded by nurses, but ministers have refused to budge, pointing to a 3 percent annual raise for nurses in 2021, when the pay of many others was frozen for the year.Britain’s health secretary, Steve Barclay, raised hackles last month by saying that striking ambulance unions had made a “conscious choice to inflict harm on patients” — a statement described by Sharon Graham, general secretary of the union Unite, as a “blatant lie.”Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has promised new laws to restrict labor unrest.Kin Cheung/Associated PressMark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, told the broadcaster Sky News, “We have had 10 years where our pay has not kept pace with inflation.” He added that 40,000 government staff members used food banks and that 45,000 of them were so poor they had to claim welfare payments.Dawn Poole, a striking border force officer at London’s Heathrow International Airport and representative of the union, said that rising food and energy costs, combined with a hike in mortgage interest rates, had been the final straw for already-struggling staff.“We have had people selling houses to downsize or struggling to pay the rent,” she said. Mr. Sunak’s tough stance is a gamble. If the strikes collapse, that could build his reputation as a leader able to stand firm and administer tough measures to stabilize the economy. It could also bolster his leadership within a fractious Conservative Party, where standing up to trade unions is associated with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who came to power in 1979 after labor unrest also known as the winter of discontent and faced down striking miners.Mrs. Thatcher, however, prepared for her standoff with the miners, ensuring that coal stocks were high and confronting them at a time when unions were widely seen as too powerful.Inflation in Britain has been running at an annual rate of over 10 percent.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockBy contrast, today’s unions appear to be more in sync with the popular mood, analysts say, because Britons know that well before the strikes, their railways were unreliable and their health service was creaking under acute pressure.“The argument that ‘We’re on strike to save the National Health Service,’ which is what the nurses have been saying, resonates with what people know from their own experience,” said Professor Fielding.Mr. Kellner, the polling expert, said he believed that the government should separate the nurses and ambulance crews from other strikers.“As long as the health workers are on strike, the other unions have some degree of cover,” he said. “If in a month’s time we are where we are now, with nothing settled, I think the government will be in a really bad position.”In the meantime, rail travelers must decide whether to even try to head to the office this week. As one rail operator warned: “Until Jan. 8, only travel by train if absolutely necessary.” More

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    ‘Most Pro-Union President’ Runs Into Doubts in Labor Ranks

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    Many union leaders say the Biden White House has delivered on its promises. But its handling of a freight rail dispute has given rise to detractors.Joseph R. Biden Jr. vowed to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen.” And for the last two years, labor leaders have often lauded him for delivering on that promise.They cite appointees who are sympathetic to unions and a variety of pro-labor measures, like a pandemic relief bill that included tens of billions to shore up union pension funds.But in recent weeks, after Mr. Biden helped impose a contract on railroad workers that four unions had rejected, partly over its lack of paid sick days, many labor activists and scholars have begun to ask: How supportive is the president, really?To those reassessing Mr. Biden, the concern is that the president, by asking Congress to intervene and avert a strike, missed a rare opportunity to improve workers’ bargaining power in ways that could extend beyond the rail sector. They worry that the move essentially validated an employer strategy of waiting out workers in hopes that the pressure would fizzle.“Whether this group of workers has sick days or not on some level was not the issue,” said Kim Phillips-Fein, a historian at Columbia University who studies labor. “It was: What can people ask for and expect to win through collective action?”That Mr. Biden did not take a stronger stand, she added, “suggested a political blindness to what was really at stake.”At heart, the railroad episode has stirred a debate over what it means to be a pro-labor president.Defenders see Mr. Biden as unusually outspoken on behalf of workers’ rights. They cite his declaration during a unionization vote at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama that “there should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats” — an unusual if carefully worded gesture of presidential solidarity — and his dismay that Kellogg planned to permanently replace striking workers.