News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
I saw that story from a distance but didn't really follow it. How did Biden negatively impact the workers striking against the railroads?
The railway strike would've caused shortages of chlorine for city water supplies, shortages of essential medicines like insulin and antibiotics, severe food insecurity and inflation, and would've led to millions of people losing their jobs. Railway freight accounts for 40% of freight transport in the US. Imagine 40% of everything that's made every day suddenly not getting to where it needs to go. There's a reason Congress has never refused to block a railway strike every time it's been threatened over the last 150 years.
The contract was good for the workers but didn't include paid sick days. Congress imposed the contract on the rail workers when a couple of unions didn't ratify it (although most of the unions did).
Biden kept working behind the scenes after signing the law Congress passed to block the strike and got the rail workers their sick days without the suffering a rail strike would've had on the millions of Americans who were already struggling with high inflation on essentials. The IBEW union explicitly thanked him for it: https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid
Imagine if more people knew this. They only saw "Biden bad for unions" and parrot the line while it's more "Biden administration weighs the challenges of a strike that would hurt common people, finds alternate path to satisfy all parties."
Sir/Mam, this is the internet. There is no place for nuance and full understanding of a topic around these parts.
Raaar, hiss, Biden bad, trump good, Biden good, trump bad, yada yada etc.
I've tried to make this argument on the more extreme political communities and the arguments supporting a strike ranged from "everyone would blame the rail companies" to "the damage to unions is worse" to "all those people without jobs would rise up in protest to support the unions" to "it wouldn't be that bad, it's being exaggerated by the corporate media."
It shows just how privileged those people are to actually think that when people who are already living paycheck to paycheck, rationing insulin to survive, and barely managing to feed their families suddenly lose their income, can't get insulin, see food prices double, and can't even drink the tap water anymore because of a "rail strike", they're going to understand the nuance of the situation and blame rail companies for not giving the workers sick days.
Why not force the companies to accept the union terms then instead of the other way around? Why is it always workers who have to capitulate to capital? The reason the government always interferes because we're ruled by capital and business interests.
If they're that important then they should have had all their issues addressed, including safety issues.
Also, the original contract was not good for the workers and that's why it wasn't ratified. The higher up union officials haven't been connected to the rank and file, hence their bad original deals and the IBEW boot licking statement. To be honest the safety issues from Presision Schedules Railroading still aren't addressed and they've only gotten a small amount of the sick days they asked for (Europe gets like 10-15, they got 4-6). It's something, but it's pathetic. You can't say you're the most friendly labor president and then sign a law destroying a strike. Instead, he should have made speeches blaming the railroad companies and tried to negotiate without signing the law destroying the strike, instead using the threat of a Congress law to force them to come to the table (which it sounds like he did, but only after destroying the unions leverage and absorbing the only power workers have). This was after the midterms so it's not like he had to worry about an immediate election.
For the record, I get why he did it, but I still disagree that it was the right move, or the only move. There are European countries that have rail strikes, and they manage to survive those apocalypses, and keep a healthier labor movement at the same time.
By saying that he would intervene with the national guard if railway workers actually striked.
100 years later, and still willing to gun down workers if profitable.
He actively pushed for, and passed, legislation that effectively forbade rail workers from picketing