On a Monday in late November, I had breakfast with Nick Wurst, a conductor on the CSX railroad, at a diner in his home town of Worcester, Massachusetts. We met before dawn, and Wurst, a bearded twenty-six-year-old, was wearing a reflective Carhartt shirt and a knit hat for his 7:30 AM shift at the freight terminal in Framingham, about thirty miles away. his union, SMART-TD, which represented railway conductors and engineers, had just voted down a proposed contract meant to resolve a three-year-long standoff over wages, scheduling, and benefits. The agreement had been drafted not in the usual course of collective bargaining between the twelve rail unions and the National Carriers’ Conference Committee but by fiat, at the best of President Biden. The Administration had impanneled an emergency board, which whipped up a contract in less than a month to prevent a strike.
Each union had a chance to