Both Parties Have Abandoned the Working Class. We Railroad Workers Are Just the Latest Proof | Opinion

Picture this: It's November 23, 2022. After a full day's work, you get to your hotel at 9:30 pm. 30 hours later, you're still in the hotel because you haven't been called in for a train to work. Thanksgiving with the family is gone, another holiday missed.

This was how my holiday looked this year—mine and that of many of my fellow rail workers. Situations like these are not uncommon, and they are not being addressed in the deal pushed by the Biden administration or even in the push members of the Senate made for seven days paid sick leave, which failed last week. In fact, many of my co-workers would rather have 12 unpaid sick days a year without getting penalized for them than seven paid sick days.

While I applaud Congress, the Senate, and the mainstream media for the attention given to this issue, the people who are not being heard from are the actual employees going through this, the railroad workers.

If they took our voices into account, they would understand why this time off is so important to us—as important as raises, if not more so.

Let me explain why.

When you are in train service as a conductor or engineer, you are subject to laws limiting how many hours at a time you can work. We are not allowed to work more than 12 hours straight. We have to be given at least 10 hours off after a 12 hour shift. Federal law allows us to work six shifts in a row, and after that sixth shift, we are supposed to get a mandatory 48 hours off.

The problem is, something that happens all the time is you'll work five shifts, and then your bosses will wait longer than 24 hours to call you in for your sixth shift. And because it's longer than 24 hours—sometimes by as little as a minute—that starts the clock of your shifts all over again. You're back to square one. It's their trick for getting us to work ten, fifteen, and sometimes more days in a row.

But it's not like someone who lives with their family having to wait five more shifts to get a two-day weekend. We are often stationed hundreds if not thousands of miles from home. It means we don't get to see our families at all for that time.

What if your kid needs to go to the doctor? What if you do? We get penalized for taking time off, even unpaid, with a points system. The carriers have found a way to make it difficult to be a regular presence in our kids' lives.

That's why it was so hard to stomach what happened when the paid time off amendment failed. As the Railroad Workers United put it in a press release, "We suffered a one-two punch at the hands of, first, the Democratic Party; the second served up by the Republicans."

I agree.

So many of my colleagues feel like I do, that neither party really represents us. The Democrats may have been better represented in the vote to secure sick leave, but it was Democrat "Union Joe" Biden, who billed himself as the most pro-union president in American history, who sold us out to the rail carriers—carries who famously said that their record profits were the result of "capital investment and risk," not labor.

But while Republicans like to bill themselves as the new party of the working class, where are they when we need them? This was such a missed opportunity to gain the respect of railroad workers and the support of our whole families. Instead, the Republicans gave us the finger and, like the Democrats, voted not to support us but to side with the corporations.

Who are the GOP looking to for votes now? I genuinely have no idea. Meanwhile, neither former President Donald Trump nor presumed 2024 candidate and GOP golden boy Ron DeSantis said a damn thing about railroad workers.

Like so many others in the working class, no one is representing our interests or speaking to our concerns. And it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon.

Charles Stallworth is a union railroad worker.

The views in this article are the writer's own.