Click here for an article entitled "The one thing you need to know about the railroads," by Robert Reich.
Reich says that "legislation effectively prohibiting a strike would impose unfair working conditions on employees in one of the most profitable industries in America — further tilting the nation’s economic imbalance toward large corporations and Wall Street, and against working people."
An example of the railroads' profitability: "Union Pacific, the largest publicly traded US railroad, paid its investors more than $41 billion in dividends and share buybacks over five years through 2021. In the first six months of 2022, it heaped an additional $5 billion on them."
Reich asks: "Why is it that whenever lawmakers confront the social costs of corporate greed, they roll over? They allow the greed to prevail while penalizing workers and others who are most immediately harmed by it."
He ends the article as follows:
In the age-old battle between labor and capital, labor is taking it on the chin. In some respects, the US economy is back to where it was in the late nineteenth century.
After all, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 began with a work stoppage by railroad employees in West Virginia protesting a reduction in their wages. Railroad workers in other states soon joined them. Commerce in the East and Midwest was seriously disrupted. The economy was threatened.
The strikes were ended within a few weeks, largely because the federal government sided with the railroads. President Rutherford B. Hayes called out federal troops to quell the strikes.
Honestly, how far have we come since then?
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