Railroad Workers United: “We Would Never Concede Our Right to Strike”
Congressional progressives, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have defended their railroad strike vote by pointing to rank-and-file support. Here, Railroad Workers United clarifies the group has always unequivocally opposed denying railworkers their right to strike.
A view of Union Pacific Train and workers as the railroad covered with snow in Historic Downtown Truckee of California, United States, March 2, 2023. (Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
On April 11, 2023, Jacobin published a transcript of an interview by editor at large David Sirota with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In the context of a general discussion about differences between the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party and the Biden administration, the subject of the vote to break the strike of the railroad workers came up.
In defending her votes — one to approve seven days of sick leave for railworkers and one to support the president’s bill to block the strike — Ocasio-Cortez states that she was acting on the wishes of Railroad Workers United (RWU) and other groups of railroad workers. She states in the interview, “When you look after the vote, folks like RWU were saying, ‘This is what we asked them to do.” Later she says, “Because, for example, with the rail vote, the only partners that I had leading up to that were railworkers. And if that’s what they asked us to do, then that’s what we did.”
But Ocasio-Cortez is clouding the reality of the situation by referring to “the vote,” when in fact there were two separate and distinctive votes. One bill proposed seven days of paid sick time, while the other bill blocked railworkers from striking; these bills were completely independent of one another.
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