Congress Votes Quick End to Rail Walkout

The national freight rail strike that threatened to paralyze the sagging U.S. economy was snuffed out in less than a day when Congress late Wednesday night passed legislation ordering 235,000 strikers back to work immediately.

The bill also creates a special three-member presidential panel that will review the protracted labor dispute between the freight railroads and eight unions and impose a final settlement by June. No new strike would be possible.

President Bush was expected to sign the bill early today. The President left instructions to be awakened whenever the bill reached the White House, aides said.

An AFL-CIO spokeswoman said pickets would be advised to depart railroad yards when Bush signed the bill. A rail industry spokeswoman predicted that freight trains would begin moving within eight hours of that. She said the rail system would return to full strength within 24 hours.

Using its power under the Railway Labor Act, which governs labor relations in the rail andairline industries, the House voted 400 to 5 for the back-to-work bill. The Senate shortly before midnight approved it on a voice vote.

“I am just delighted that we are very close to having this over,” said Transportation Secretary Samuel K. Skinner. “They will be back to work. That means the layoffs that would have occurred will not occur. That means the plants that would have to shut down, will not have to shut down.”

Railroad officials, while pleased with the strike’s end, withheld formal comment. The unions involved in the dispute were disappointed by Congress’ action. They had hoped to use a strike to gain leverage against the railroads after working three years without a contract.

“I’d say we didn’t win,” said one disgruntled union official.

Congress, aware of predictions that hundreds of thousands of workers in rail-dependent industries might be laid off if the strike lasted more than a few days, acted with extraordinary speed.

“I have not seen an issue as potentially contentious as this one resolved with so little partisan politics,” said Rep. Al Swift (D-Wash.), who headed a key subcommittee in the fashioning of the back-to-work bill.

The only votes against the bill were cast by Reps. Carl C. Perkins (D-Ky.), Don Edwards (D-Calif.), Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), Henry B. Gonzalez (D-Tex.) and Jim Moody (D-Wis.)

The strike had begun 14 hours earlier, at 7 a.m. local time Wednesday, after a federally mandated cooling-off period expired at midnight.

A harrowing combination of circumstances made it certain that the strike would not be allowed to last long.

With so many industries struggling to climb out of the recession, the threat of even temporary mass layoffs and production slowdowns was politically unpalatable. The fact that tens of thousands of commuters were also affected when passenger trains were unable to use struck freight tracks worsened the dilemma.

“If it went on for three or four days, it could have been an economic catastrophe,” said Rep. Gerald B. H. Solomon (R-N.Y.).

Congress intervened even faster than it had during the last national rail strike, which lasted four days in 1982.

The new legislation requires independent review of the recommendations released last January by a presidential emergency board, which Bush had appointed in 1990 in an effort to push the railroads and unions toward contract agreement.

Because the recommendations of the emergency board were not binding, they failed encourage negotiations or stave off a strike. The unions considered them biased toward management.

The new legislation creates a “special arbitration board” with the power to impose a settlement. The new board is to closely model its settlement after the recommendations of the presidential emergency board, which suggested wage hikes of only 10% over four years and called on employees to begin paying for a portion of their health benefits.

The new board can use its own judgment if labor or management can show “material errors” that challenge the “presumptive validity” of the original recommendations, Congress said. Contentious issues such as the size of crews on trains remain to be dealt with.

The wording of the legislation was a compromise. The White House and the railroads wanted Congress to flatly impose the recommendations of the presidential emergency board. The unions, which did not want Congress to become involved at all, hoped that Congress would at least start a completely new review of the dispute.

When Wednesday’s strike began, the railroads shut down immediately rather than attempting to operate a limited freight schedule with supervisory personnel. Trains en route to their destinations were stopped at the nearest freight yard.

“Nothing’s operating that we know of,” said George Whaley, a spokesman for the Assn. of American Railroads.

The strike quickly put a stranglehold on American industry, stalling rail carloads of everything from auto parts and coal to Cap’n Crunch and chicken feed. Ford Motor Co. cut two shifts at its big Chicago assembly plant Wednesday.

Commuter rail services that depended on using freight tracks generally shut down, except in Chicago, where a federal court ruling kept them running.

Amtrak, which had said that it would stop its San Diego-to-Los Angeles passenger service during a strike, changed its mind early Wednesday morning. But hours later, to the confusion of many riders, Amtrak said it could not guarantee that it would be able to maintain its full schedule of trains.

On the picket lines, strikers expressed anger at the railroads for what they described as unfair wage and work rule demands. Many were equally unhappy with the knowledge that Congress would likely force them back to work within a few days, robbing them of the bargaining leverage that most strikes carry.

“If we haven’t got the right to strike, we don’t have any power at all,” said Wayne Jones, 48, who has worked as a track welder for the Santa Fe Railway in Los Angeles for a quarter century.

There were no reports of major strike violence.

The White House Wednesday sharply lowered its estimate of initial financial damage from the strike. Earlier in the week it had warned that a strike could cost the economy $1 billion a day. But White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said that the cost on the first day, when most businesses still had inventories, would be about $50 million. He estimated that the daily cost would gradually climb to $600 million a day over two weeks.

The strike would have cost the railroads about $70 million a day in lost revenue and would have imposed financial hardships on industries that rely on rail deliveries.

General Motors, the world’s largest auto maker, with 184 auto-related factories and 350,000 employees in the United States, said Wednesday that it would be forced into a virtual production shutdown if the strike lasted until by week’s end.

“We anticipate that approximately 75% to 80% of our operations will be affected within the next 24 hours,” GM spokesman Karen Longridge said.

At a congressional hearing Wednesday morning, Transportation Secretary Skinner said that the White House wanted to end the strike before “tomorrow’s (morning) rush hour.”

Even before Congress acted Wednesday night, union officials acknowledged that the strike would be a short one.

“We have a feeling that at least by Friday morning, everybody’s going to be back to work,” said Jim Kennedy, secretary of the Railway Labor Executives Assn.

Unions contended that the presidential emergency board recommendations would eventually eliminate 20,000 railroad jobs. Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the legislation passed Wednesday would “rationalize the differences and resolve the questions that vex us.”

The bill automatically puts into effect some provisions of the previous board’s recommendations, such as 10% in wage increases and 11% in cost-of-living increases over four years. It also adopts the board’s recommendation that workers start paying a share of health care costs, previously paid in full by the railroads.

But it allows a reconsideration of ambiguities in the previous board’s recommendations and bitter points of dispute remaining between the two sides.

Both the unions and the railroads would have to accept whatever the new panel recommends if they cannot agree among themselves. Unions could not resort to another strike and railroads could not engage in a lockout.

During a 65-day period, neither side could change the working conditions of members of the eight unions that put up picket lines at 7 a.m. Wednesday. New contracts involving three other unions that earlier reached agreement with the companies would be allowed to go into effect.

Eaton reported from Washington and Baker from Los Angeles.

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