News and Media

Reported by Mark Gruenberg Eliminate the minimum wage. Emasculate the National Labor Relations Board by cutting its budget, killing its rules and ending its jurisdiction over “small” businesses. Curb overtime pay. Make job safety and health depend on bosses’ “voluntary compliance.” Kill worker protections in construction, seafaring and mass transit. Eliminate the Department of Education.

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Reported by Lillianna Byington for Bloomberg Government The stalled legislation still faces opposition from the rail industry, which is expected to continue with this new measure. The “remaining challenges in the Senate Rail Safety Act seem to be repeated in the new House companion legislation,” said Jessica Kahanek, assistant vice president of communications at the

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Reported by Bob Johnston for Trains Three labor organizations have opposed Amtrak’s request for a waiver allowing installation of a device the company claims will prevent incidents where trains fail to trigger track circuits. As a result, a decades-old issue that recently has forced Amtrak to assign at least seven Superliners to trains operated over

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Reported by People’s World U.S. rail unions and the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department have by and large agreed with federal safety findings as a result of the East Palestine, Ohio, freight train derailment disaster early in 2023. But there are some holes. A reading of the National Transportation Safety Board’s summary report shows the top

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Reported by Bill Stephens for Trains Note: Updated at 10:22 a.m. on June 27 with comment from TTD officials. The 31 new safety recommendations that the National Transportation Safety Board made yesterday in response to Norfolk Southern’s hazardous materials wreck in East Palestine, Ohio, have prompted a flurry of responses from the rail industry, lawmakers,

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Reported by Benjamin J. Hulac for NJ Spotlight News For those looking for relief from New Jersey’s hellish train commute into and out of New York City lately, don’t expect it anytime soon from what has been a prime culprit: Amtrak. A backlog of repairs and decades of slim federal investment in American railroads have

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Reported by Diana Ionescu In a hearing of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee on highways and transit, federal lawmakers and industry experts weighed in on the state of public transit in the United States. Dan Zukowski describes the meeting in Smart Cities Dive, writing, “Experts from the transit industry and labor unions

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Reported by Dan Zukowski for the Smart Cities Five Two main viewpoints on the role of public transit in the U.S. emerged during the hearing, which focused on declines and changing patterns in ridership and the resulting decrease in revenue caused by the pandemic.  Greg Regan, president of the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department, disagreed, saying

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