WASHINGTON — The Senate Budget Committee has unanimously voted to advance a bill that would permanently exempt railroad workers’ unemployment and sickness insurance benefits from sequestration cuts, and end current cuts.
Industry and labor groups had jointly written members of the committee earlier this week asking for support for S.1274, the Railroad Employee Equity and Fairness, or REEF, Act [see “Rail industry, labor urge Senate to pass bill ..,” Trains News Wire, March 5, 2024]. The committee provided that support in a meeting today (Wednesday, March 6, sending the bill on to the full Senate.
Railroad Unemployment Insurance Act benefits underwent a 5.7% cut in May 2023, amounting to $50 per week, and that cut could continue until 2030 without congressional action. It is the only federal unemployment program subject to such cuts — “likely because of an omission Congress made almost 40 years ago,” committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said in prepared remarks.
Whitehouse said the legislation does not change the program’s eligibility or benefit structure, and that because the program “is self-financing and has a dedicated trust fund, paying these benefits does not meaningfully contribute to the deficit. It never made sense for it to be sequestered.”
Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), who introduced the bill, called it “legislating where Republicans and Democrats come together to accomplish real things for real people,” and said it will “right the wrong of unfair cuts.” Similarly, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), one of the original cosponsors, said in a statement that the committee’s moves the legislation “one step closer to ending the unfair rules that have resulted in cuts to the unemployment insurance that railroad workers have spent their careers paying into.”
