With the baby steps the Democratic Party’s taken toward a more
economically progressive, pro-working-class politics over the last two
years, it shouldn’t be forgotten that this is still a corrupt,
out-of-touch party divorced from any such tradition. And with his loss
in the 2020 Democratic primary, it’s easy to forget the value of Bernie
Sanders’s continuing presence in American political life, especially the
US Senate.
Yet the events of the past twenty-four hours should serve as reminders of both.
For the past week or so, Congress has been consumed by the prospect
of a looming and potentially monumentally disruptive strike by
railworkers, who have spent three years negotiating with
rail carriers for a better contract, centered on their lack of rights
to take paid time off work if they fall ill. After four unions
representing more than half of the unionized rail workforce rejected a
deal put together by President Joe Biden’s White House and a panel of
experts that didn’t do enough to fix these grievances, labor secretary
Marty Walsh and, eventually, congressional leaders themselves pushed for
congressional intervention to end the stalemate, effectively by forcing
railworkers to accept the deal anyway ― in the process, stripping the
workers of leverage in negotiations. The whole episode came to a head
yesterday.
In a statement on Monday calling for Congress to end the impasse, Biden ― the self-proclaimed “most
pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in
American history” ― misleadingly hailed the White House–brokered deal
that cut the legs out from under railworkers as a grand victory agreed
to “by both sides.”
Casting himself as a “proud pro-labor president,” he stressed the
potential economic downsides of a rail strike to explain why he was
reluctantly overriding “the views of those who voted against the
agreement” ― meaning, striking railworkers ― and rejected letting
Congress modify the deal for workers’ sake, claiming “any changes would
risk delay and a debilitating shutdown,” even though unions set the
strike deadline for December 9, nearly two weeks after he put out the
statement. Ironically, the president has ended up to the right of where
he was in the 1990s, when the then senator Biden was arguably at the terrible peak of his neoliberal transformation yet nonetheless voted against letting Congress end a major rail strike. Railworkers have understandably savaged Biden, while big business groups have sung his praises.
Outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put out a similarly tone-deaf statement,
patting Biden and his labor secretary on the back as “proudly
pro-union” while hailing the contract they were forcing on railworkers
as having “secured important advances for workers.” Pelosi lamely added
some condemnation of railroad companies’ “obscene profits” for good
measure, even as she made clear she was intervening firmly on the side
of helping the carriers maintain those profits.
This was more or less the
position of other prominent Democrats: expressions of regret and even
condemnations of corporate greed meant to mask the fact that they were
intervening on the side of the corporate profiteers. The House’s number
two Democrat, Steny Hoyer, insisted he was “sympathetic to the issue of
sick leave” and thought “the labor unions make a very valid case” as he
lined up behind the White House. Even otherwise pro-worker Democrats
like Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, and Kirsten Gillibrand ― who had
rebranded herself as a progressive in order to run for president in 2020
― borrowed from this playbook as
they made clear they would go along with Biden’s plan. Transportation
secretary Pete Buttigieg, meanwhile, didn’t even bother with this
formality, simply saying it was “vitally important” for the thing to pass due to the “devastating impacts on our economy.”
A more common response was to do as the number three House Democrat,
Representative Jim Clyburn, did and simply ignore the matter entirely.
By yesterday late afternoon, prominent Democrats like Cory Booker, Ed
Markey, and ex–presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar ― who had seen fit
to tweet that afternoon about the United States winning its soccer World Cup match and an elderly retiree hiking the
Appalachian trail ― hadn’t said a single thing either way. The ranks of
Democrats staying silent on the situation unfortunately included a
number of high-profile progressives, including “Squad” members Ilhan
Omar and Ayanna Pressley, and Illinois progressive Chuy GarcÃa.
The political malpractice on display here became clear when several
Republicans used it as an opening to posture as pro-worker. Ted Cruz
called railworker demands for sick leave “quite reasonable,” while, more
significant, Marco Rubio put out a subtly union-bashing statement calling
for both sides to “go back and negotiate a deal that the workers, not
just the union bosses, will accept” and affirming he would “not vote to
impose a deal that doesn’t have the support of the rail workers.”
