Is Biden the Most Pro-Union President in History?
For now, the country’s railroads will continue to run. A national strike—which would’ve started at midnight tonight and disrupted both freight and passenger rail—was averted by a tentative deal between union leaders and railroad management. That deal still needs to be ratified by the union members themselves.
President Joe Biden praised the agreement as “a big win for America.” The president “basically twisted the arm of the rail companies,” Erik Loomis, a professor at the University of Rhode Island who specializes in U.S. labor history, told me. Biden’s rationale may have been partly political, Loomis said: A shutdown of freight deliveries could worsen inflation at a delicate moment for his approval rating. But another element of it, he said, could be linked to his Scranton identity and his upbringing in “one of these ultimate working-class industrial towns.”
Though Loomis warns that it is still early, he believes Biden might turn out to be the country’s most pro-union president. At the very