“He has helped create a mood in the country as it relates to unions that has helped propel the extraordinary organizing going on,” said Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which organized the unsuccessful drive at the Alabama warehouse and is challenging the result. Mr. Appelbaum added that Mr. Biden’s announcement during the campaign was “beyond what we’d hoped for.”The president’s backers also point to a raft of labor-friendly regulations and legislation. Mr. Biden issued an executive order requiring so-called project labor agreements on federal construction projects above $35 million — agreements with unions that set wages and work rules — and the major climate and health bill he signed created incentives for clean energy projects to pay wages similar to union rates.Celeste Drake, a senior White House labor adviser, said in a statement that Mr. Biden had made “lasting strides for workers and unions” and that many of his achievements were “passed on a razor’s edge of tight margins in Congress, often with Republican votes, where the president’s advocacy for unions as a means to rebuilding the middle class could have jeopardized everything.” (More than 70 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, according to a recent Gallup poll.)Liz Shuler, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., who was the labor federation’s second-ranking official during the Obama presidency, said Mr. Biden’s administration had been far more solicitous of labor than the previous Democratic president, whom labor leaders sometimes criticized for backing free trade deals and contentious changes in education policy.“For the decisions made in the Obama administration, labor was often an afterthought,” Ms. Shuler said. “It’s the polar opposite with Biden. We’re included at the table ahead of time, before decisions are made.”Even the railway labor situation, in which Mr. Biden urged Congress to enact a contract that included significant wage gains and improvements in health benefits, ended up more favorable to workers than it probably would have under another administration, union officials say.The alternative view of Mr. Biden, put forth by many labor historians and activists, is that while the president has in fact been more obliging to unions and maintained better relationships with union leaders than his recent Democratic predecessors, the difference is one of degree rather than kind.They say that like his predecessors, Mr. Biden effectively seeks to manage the long-term decline of labor in a relatively humane way — by making favorable appointments and enacting measures that help at the margins — but has yet to take the sorts of risks that would restore power to workers.Mr. Biden has “gestured in interesting ways in certain moments,” said Gabriel Winant, a labor historian at the University of Chicago. “But it doesn’t seem like he has the stomach to see the gestures through.”For those who subscribe to this view, the rail labor dispute was a telling encapsulation of Mr. Biden’s approach: an instance in which the administration worked closely with many leaders of the dozen unions representing rail workers but angered portions of the rank and file. Members of four unions voted down the deal that the administration had helped broker but were not allowed to strike for a better one.Administration officials say that while Mr. Biden strongly supports the right to strike, the potential costs to the economy, which the industry said could be more than $2 billion per day, were simply too high to allow rail workers to walk off the job. They point out that a strike could have also posed health and safety risks — for example, by halting shipments of chemicals that ensure clean drinking water.But to critics, these risks were in some sense the point: They provided workers with a rare moment of leverage. They say Mr. Biden could have simply refused to sign any legislation that didn’t include paid sick days, then made clear that rail carriers were to blame for any disruption if they refused.Administration officials say the potential costs to the economy were simply too high to allow rail workers to walk off the job.Dustin Chambers for The New York Times“Biden in this case revealed that I’m your friend, but I won’t risk anything for you,” said Joseph A. McCartin, a historian at Georgetown University who has written extensively about transportation labor disputes.And if taking a more forceful stand on behalf of rail workers was high risk, Mr. McCartin said, it was also high reward: Because transportation infrastructure touches almost every part of the country, labor relations in that sector tend to reverberate widely.“Everybody sees it, everybody watches, everybody’s affected,” he said. An open letter to Mr. Biden last month, signed by Mr. McCartin and more than 400 other scholars, said federal interventions in transportation labor disputes “can set the tone for entire eras.”The letter cited the government’s move to grant rail workers an eight-hour workday to avoid a strike during World War I, which paved the way for similar gains by other workers in the 1930s. By contrast, the letter said, President Ronald Reagan’s firing of striking air traffic controllers in the early 1980s helped undermine the leverage of workers across the economy for decades.The contention among critics is that by effectively depriving rail workers of the right to strike, Mr. Biden has made it more difficult for other workers to use that tool — and, ultimately, to reverse the movement’s long-term decline.Strikes with strong backing from union membership “are the only way to win standard-setting contracts, and winning standard-setting contracts is the only way to rebuild the labor movement,” said Jane McAlevey, a scholar and longtime organizer. Her coming book, “Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations,” documents the importance of aggressive labor actions in improving pay and working conditions.Workers and organizers at the forefront of recent union campaigns at companies like Starbucks and Amazon said they worried that Mr. Biden’s intervention in the rail labor dispute sent employers a message that the federal government would not punish them for anti-union behavior.