WASHINGTON, D.C. — The following statement was issued by AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney regarding loan guarantees for Amtrak:
We urge President Bush to step forward quickly with loan guarantees to prevent the collapse of Amtrak. And we insist that this be done without demanding privatization measures or wage and benefit concessions from Amtrak employees, who are already the lowest paid railroad workers in the freight and commuter rail industry and who haven’t had raises for several years.
Certainly, the Administration and the Congress must face up in the long-run to the basic Amtrak dilemma, namely that we must stop demanding that Amtrak provide national passenger rail service and then refuse to fund those services. No other form of transportation is held to the standard that it must survive free from federal subsidy. We must end this charade and give Amtrak and its 23,000 hard working employees a chance to succeed.
But in the short term, the President and lawmakers must come together and prevent the economic and human hardship that would result from an Amtrak shutdown. The hardship that would be suffered by Amtrak workers and their families would be harsh, but the damage to our economy would be calamitous. Hundreds of thousands of men and women depend upon Amtrak and the commuter operations it provides to get to and from work and to conduct business. And on the east coast, all rail freight carriers lease tracks from Amtrak.
We urge the Administration to act as quickly in securing a $270 million federal loan guarantee for Amtrak as it did in bailing out the airlines after September 11th. But in the long run we must insist that Congress and the President stop the shortsighted political games and make a serious multi-year financial commitment to America’s passenger railroad without resorting to privatization schemes that would surely wreck Amtrak, hurt workers and damage the economy.