A group of senators with unlimited sick leave voted down a measure on Thursday which would have given rail workers just seven paid days of sick leave—a fair rise considering where they currently stand: zero.
It’s a “horrific” decision, according to host Andy Levy on this week’s episode of political podcast The New Abnormal.
“How are we discussing the fact that these workers get no paid sick leave?” he asks.
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“I’m really upset with Joe Biden on this. His whole thing is how much he loves railroads and all this stuff. Well then show a little love for the workers. He talks out of both sides of his mouth. I get super-mad about this and just realize how bad all this is.”
The vote was separate to legislation that would impose a 24 percent wage increase over five years and a $5,000 bonus for workers, which the Senate did pass later Thursday. The legislation was targeted at preventing a rail strike that President Joe Biden warned could cause a “crippling” national shutdown.
“What we're going to end up with is a whole bunch of railroad workers who apparently are not allowed to go on strike for better working conditions. And this is somehow being heralded as a good thing by a lot of Democrats, which greatly confuses me,” Levy says.
Though a majority of senators (52) did vote in favor of the measure, 43 voted against it—failing to reach the 60 votes needed to pass.
“My feeling is this is not a win,” said podcast co-host Danielle Moodie. “I don’t know who this is a win for. We all just went through the heights of a global health pandemic. People lost their jobs, people needed to take off because guess what? We needed to quarantine. So the fact that even after going through this for over three years, that members of Congress could vote to deny people access to sick days, it’s draconian, it’s disgusting.”
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Also on the podcast, Latosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter and founder of Southern Black Girls Consortium, tells Moodie about the Georgia runoff race as it finally nears an end.
“Folks may recall that in this election, the Secretary of State, who is the officer that is the constitutional office for the state of Georgia, right? You oversee the elections and also a part of their charge is around voter education and engagement. That’s their office charge. Here it is that the office that is supposed to be responsible for keeping voting on our minds, that’s supposed to be responsible for making sure that people have access to the ballot, that is actually suing because they did not want early voting.”
What local communities did, however, is respond by making it a priority to vote.
“What you saw is the (Raphael) Warnock campaign and several other organizations actually sued the state and as a result it opened up early voting. And guess what? We had one of the highest turnouts in the state, you had thousands and thousands of people who voted that day and on that weekend.
“The bottom line is that has taken an enormous amount of people power, an enormous amount of resources, enormous amount of work in ways that literally we should not have to work this hard just to get people to be able to have free and fair access to the ballot. We’re doing it because it needs to be done, but we have to really recognize if we’re gonna say that this is a 21st century democracy, we shouldn’t have to do that.”
Then, The Daily Beast political reporter Roger Sollenberger talks to Levy about his story surrounding Republican megadonors Dick and Elizabeth Uihlein. The billionaire owners of shipping supply company Uline seem to have donated more money than ever imagined to 2020 election deniers including Ron Johnson, Steve Scalise, and Doug Mastriano. We’re talking $20 million, just through one non-profit.
Dick “gives tons of money. He is this year the top Republican megadonor, the top one, and he gives 80 percent of that money,” Sollenberger says.
Uihlein, according to Sollenberger, “is not only funding candidates, he’s actually funding and helping to build and maintain and further the infrastructure that would allow these anti-democratic forces to not only continue to operate but to expand those operations.”
“The interesting thing about this particular year is that he has really focused his efforts, it seems almost single-mindedly on what they call on the right-wing election integrity efforts,” Sollenberger says, noting an anti-abortion group that received a $3.2 million donation.
“So when you’re using Uline, when you’re buying those cardboard boxes, a few cents on the dollar, or probably more than that, actually might be going to fund anti-democratic groups.”
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