“Everyone understands the significance of the president getting involved,” said Christian Smalls, the president of the Amazon Labor Union, which won an election to represent workers at a Staten Island warehouse in April. “To claim you’re the most pro-union president in history and do something like this contradicts everything.” (Amazon has challenged the union’s victory.)In some respects, it may have been unrealistic for labor activists to expect that Mr. Biden, who has carried himself as a middle-of-the-road Democrat for much of his career, would depart from the basic model of labor relations that has long prevailed in his party.But during the presidential campaign, Mr. Biden and some of his senior advisers discussed ways in which they hoped to break with longstanding economic orthodoxy in Washington, with its emphasis on free markets and a small role for government.Those who support more populist-minded policies say Mr. Biden has delivered in certain ways: enacting subsidies for domestic manufacturing and restrictions on trade with China and appointing regulators who have frequently gone to court to block large mergers.“There obviously has been progress made,” said Oren Cass, a former Republican policy aide and the founder of American Compass, which seeks to make conservatism more supportive of workers.Yet when it comes to labor, some say Mr. Biden has been less willing to rethink the reigning economic model.“If Biden had intervened in a way that was more favorable and sympathetic to the rail workers, that would have been a sign of him really breaking with that model, and the model itself no longer seeming to fit the current moment,” said Ms. Phillips-Fein, the Columbia historian. “That it didn’t happen suggests the limits of his political imagination.” More

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    Leaders in Congress Say They Will Act to Prevent Rail Strike

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    Democratic and Republican leaders prepared to intercede as President Biden warned the prospect of a December strike put the U.S. economy “at risk.”After a meeting with President Biden, Democratic and Republican leaders pledged to pass legislation that would avert a planned nationwide rail strike in December.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWASHINGTON — Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress vowed on Tuesday to pass legislation averting a nationwide rail strike, saying they agreed with President Biden that a work stoppage during the holidays next month would disrupt shipping and deal a devastating blow to the nation’s economy.The rare bipartisan promise to act came as some of the nation’s largest business groups warned of dire consequences from a rail shutdown. Mr. Biden, who had promised to be the most pro-union president in the country’s history, said the federal government must short-circuit collective bargaining in this case for the good of the country as a whole.“It’s not an easy call, but I think we have to do it,” he told the top four lawmakers from both parties during a meeting at the White House on Tuesday morning, as the Dec. 9 strike deadline loomed. “The economy is at risk.”Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House would vote Wednesday on a tentative agreement that Mr. Biden’s administration had helped negotiate between rail companies and the unions earlier this year. The agreement raised wages but lacked provisions for paid medical or family leave.Late Tuesday, facing substantial frustration among progressives who demanded that the offer include paid leave, Ms. Pelosi said she would also bring up a separate proposal to add seven days of paid sick leave to the agreement. It is unclear whether Republicans in the Senate would agree to such an addition, but the plan to hold a vote illustrated the degree of discontent among pro-union liberals about the agreement Mr. Biden had struck.“They demand the basic dignity of paid sick days. I stand with them,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, said on Twitter. “If Congress intervenes, it should be to have workers’ backs and secure their demands in legislation.”Senate leaders said they would work to pass legislation to avert the strike quickly after it passes the House, as expected. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, told reporters that “we’re going to need to pass a bill,” suggesting that Republicans did not intend to try to block such a move. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House minority leader, said, “I think it will pass.”If it does, it will be bittersweet for Mr. Biden, who has built a decades-long political career by stressing his support for unions in their battles against management. Aides said the president had been reluctant to override the will of union workers, but ultimately changed his mind when three of his cabinet secretaries told him that negotiations had broken down and a strike seemed inevitable.Officials said Mr. Biden concluded that the effects of a strike, including hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, would be too damaging. Frozen train lines would snap supply chains for commodities like lumber, coal and chemicals, and delay deliveries of automobiles and other consumer goods, driving up prices even further.The American Trucking Associations, an industry group, recently estimated that relying on trucks to work around a rail stoppage would require more than 450,000 additional vehicles — a practical impossibility given the shortage of equipment and drivers.Understand the Railroad Labor TalksCard 1 of 5Averting a shutdown. More

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    Railroad Workers Point to Punishing Schedules as Cause of Strike

