Unfolding in one of the country’s oldest and most far-flung industries is a story of prioritizing payments to wealthy stockholders over everything else—including serving the public interest.
In our click-driven world, the threatened strike at America’s freight railroads, and President Biden’s intervention to prevent it, represents last week’s news.
The modern rail-freight industry dates back to 1980, when Congress partially dismantled a strict system of regulation that had been introduced in the late nineteenth century following a catalogue of abuses by the companies of the original railroad barons, men like Jay Gould, James Hill, and Edward Henry Harriman. The Staggers Rail Act of 1980—named after the Democratic congressman Harley O. Staggers, Sr.
Rather than expanding their operations for a greener age, the big railroads have been doing what unregulated or lightly regulated monopolists tend to do: rationalizing their operations, reducing their workforces, and charging prices well above their costs.
Much of the impetus for the cost cuts and layoffs has come from Wall Street, where activist investors have taken stakes in railroads and demanded changes and higher profits. The process began more than a decade ago, when the Children’s Investment Fund Management, a London-based hedge fund, invested in C.S.X., and it is still ongoing. Earlier this year, Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge-fund manager who had previously invested in Canadian Pacific, purchased another stake in the company.
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