(Source: Written statement of Greg Regan, President of the Transportation Trades Department, AFL-CIO, before the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, February 1, 2023)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — On behalf of the Transportation Trades Department, AFL-CIO (TTD), and our 37 affiliated unions, I thank Chairman Graves and Ranking Member Larsen for inviting me to testify before the Committee today on the current state of our supply chain. The employees represented by TTD affiliated unions are on the front lines of these challenges—including the workers directly engaged in freight transportation at railroads and ports and who work in industries that have struggled with the down-economy effects of chokepoints and delays.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, many of the most significant supply chain challenges we’ve faced as a nation are due to harmful employer practices driven not to increase efficiency or deliver better service but purely out of greed. These practices have degraded the transportation and infrastructure workforce in every possible way and upended the reliability of our freight network. And it is your constituents who have paid the economic price for the decisions and practices of these companies.
From rail and aviation to maritime and trucking, employers are simply not investing in their employees. Nor are they investing in the critical infrastructure on which our economy and communities depend. The lack of investment from employers in their workforce and infrastructure lies in stark contrast to the record federal investments resulting from the historic, bipartisan Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act (IIJA). Transportation Labor has been sounding the alarm about the severe consequences of slashing workforces in the freight industry and investments in infrastructure long before the pandemic brought these challenges squarely into the spotlight. I’m not sure how much louder we can be at this point. And despite the fact that transportation unions and their members have worked tirelessly to shore up and improve our transportation network and systems, I’m sad to say there are those who continue to try to blame the workers for supply chain problems.
Labor unions, the workers they represent, and even this administration – which signed the most consequential infrastructure and domestic manufacturing bills in generations – have all been scapegoated. Those who blame working people or this President for our supply chain problems do so knowing their claims are hollow but advance their narrative anyway to score cheap political points and shield themselves from blame. The truth is, since the start of the pandemic, corporations have vacuumed up massive, record-setting profits.
At the same time, they’ve opportunistically made it harder for American families to get by. These companies charge obscene amounts of money for goods, gouging the public and making it harder for everyday workers to make a fair and honest living. That blame needs to be focused where it’s due: rampant corporate greed that prioritizes already wealthy shareholders over everyday consumers, workers, and the economic health of this country. That is the true reason our supply chain has suffered and it’s the reason American families have suffered. It’s time to rein in these practices and refocus our national goals on helping working people get ahead. We urge all policymakers to do the same.
Full statement: www.ttd.org