I'm not sure how it goes down in the USA, but here in Canada, federal transport workers are de facto prohibited from striking or other job action. Every time they go on strike, the next day the government passes legislation declaring the strike illegal because they are essential workers and a disruption poses a threat to infrastructure of national interest, and a new binding labour contract is imposed on the workers. The only legal option is to quit. (But you can't even encourage your coworkers to quit, too. That amounts to illegal labour agitation.) Air traffic control, port workers, railway workers, etc. get this treatment. They have no right to strike, in practice.
Edit: a quick Google search suggests it's same situation in the USA:
> The House has passed a resolution 290-137 that would force unions to accept a tentative agreement reached earlier this year between railroad managers and their workers and make an imminent strike illegal.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/30/1139876084/congress-house-rai...
Given the level of corruption we live with today, that term packs an increasingly weak punch as labor continues to see completely unacceptable work arrangements.
What will eventually happen is they will strike anyway. It plays out in courts and a lot of people get harmed.
That same corruption will be the source of blame placed on labor.
It will eventually be on all of us to reject that proposition, stand up for these people and insist on reasonable and prudent labor arrangements. Yes, this means shit costs a bit more. So what?
The clowns abusing their labor could always give a little margin back too. Think they will? Nope. Not willingly. Not one cent.
Realistically the rail workers almost certainly don't need to strike to cause pain. They can likely slow things down dramatically by following rules and regs to the letter. Perhaps we'll start to see infrastructure sabotaged. Maybe dockworkers will refuse to handle rail cargo. Maybe Teamsters will refuse to do last mile for rail cargo. Who knows.
That assumes a situation where workers are able to do these things. Sure, in theory everyone could quit, but then they would need another way to earn money.
If employers know that their employees cannot afford to quit or risk losing their job, the whole "the market will fix it" theory falls flat, since there is no market.
Not sure how if this is the case for railroad workers.
The workers could decide to stop doing precision train scheduling (or whatever it was called). They could force their employer to give them concessions. If you're saying the workers can't afford to quit or resist then you're saying they have to accept whatever they are given.
