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- Rail workers are rallying across the country for paid sick leave, including at the Capitol.
- The actions come after Congress voted through a contract with rail management with just one additional personal day.
Rail workers won't give up sick leave and better conditions without a fight.
Even after Congress voted through a contract that left workers with just one additional personal day, workers are still pushing for more. And some lawmakers are going straight to the White House.
The rail worker actions are organized by SMART-TD, the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers Transportation Division, the country's largest rail union. Workers will rally at the Capitol in DC, where Senator Bernie Sanders is slated to speak, and in states ranging from Massachusetts to Utah.
"Our plan today is just to make people more aware they just recently signed a contract where we're not getting sick time. We're probably one of the only trades that doesn't have sick time," Chris Weldon, the state legislative director for New England SMART-TD, told Insider as he traveled to the Massachusetts rally.
At President Joe Biden's urging, Congress voted to pass a contract between rail management and workers in an effort to avert an economy-rattling strike. A rail walkout — which workers were prepared to do over paid sick leave — would've strained the supply chain and potentially jeopardized access to clean drinking water. However, a progressive-backed proposal to tack seven paid sick days onto that contract did not pick up enough votes to pass.
"The American people should know that while this round of collective bargaining is over, the underlying issues facing the workforce and rail customers remain," the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department (TTD) said in a statement.
In addition to worker rallies, Sanders and more than 70 other members of the House and Senate have called on the Biden administration to use different executive avenues to give workers sick leave. One potential action could be issuing an executive order, similar to the one that President Barack Obama signed in 2015, which granted paid sick leave to federal contractors — but did not include rail workers, even though they are technically included in that category.
"It is literally beyond belief that rail workers are not guaranteed this basic and fundamental human right. Therefore, we urge you and your administration to do everything within your authority to guarantee rail workers the seven paid
sick days that they desperately need through executive action," Sanders and the other legislators wrote in a letter to the White House.
"Expanding paid sick leave access is a priority for President Biden," a White House spokesperson told Insider. "He's pressed proposals to advance the cause of paid leave for all workers throughout his two years in office, and he'll continue to do so."
Rail union officials told CNN that they've been in discussion with the administration about a potential executive order, and reportedly are "hopeful action could be forthcoming."
"Rail workers care about their industry and want to see it grow and expand. We don't want to see the railroads hurt our supply chain either by causing the work conditions and the lack of sick leave to be so bad that people leave the industry and hurt the economy," Michael Paul Lindsey, a locomotive engineer in Idaho who is a steering-committee member for Railroad Workers United, told Insider.
There are 115,000 union-eligible rail workers across the US who prepared to walk out. They keep the trains running that ship everything from food to chemicals to cars — goods that touch every aspect of the American economy, and its consumers. A strike over sick leave would have been acutely felt across the US.
"We want to see our industry thrive and grow because it's good for the economy, and these rallies are about helping the industry — not hindering the industry," Lindsey said.