Biden signs bill to avoid US rail strike

Joe Biden has signed a deal to avert a potential rail strike after he had pushed for an eleventh-hour agreement between companies and worker unions, angering some of his supporters in the labour movement in the process.

In a signing ceremony on Friday morning in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, Biden said the bill helped the US avoid a cataclysmic economic blow, and that union workers would still get to lobby for some of the important measures that had been left out of the current agreement, most notably additional sick leave.

The bill “ends a difficult rail dispute and helps our nation avoid what could without a doubt would have been an economic catastrophe at a very bad time on the calendar”, Biden told reporters. “Our nation’s rail system is literally the backbone of our supply chain.”

Without the bill, many US industries “would literally shut down”, while as many as 765,000 Americans, many of them union members, “would have been put out of work for the first time”, Biden said.

The president intervened to prevent the strike this week after four of the country’s dozens of rail unions announced they would not support a tentative pay deal with rail companies, largely because it did not offer paid sick leave.

By choosing to intervene, Biden became the first president since George HW Bush to move to enforce a rail contract against the will of some union members — a particularly dramatic move for Biden given his longstanding ties to the unions and his claims to be the most pro-union president.

The intervention worked. This week, the House of Representatives and Senate passed legislation to avert the shutdown in two bipartisan votes. However, Congress failed to approve additional legislation to secure seven days of paid sick leave for workers — it passed in the House, but it failed to secure the requisite 60 votes in the Senate despite support from a half-dozen Republicans.

The decision to intercede earned Biden sharp criticism from some union leaders.

In his remarks on Friday, Biden acknowledged that the bill had been a “tough” decision for him and for many members of Congress, and stressed that the sick leave negotiation was not over, although he did not offer any concrete assurances on how it would be secured.

“We still have more work to do, in my view in terms of ultimately getting paid sick leave not just for rail workers but for every worker in America.

“Look, I know this bill doesn’t have paid sick leave, these rail workers and frankly every worker in America deserves that, but that fight isn’t over . . . I’ve supported paid sick leave for a long time. I’m going to continue that fight till we succeed.”