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Congress should extract commuter rail from the federal Railway Labor Act.
The New York City metro area, the seat of global finance, recently endured its second commuter-rail strike in a year.
Last month’s three-day stoppage on the state-owned Long Island Rail Road, which stranded hundreds of thousands of commuters, followed a similar job action in May 2025 that slammed the brakes on New Jersey Transit.
States can generally prohibit public employee strikes, as New York does, but their statutes are preempted by a century-old federal law that expressly permits stoppages. To prevent another commuter rail walkout in New York, Congress will have to step in.
The national Railway Labor Act (RLA) was crafted in 1926 to quite literally keep the trains running on time by forcing railroad companies and their unions to keep contract negotiations going as long as practicable in hopes of avoiding strikes — worker actions the statute implicitly allows. Congress recognized that a stoppage could be extremely destructive economically not only for the two sides but also for other rail companies and customers whose crews would be idled or whose products would rot in rail yards because of a dispute elsewhere in the network.
As private commuter rail operations went bust over time and became absorbed by state agencies such as New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, they still mostly remained under RLA jurisdiction.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Washington Post (paywall)
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Ken Girardin is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.