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    Employees say the inflexibility of scheduling upended their personal lives. The companies say they maintained service while using fewer resources.To defuse a labor dispute that brought the nation to the brink of a potentially catastrophic railroad strike, negotiators had to resolve a key issue: schedules that workers say were punishing, upending their personal lives and driving colleagues from the industry.Workers, industry analysts and customers say the practices emanate from a business model that focuses relentlessly on holding down expenses, including labor costs. They say this leaves rail networks with little capacity to work around a disruption, whether it be a personal issue for an employee or a natural disaster like a hurricane — or, for that matter, a pandemic.Negotiations in which the Biden administration took an active role produced a tentative contract deal announced early Thursday. The agreement included a significant pay increase for the workers, whose base wages typically start around $50,000 and top out around $100,000, excluding overtime and benefits. But scheduling was the sticking point.Unions complained that to manage a shortfall of employees, the carriers effectively forced their members to remain on call for days and sometimes weeks at a time, partly through the use of strict attendance policies that could lead to disciplinary action or even firing. They said the policies pushed workers to the limits of their physical and mental health.“Every facet of your life is dictated by this job,” said Gabe Christenson, who until this year worked as a conductor for a large freight rail carrier. “There’s no way to get away from it.” Carriers said employees could take time off through paid vacation, income replacement for sick workers or removal of themselves from the list of available workers.“Railroads provide multiple ways for employees to take time to care for themselves and their families,” the Association of American Railroads, an industry group, said in a statement earlier this week.By Sunday, leaders of 10 of the 12 unions in the talks had agreed to contract terms. But two unions representing conductors and engineers — about half the 115,000 freight rail workers involved in the dispute — held out for a concession on scheduling, like the ability to see a doctor or attend to a personal matter without risking disciplinary action.President Biden in the Oval Office on Thursday with representatives of the railroads and the unions as well as Labor Department officials.Doug Mills/The New York Times“It would not harm their operations to treat employees like humans and let them take care of medical issues,” Dennis Pierce, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, one of the two unions, said in an interview on Monday. “It’s the primary outstanding issue, one we won’t budge on — the request that they stop firing people who get sick.”After the tentative deal was announced, the two unions said it included “contract language exempting time off for certain medical events from carrier attendance policies.” The agreement will require ratification by union members, a process that could take a few weeks.In some respects, the freight rail industry is similar to other swaths of the economy, such as retail and food service, where employers have imposed increasingly lean staffing in recent decades.Rick Paterson, a longtime industry analyst with the investment bank Loop Capital, said the staffing trend for railroads became more pronounced in the early 2000s when, after years of consolidation, carriers and their investors began to recognize that they had pricing power.As a result, the dominant business model in the industry shifted from one in which the carriers sought larger volumes of traffic to one in which they sought to increase profits by raising prices and lowering expenses like labor costs.“They realized that if growing pricing is good for margins, then keeping costs low is even better,” said Mr. Paterson, who has referred to this thinking as “the cult of the operating ratio,” after the ratio of operating expenses to revenue.A freight train yard near the Port of Los Angeles on Thursday. A strike by freight rail workers would have been economically damaging.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesThe side effect, however, was to gradually eliminate any cushion in staffing levels.Unlike many workers, the conductors and engineers who operate trains don’t get weekends or other consistent days off.Instead, said Mr. Pierce, the president of the locomotive engineers union, workers go to the bottom of a list of available crews when they return home from a trip that can last days. The fewer the workers, the shorter the list, and the less time it takes for them to be summoned into action again.“It can go on indefinitely, till they interrupt the cycle by taking paid time off, which the companies routinely reject,” Mr. Pierce said.Major U.S. freight rail carriers began to accelerate the staffing cuts in recent years as they switched to a system known as precision scheduled railroading, or P.S.R., which focuses on scaling back excess equipment and employees and streamlining the shipping process. The industry has said P.S.R. enables carriers to run more efficiently and provide more reliable service, while also improving profits. Freight rail customers and employees say it has resulted in deteriorating working conditions and customer service and little resilience in dealing with unforeseen circumstances, like weather emergencies. The Surface Transportation Board, a federal regulatory agency, estimates that the carriers have 30 percent fewer employees today than six years ago.Reducing labor to match this operating model may have been sound in principle, said Mr. Paterson, the industry analyst. But he said the carriers appeared to have cut back too much to allow them to handle potential disruptions, of which the pandemic was an epic example.