By JIM GERAGHTY
We live in a country where the (currently) ruling political party and most of the national media have a symbiotic relationship. (Jen Psaki started work at NBC News this week.) One of the problems with this dynamic is that when the ruling class decides something is important — say, emphasizing the issue abortion as the midterm elections approach — it tends to squeeze out everything that the ruling party doesn’t want emphasized.
Don’t get me wrong; abortion is a hugely important issue to many Americans. You can read more about South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham’s bill from Alexandra DeSanctis and Charlie Cooke and John McCormick and Kathryn Jean Lopez.
But there are a lot of things going on in this world, and one issue that seems spectacularly under-covered — a ticking time bomb, if you will — is that starting at 12:01 a.m. Friday, or about a day and a half from now, if there isn’t a deal between freight-rail unions and employers, the U.S. economy comes to a screeching halt and . . . well, the term “derails” seems fitting.
Maybe there will be an eleventh-hour deal; I suspect many casual observers simply assume that a deal will get done because the consequences of even a brief work stoppage are so far-reaching. But freight companies are already halting certain shipments in preparation for a potential strike, so in some ways, the consequences of a strike are already here.
The American Association of Railroads said that this week they’ve begun taking steps to secure the shipments of hazardous and security-sensitive materials, such as chlorine used to purify drinking water and chemicals used in fertilizer, and warned that, “other freight customers may also start to experience delayed or suspended service over the course of [this] week, as the railroads prepare for the possibility that current labor negotiations do not result in a resolution and are required to safely and securely reduce operations.”
At noon today, Norfolk Southern will close all gates to intermodal traffic — that means anything using multiple modes of transportation such as rail, ship, aircraft, and truck. BSNF Railway, one of the largest freight railroads in North America, announced it was making the same move.
Amtrak has already suspended most cross-country routes and announced that, “It will only operate trains that can reach their final destination by 12:01 a.m. on Friday, when a freight rail strike or lockout could begin.” Without a deal, most Amtrak operations in California will suspend operations Thursday.
A freight-rail strike will also bring commuter-rail services to a halt in some areas: “Virginia Railway Express said if there is a strike it would immediately stop all of its commuter train service because Norfolk Southern owns the tracks for VRE’s Manassas Line, and CSX owns the tracks for its Fredericksburg Line.” Across the Potomac in Maryland, “Since CSX owns and maintains the Camden and Brunswick lines in addition to dispatching MARC trains, any labor strike would result in the immediate suspension of all MARC Camden and Brunswick Line service until a resolution is reached.” It’s the same story for Metra, the commuter-rail system in the Chicago metropolitan area serving the city of Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, and Metrolink, the commuter-rail service in southern California.
The U.S. Department of Transportation estimated that a freight-rail strike would cost the economy about $2 billion a day, but that’s just a big, abstract figure in most people’s minds. What Americans will notice is all kinds of products getting scarcer and more expensive. (Again.) As our Dominic Pino notes, crude oil, natural-gas liquids, refined products, petrochemicals, and plastics are transported by rail, meaning that a disruption in rail service is likely to spur a gas price rise again. The average price for a gallon of regular unleaded gas nationwide is currently $3.70, which is better than the $5-per-gallon price of mid June, but it’s still high by historical standards.
Once again, if you read local press or trade publications, you realize how many things in this country grind to a halt if there’s a freight-rail strike. From EnergyWire:Chemicals make up the second-largest category of rail freight after coal — 55,000 carloads a week — and there aren’t enough trucks and barges to handle the volume, said Jason Miller, a professor in the department of supply chain management at Michigan State University.
A prolonged strike would have a bigger impact on the economy than the shutdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, Miller said.
“At least during Covid, you able to keep [chemical] production going, oil production going,” he said. “You can’t do that with a rail strike.”Farmers have a limited window to get their harvested crops to buyers before the food spoils, and for many crops, this is harvest time; farmers are now wondering if the usual rail options will be available after Friday:
A painful example of supply chain concern can be found in soybean farming. Hungry markets in Asia and elsewhere count on soybeans to make the ships in the Gulf of Mexico and the west coast.