Likewise, Josh Hawley, who has moved to brand himself as a pro-worker populist in advance of a planned 2024 run, stated that
workers “said no and then Congress is gonna force it down their throats
at the behest of this administration.” Even Colorado Democrat John
Hickenlooper, hardly a progressive firebrand, saw which way the wind was
blowing and affirmed that “any bill should include the SEVEN days of sick leave rail workers have asked for.”
In other words, several Republicans and a guy who drank fracking fluid were to the left of the “most pro-union president” in history.
Left-Wing Pushback
This abysmal state of affairs was injected with a modicum of hope
thanks to the small but significant presence of left-wing lawmakers in
Congress, whose pushback against the Democratic leadership’s move was
led by Sanders in the Senate.
Sanders had made clear for months he would back whatever decision railworkers made and had criticized billionaire
Warren Buffet ― who owns the parent company of BNSF Railway ― earlier
this week, pointing out that “in one day, Mr. Buffett made twice as much
money as it would cost to guarantee fifteen paid sick days a year to
every rail worker in America.” More important, while Democrats got in
line behind the president and party leadership, Sanders ― who had withheld his support for the president’s agreement for months and blocked Republicans’ earlier attempts to ram the inadequate deal through ― criticized the plans and made clear he’d block any such legislation until seven paid sick days for railworkers were included.
He was joined by a number of other left-wing lawmakers, like “Squad” member Jamaal Bowman, who called it “an inhumane deal being pushed onto workers even after a majority voted it down.” Fellow “Squad” members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“If Congress intervenes, it should be to have workers’ backs and secure their demands in legislation”), Rashida Tlaib (“I stand with rail workers”), and Cori Bush (“I
will not support a deal that does not provide our rail workers with the
paid sick leave they need and deserve”) also took the side of workers.
Before long, Sanders made plans to introduce an amendment in the
Senate to the legislation mandating seven days’ worth of sick leave for
the railworkers, joined by Bowman doing the same in the House, daring Republicans to vote against it. “Look, you have a number of Republicans who claim — claim —
to be supporters of the working class,” Sanders told Chris Hayes last
night. “Well, if you are a supporter of the working class, how are you
going to vote against the proposal which provides guaranteed paid sick
leave to workers who have none right now?”
These efforts rapidly rearranged the political terrain, with Pelosi
suddenly and subtly shifting her position late in the day and announcing
plans to allow lawmakers to vote today to add the seven days of paid
sick leave to the agreement. Previously silent lawmakers like GarcÃa
expressed support for the move. It all culminated in the House passing
the seven-day sick leave amendment just now by a vote of 221-207, with
all Democrats and only three Republicans voting in favor.
Despite the dearth of House GOP support for the measure, Republican
senator John Cornyn had earlier predicted it could get the required GOP
support needed to reach sixty votes in the Senate, because “there will
be a lot of sympathy for providing sick leave for workers.” In many
ways, this is something of a repeat of events at the close of 2020, when
Sanders and other progressives in Congress, with the belated aid of
Hawley, forced the foot-dragging then-president Donald Trump,
president-elect Biden, and Democratic leadership to all reluctantly back
another round of stimulus checks. But whether progressives will succeed
here is an open question and one that’ll largely depend on how many
Republicans see it in their political interest, as they did when they
just voted to legalize marriage equality, to move to the center, away
from their long-standing hostility to workers’ rights.
Whatever happens, this has been another sign of the modest but
significant political shift that’s taken place in US political life
thanks to both the larger prominence of Sanders and his progressive
allies in Congress, and the resurgence of labor militancy and an
organized socialist movement in recent years. Forty years ago, a
Republican president dealt a terrible blow to the union movement by
breaking an air traffic controllers’ strike. Decades later, Republicans
may force a Democratic administration into a more pro-worker position by
following the lead of an openly socialist senator.
Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.