A battle over paid leave is threatening to grind the US economy to a halt

• US rail workers are preparing to strike over their latest negotiations with management.
• Joe Biden is urging Congress to codify an existing agreement as-is, calling the moment "critical."
• A strike could threaten shipment of cars and food as well as holiday travel and even drinking water.

Jeff Kurtz used to do something that may sound impossible to US railroad workers of today: Easily take time off.

"You'd work for a while, and when you felt yourself just getting sick of this place, you took off a couple of days and you'd come back and you'd be fine," Kurtz, a locomotive engineer for over 40 years and a former state representative for Iowa, told Insider. Today, he said, "things have gotten progressively worse."

Three years of rail workers' negotiations with management over this issue could soon culminate in an economy-disrupting strike, after the latest tentative agreement included just one paid personal day off a year. That's too far from the 15 days of paid sick leave that rail workers pushed for, and which railroads argue would cost them $688 million a year.

"People are going to work with the flu, and working around very dangerous equipment sick because we have no time off," a BNSF railway conductor of over a decade told Insider. "When you're on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you can't schedule a doctor's appointment or dentist appointment, take the day off for your wife's birthday. I mean, it's just made it nearly impossible to get any time off."

The group representing management at the nation's largest freight railroads defended the current agreement in a statement, noting that it includes the largest wage increases in nearly five decades and platinum-level healthcare coverage. But four out of 12 rail unions voted down the agreement and are preparing for a work stoppage that could mean canceled holiday travel, undelivered packages, and unclean drinking water.

But not if President Joe Biden gets his way. In a Monday statement, he urged Congress to codify the agreement between rail workers and operators as-is, calling it a "critical moment for our economy" that cannot be ruled by "our strongly held conviction for better outcomes for workers" — and saying a strike could "hurl this nation into a devastating rail-freight shutdown."

In the US, trains carry products like cars and trucks, packaged food, crops, chemicals such as chlorine and fertilizers, and coal — about 40% of shipped goods annually and more than any other mode of transportation. Now that rail employees are among a wave of American workers threatening to take action for better benefits, their fight could start shockwaves that would plunge the already teetering US economy into a recession.

Rail workers helped pull the US out of a supply-chain crisis — and they can plunge the economy back into chaos again

A strike could cost the US economy $2 billion a day, according to the US Chamber of Commerce, a business-interest group. It would start by sending ripple effects throughout the supply chain, Ted Stank, the faculty director of the Global Supply Chain Institute at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told Insider.

Retailers and shoppers wouldn't notice the effects of a strike immediately, he said, as most consumer products you'd buy in a store are transported by truck. But, he added, if materials typically shipped by rail such as petroleum, coal, and lumber have to be temporarily transported by truck, it could raise the cost of shipping across the board. This would in turn raise retail prices.

This supply-chain-inflation ripple effect may sound familiar. Now that the US supply chain is on the verge of recovery and inflation seems to have peaked, we're seeing a "pent-up response from workers who were continually on the job throughout these disruptions," Jess Dankert, the vice president of supply chain for the Retail Industry Leaders Association, told Insider.

"People watched our industry shrink itself and watch the railroads demand more and more and more out of us, and discipline people for being sick or their family being sick," Michael Paul Lindsey, a locomotive engineer in Idaho who is a steering-committee member for Railroad Workers United, told Insider.

While praise for essential workers has faded, rail workers still hold a lot of power in the economy. In 2021, according to the Association of American Railroads, freight rail carried 3.3 million carloads of coal, a third of the country's grain exports, and 2.2 million carloads of chemicals. During a strike, the rail-shipped chlorine used to clean drinking water might be in short supply, affecting production of safe water. Rail also transports 75% of the country's new cars and trucks, which have already been in short supply.

"No one benefits from a rail-work stoppage — not our customers, not rail employees, and not the American economy," the Association of American Railroads' president and CEO, Ian Jefferies, said in a statement.

The BNSF railway conductor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in fear of losing her job, told Insider she didn't think a strike would have as outsize an impact on the economy as the president and railroad companies claim. "If we were actually allowed to strike, it wouldn't last very long, because the companies can't afford to lose that kind of money," she said. "The stockholders would go absolutely crazy if we were able to strike for one day."

Lindsey, the locomotive engineer, isn't surprised that Biden is asking Congress to step in on behalf of the economy, though he still had hope that someone might do something for workers.

"This hurts all labor," he said. "Anyone that's trying to unionize — or even if they're not union, if they're just trying to get better work conditions — this shows that bottom line, at the end of the day, big business will always get what they want, no matter what happens."