On December 2, President Joe Biden signed legislation he had requested to block an impending strike of 115,000 railroad workers, and impose the terms of a contract that a majority of those workers had voted to reject after three years of negotiations.

In so doing, he invoked the urgency of avoiding the economic catastrophe of a nationwide strike, while also touting the rejected contract he had brokered in September, saying that he had “negotiated a contract no one else can negotiate.”

The legislation may have blocked the immediate threat of a rail strike, although that remains railroad workers’ decision to make themselves. But by imposing a contract, Biden risks exacerbating the core problems that led to the current rail crisis, while further eroding a collective bargaining framework that has been crumbling for decades. The effect could be to turn US labor relations back to something closer to what they looked like in the nineteenth century.