In our click-driven world, the threatened strike at America’s freight railroads, and President Biden’s intervention to prevent it, represents last week’s news. But there are two groups for which the averted strike is still very much front and center: the hundred and fifteen thousand rail workers who will be forced to work under the terms of the contract agreement that the White House and Congress imposed upon them after some rail unions rebuffed a deal mediated by the Administration, and the managers and owners of the railroads, who will get back to running what, these days, is an immensely lucrative, and suspiciously monopolistic, business.

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Similarly to what happened in the decades after the Carter Administration deregulated the airline industry, the era of vigorous rail competition gradually gave way to consolidation and tacit collusion. After a long series of mergers, there are now just seven large, or Class I, railroads, compared with thirty-three in 1980, and between them they control more than eighty per cent of the freight market. “CSX and Norfolk Southern have a duopoly on traffic east of Chicago, while Union Pacific and BNSF have a duopoly on traffic west of Chicago,” Matthew Jinoo Buck, a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project, pointed out, in an illuminating article for The American Prospect earlier this year. “CanadianPacific, Canadian National, and Kansas City Southern run much traffic going north-south through the Midwest.”

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The railroad companies claim that they have made up for their lost workers and capacity cuts with gains in efficiency. In recent years, they have introduced some new technology and forced their remaining employees to accept new work rules under a system known as Precision Scheduled Railroading; as Buck explained, this “meant running faster, longer trains, and skimping on service, spare capacity, systemwide resilience, and safety.” It is largely because of this new bare-bones system that the railroads were so reluctant to give their workers paid sick days. If a conductor or engineer calls in ill at short notice, the company has to find a backup to replace the absentee, and this can be costly or difficult. Rather than compromising on paid sick leave, the railroads agreed to raise pay and hold the line on contributions to employee medical plans. That stance indicated just how important maintaining an ultra-lean and ultra-flexible staffing system is to their new business model.

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