“When you do P.S.R., you can drop your head count by 30 percent, but why don’t you drop it 28 percent and build in a crew reserve?” he asked. “That didn’t happen.”With little margin for error, carriers found themselves with too few workers to operate their rail networks once business began to recover in the second half of 2020, putting more and more stress on their workers, and making it even harder for them to take time off.Freight rail workers on train tracks in Atlanta on Thursday.Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesWhen Mr. Christenson, the longtime conductor, who is also a co-chair of the industrywide group Railroad Workers United, began feeling run-down last year, he was reluctant to see a doctor. Under his company’s attendance policy, taking an unplanned day off could lead to disciplinary action, and “I worried about triggering an investigation,” he said.So he waited until he could get an appointment on a scheduled day off a few months later, at which point he got bad news: He had an infection that might have been easily resolved with medication but now required surgery.“They had to cut infected tissue out in my leg,” Mr. Christenson said.Railroad workers and their families, many of whom asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, said similar attendance policies, which are partly intended to manage the industry’s labor shortfall, had resulted in workers’ missing important life events.This year, for example, BNSF Railway introduced a new point system for some employees, according to a February memo obtained by The New York Times. Under the policy, workers were awarded 30 points to start with and would lose points — from two to 10 — for scheduling a day off for a variety of reasons, including a family emergency, sickness or fatigue. They lose even more points for being unavailable at the last minute.When workers run out of points, they face escalating penalties, starting with a 10-day suspension, followed by a 20-day suspension and ending with possible firing. Workers can earn back points by being available for two weeks straight. BNSF said on Thursday that the policy was “designed to improve the consistency of crews being available for their shifts” and to give employees more “predictability and transparency” regarding their schedules. It said that the program was achieving those goals but that revisions had been made to give employees more flexibility. One railroad worker said the fast turnaround time between shifts had forced him to skip doctor’s appointments to address his symptoms of long Covid. Railroad workers’ family members said they rarely celebrated birthdays or holidays together even before the pandemic.Workers say that while they have paid vacation and days allotted for personal leave, the constraints that employers impose — like requiring vacation to be taken in limited windows that are far oversubscribed, or simply rejecting a proposed personal day — severely limit their options as a practical matter.Shippers have grown frustrated, too.Rail cars full of grain sat at production facilities in the Midwest for weeks at a time earlier this year, far longer than typical, said Max Fisher, the chief economist and treasurer for the National Grain and Feed Association.Chemical manufacturers, which rely on freight rail to move their products, have grown increasingly frustrated with the carriers since December, according to three surveys by the American Chemistry Council, an industry association. The latest, conducted in July, found that 46 percent of the companies felt that rail service was getting worse, while only 7 percent said it was improving.“Freight rail has been a constant thorn in our side and been a significant challenge for our members for quite some time,” said Chris Jahn, the organization’s chief executive.While the labor agreement announced on Thursday may avert a strike, it is unlikely to resolve the deeper issues that have put unions and rail carriers on a collision course. Even if carriers wanted to turn back the clock on efforts to increase efficiency, they would have shareholders to answer to.After Bill Ackman, the activist investor, won a proxy battle over the freight carrier Canadian Pacific a decade ago, the company hired Hunter Harrison, who pioneered P.S.R., as its chief executive. Mr. Harrison imposed the system there and then at CSX after joining that company in 2017, prompting investors to pressure other carriers to follow suit to eke out similar efficiencies.“Lurking in the background is the constant threat of shareholder activism if any of the railroads’ operating ratios become outliers on the high side,” Mr. Paterson said in testimony to the Surface Transportation Board this spring. More

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    Biden Maneuvers to Try to Avoid Devastating Rail Strike

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    The Biden administration is considering executive action to try to avoid a shutdown of the nation’s rail network that would harm the economy ahead of the midterm elections.WASHINGTON — President Biden, desperate to avert a damaging freight rail strike that could exacerbate rapid inflation, is pushing rail companies and unions to reach an agreement ahead of a Friday deadline, while exploring whether he can do anything unilaterally to assuage workers’ concerns.Mr. Biden and his economic team have been inserting themselves into final-hour negotiations between rail unions and large rail companies, which are at loggerheads over scheduling and sick time. Labor groups have insisted that employees be able to take unpaid time off for physician appointments, a request railroad companies have been unwilling to grant.On Wednesday, in anticipation of a