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President Joe Biden’s allies are counting on political dividends from the agreement he brokered to avert a disastrous railroad strike, yet there’s still a risk the deal falters before November’s elections.

Biden, who ran for office on a pledge to keep the nation’s proverbial trains running on time, managed to keep engineers and rail yard workers at their jobs — at least for now. The tentative agreement reached Thursday between unions and railroad companies means a strike that would have wreaked havoc across the US economy won’t happen for weeks or months, if ever.

President Biden on Thursday celebrated a last-minute agreement between railway companies and union leaders averting a potential strike that could have slowed commerce and delivered another blow to an already volatile economy.

“This agreement is a big win for America,” Biden said during a hastily arranged event in the White House Rose Garden. “It’s a win for tens of thousands of rail workers and their dignity.”

The tentative agreement, which must be ratified by 125,000 union members, emerged in the early morning hours after round-the-clock negotiations at the Department of Labor overseen by Secretary Marty Walsh.

As the White House on Thursday celebrated a tentative agreement to avert a nationwide rail strike that could have devastated the economy, union officials cautioned that not everything is signed, sealed and delivered.

Most crucial in the days ahead: Workers across a dozen unions need to vote to ratify the compromise.

“There’s going to be a lot of work to do after today,” AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department President Greg Regan said. “This was a big breakthrough, and we can take a day to reflect on it.” Yet “I don’t want to kid anybody here.”

Reported by Ben White and Eleanor Mueller for Politico.

President Joe Biden narrowly avoided an economic and political debacle on Thursday as senior administration officials helped salvage a tentative, last-minute deal to avert a devastating railroad strike.

And it almost didn’t happen.

Steering clear of disaster required some 20 straight hours of talks beginning Wednesday that taxed Labor Department coffee supplies, kept West Wing office lights burning through the early hours and left everyone involved bleary-eyed and largely sleepless.

The Transportation Trades Department of the AFL-CIO has offered its support for Surface Transportation Board vice chairman Robert Primus, who is seeking to serve a second term on the STB.

“During his current term, Mr. Primus has demonstrated an expert understanding of the economic state of the railroad industry, including widespread service and staffing issues,” TTD President Greg Regan wrote in a letter to members of the Senate. “… Member Primus has been a leader in ensuring that the STB takes all necessary steps to address the numerous challenges in our freight rail system. Further, Mr. Primus understands the need to exercise the STB’s oversight authority to improve service for rail customers, grow the freight rail workforce, and bring long-term stability to the freight rail system.”

On the heels of the latest round of labor negotiations between the National Mediation Board, unions, and freight railroads, the Association of American Railroads has released a report projecting that the economic impact of a nationwide railroad strike could be more than $2 billion a day.

So far, five of the 12 unions, representing 21,000 employees, have reached voluntary agreements with the railroads. The expiration of the 30-day cooling-off period when unions can walk off the job is midnight on September 16. There are just under 115,000 Class I railroad employees in the U.S., according to August data.

A potential nationwide freight rail strike is looming, threatening to cripple the U.S. economy ahead of the holiday shopping season and November’s midterm elections.

Roughly 115,000 rail workers could walk off the job as soon as Sept. 16 if they cannot agree to a new contract with railroads.

That’s the first day workers could legally strike after a White House-appointed panel released collective bargaining recommendations aimed at ending years of contentious negotiations.

Reported by Caitlin Harrington for Wired.

EARLY THIS SUMMER, farmers worried that millions of chickens in California’s Central Valley might soon peck each other to death. The birds were running perilously low on feed, which should have been delivered by Union Pacific Railroad from Midwestern corn producers. Foster Farms needed at least nine trainloads of corn each month to feed its tens of millions of chickens and turkeys, plus tens of thousands of dairy cows at its California facilities. But the trains weren’t showing up. Chickens can’t go long without eating—they become aggressive and turn to cannibalism—and if the feed didn’t arrive soon, the mega-flock would have to be euthanized.

Executives at Foster Farms began behaving like, well, chickens with their heads cut off. “Your failure to deliver is about to kill millions of chickens,” one incensed vice president at the company emailed a director at Union Pacific. “These dead animals will have to be picked up in dump trucks and taken to the local dumps. This is going to be an animal disaster, [and an] economic and media nightmare.”

Reported by Colin Staub for NW Labor Press.

“If it moves, we represent the people who build, operate and maintain it.” That’s how AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department President Greg Regan describes his member unions. Transportation Trades Department is a national coalition of 37 unions that represent workers across all modes of transportation, including pilots, flight attendants, ground crew, air traffic controllers, freight and passenger rail workers, longshoremen, and maritime workers.

Regan, 38, was elected to lead it in 2021 after five years on Capitol Hill and 10 years at AFL-CIO headquarters working his way up in the Transportation Trades. Transportation Trades is one of six AFL-CIO trades departments.

Reported by Mark Gruenberg for People’s World.

Crunch. And a shortage of everything. That’s the warning rail union leaders are sending to consumers as the nation approaches the holiday season.

Expect, they said, a repeat of last year’s fiasco, where gifts were delayed for weeks or months as cargo ships backed up outside the Port of Los Angeles-Long Beach, the major import point for containers of toys, clothes, gadgets, games—or anything else arriving from Asia.

It wasn’t just because the ports themselves had problems. It was because the nation’s supply chain onshore, and especially its railroads, had virtually broken down.