“It’s gonna be devastating because just about all of the soybeans that are produced here go to a crush plant, and that crush plant is in Hastings, and they send two unit trains of soybean meal per week to the Pacific Northwest,” Greving said. He sits on the USDA United Soybean Board. “That is loaded on bulk vessels there and shipped to Southeast Asia.”
The price of oil affects everybody, farmers included. A rail shutdown would also stop the delivery of corn to most ethanol plants.Remember, much of the world’s food markets are still reeling from the effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the near-complete shutdown of Ukraine’s food exports.
Yesterday, I briefly mentioned the disruption to coal getting to electric power plants. Grist lays out why there aren’t any realistic alternatives to get coal to those plants:
Cmon, man! The unions LOVE idiot Biden. He’s a union man (he says). He just has to snap his fingers and the unions will carry out his wishes.
Maybe tell the union members to go by an EV instead of holding out for their demands. That usually works.
Or, why doesn’t the idiot Biden regime simply tell the unions everything is wonderful and they are totally happy with the current provisions? Like “the border is secure” and “inflation was only 1/10 of 1%”, just give the union the regime’s version of reality and expect them to accept it. Why not?
Would this treat be there if idiot Biden hadn’t destroyed the economy and eroded incomes as they have?
What a union rail worker says: Why Railroad Workers Like Me Are Planning to Strike This Friday
“I’m Driving Home. Wanna Come with Me?” – Joe Biden Cracks Jokes at Detroit Auto Show as Inflation Crushes Americans
Trump really did make America great…
@Greg
So, you hate science and technology? You hate efficiency? Look on the bright side; all those railroad workers have to do is go get one of those “jobs of the future” in the green energy field. Isn’t that what you stupid idiots tell everyone laid off in the petroleum industry or those building fossil-fuel powered vehicles? What’s wrong, you don’t BELIEVE in green energy jobs?
Science and technology must be Man’s servant, not his master. What use is efficiency that displaces more and more human beings? Science gives us knowledge and power, but they’re worse than useless without wisdom.
@Greg
How do you afford technology unless you make the products more efficiently?
So, you feel all automakers should remove all their robots, get rid of traffic lights and put traffic cops back out at intersections, no more powered trenchers that displaces ditch-diggers (of course, with 2.5 million illegal immigrants a year, we do have an abundance) no more ATM’s displacing bank clerks, no more automated help centers (displaces those manning the phones in India), just “technology” to set on a shelf and admire?
Science has given you no knowledge and you have no wisdom. You think union demands overrules business efficiency. Every business works to lower costs to compete, and for most, that is cutting the man-hours needed to produce a product. When equipment can do the job of a human, the equipment wins out. Equipment doesn’t call in sick, doesn’t take toilet breaks, doesn’t complain and, best of all, doesn’t shut down production by going on strike.
As I recounted earlier, when the left began pushing for $15 an hour for burger flippers, even in a McDonalds up in the panhandle of Texas installed automated order taking kiosks to replace over-paid unskilled workers, most of which are illegal immigrants you can barely understand (and who, obviously from the orders I’ve picked up, barely understand you). The way humans protect their jobs is to make themselves more efficient and cheaper than a machine. That is the harsh fact.
While you can’t accept technology eliminating human jobs, you have no problem with the least knowledgeable, most unwise idiot in the country, idiot Biden, eliminating much needed jobs with the stroke of his pen on the orders of far left climate Nazi fascists like AOC. Like I said, why aren’t you supporting the displaced union railroad workers getting one of those marvelous (and plentiful) green energy jobs? Or, learn to code? Why not?
There goes gasoline for cars because no pipelines can carry ethanol (it has alcohol in it).
So, expect a gas price hike and a gas shortage both if the strike happens.
Under most harsh weather conditions or desert/mountainous terrains, a diesel locomotive is very beneficial over an electric locomotive.
We have yet to see an all-electric train pull a load over the Rockies or thru the southern deserts.
Rail workers allowed a vast amount of pillferage from our trains at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach as we all saw on the news only a few months ago.
Do they deserve a raise after that?
joe will give in to them after we all suffer some from their strike.
Should we thank him?
Money in their pockets means less money to secure the rail cars, less money for electric trains.
Less money for rail upkeep.