strike, Amtrak said it would cancel all long-distance passenger trains beginning on Thursday in order to avoid possibly stranding people given that many of its trains run on tracks operated and maintained by freight carriers.Also on Wednesday, members of a small rail union, whose leaders had reached a tentative deal with freight companies, voted down the agreement, signaling more difficulty in negotiations to come. And Mr. Biden’s labor secretary gathered union and company leaders in Washington to try to resolve the impasse, with little progress.The looming strike has plunged Mr. Biden into a difficult position at a critical moment, with midterm elections that will determine whether Democrats retain control of Congress rapidly approaching and rampant inflation chipping away at the president’s support. Mr. Biden, a longtime champion of labor leaders and union employees, is caught between his long-running push to reduce the pandemic-era supply chain snarls that have helped fuel inflation and his efforts to continue to win the enthusiastic support of labor unions.As a result, Mr. Biden is attempting to walk a careful line, taking pains to tell both unions and companies that they have an obligation to the public to keep rail service moving. While he has pushed to elevate the power of organized labor throughout his time in office, he is wary of hurting American consumers and the economy, which could experience shortages and price spikes from even a brief strike.President Biden and his economic team have been inserting themselves into final-hour negotiations between the rail unions and large rail companies.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesOn Monday, Mr. Biden phoned leaders on both sides of the table to urge a deal, stressing the same message to both sides, according to people familiar with the discussions: A strike will hurt rail customers and a broad swath of people and businesses across the country, and a negotiated agreement is the best way to avoid one.Martin J. Walsh, the labor secretary, and White House officials hosted union and company leaders in Washington on Wednesday in an attempt to broker a deal before Friday, when a federally imposed “cooling off period” for negotiations expires. Workers could go on strike immediately, though they will not automatically do so.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More

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    Strike Threat on Freight Railroads Is New Supply Chain Worry

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    Administration officials are pushing for a settlement to head off a walkout by tens of thousands of workers on Friday.Biden administration officials are racing to prevent a strike by tens of thousands of freight railroad workers that could further disrupt an already strained supply chain and cause billions of dollars in economic damage.The industry failed to reach a contract agreement with two unions representing much of the work force, and a federally mandated 30-day “cooling off” period ends on Friday, opening a door to strikes and lockouts. Some freight companies have started to limit services, and Amtrak, which carries many travelers on lines operated by freight railroads, said it would cancel some passenger service starting on Tuesday.Labor Secretary Martin J. Walsh pressured both sides over the weekend to reach an agreement, and administration officials have held dozens of calls with the industry and the unions, according to the Labor Department.“All parties need to stay at the table, bargain in good faith to resolve outstanding issues and come to an agreement,” the department said in a statement. “The fact that we are already seeing some impacts of contingency planning by railways again demonstrates that a shutdown of our freight rail system is an unacceptable outcome for our economy and the American people, and all parties must work to avoid that.”The deadlock puts President Biden in a complicated position. His administration has taken pains to restore and fortify the supply chain, which was deeply disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. It has also worked hard to protect and endorse union rights.“A strike doesn’t help anybody,” Mr. Walsh said in an interview late last month. “A strike doesn’t help the workers. A strike doesn’t help the general public. A strike certainly doesn’t help the supply chain.”In July, Mr. Biden established an emergency board to help mediate the dispute between the industry, which includes six of the largest freight rail carriers, and about a dozen unions. Last month, that board recommended a resolution with a cumulative raise of 24 percent from 2020 through 2024, including an immediate 14 percent wage increase covering the first three years.Most of the unions agreed to the proposal, pending a vote of their membership. But two major unions are holding out for improvements to working conditions, which they say have steadily worsened in recent years as rail carriers have cut staffing.The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen and the SMART Transportation Division, which represent engineers and conductors, say workers must often stay on call for several days at a time, working 12-hour shifts with little notice, and are penalized for calling in sick.“Our unions remain at the bargaining table and have given the rail carriers a proposal that we would be willing to submit to our members for ratification, but it is the rail carriers that refuse to reach an acceptable agreement,” they said in a joint statement. “In fact, it was abundantly clear from our negotiations over the past few days that the railroads show no intentions of reaching an agreement with our unions.”Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More