SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
merger
Top Rail Unions Denounce Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern Megamerger as 'De Facto Monopoly'
"For rail customers, it will be a choice between ‘Hell or the highway,’” said Mark Wallace, the national president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.
Dec 17, 2025
Two of America's largest railway workers unions have come out against the $85 billion merger of two major railroad conglomerates, warning that it will harm competition and worker safety.
The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) and the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees Division (BMWED) represent more than half of the employees at the Union Pacific Railroad and the Norfolk Southern Corporation, which it plans to acquire.
The US Surface Transportation Board (STB) is expected to receive a formal proposal from the two companies on Friday. President Donald Trump said in September that the deal "sounds good" to him.
If approved, it would allow the two firms to merge into the largest railroad company in US history, controlling more than 50,000 miles of track across 43 states. According to the Associated Press, such a railroad would likely control over 40% of the nation's freight.
The unions warned on Wednesday that the deal would create a "de facto monopoly" in large swaths of the country.
“We believe this transcontinental railroad will make shipping by rail less attractive as the merged carrier passes off rail lines that serve small towns, factories, and farms to short line railroads while running miles-long slow-moving trains on the main line," said BLET national president Mark Wallace. "For rail customers, it will be a choice between ‘Hell or the highway.’”
Loosened merger regulations by Congress have allowed railway companies to consolidate over the past 40 years. As the unions point out, in 1980 there were roughly 40 different Class 1 railroads in the US, whereas in 2025 they have combined into just six entities.
An October analysis by the American Economic Liberties Project, which warned against the Norfolk Southern-Union Pacific merger, noted that as a result of this consolidation, "shippers reported a deterioration in service, fewer options with higher prices... while workers lost jobs and those who didn’t face strenuous working conditions."
While the unions credited Norfolk Southern’s spending on new safety measures following 2023’s catastrophic derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, they said that Union Pacific “continues to cut corners and oppose needed reforms.”
During the Biden administration, federal regulators found that Union Pacific made a concerted effort to undermine government safety assessments, including coaching employees on how to respond to questions from the Federal Railroad Administration and threatening them with discipline if they did not give the company's preferred responses.
The merger has received backing from SMART-TD, the nation's largest railroad union, which cited promises from Union Pacific CEO Jim Vena not to lay off workers as a result of the acquisition.
But BLET and BMWED say these promises are hollow and that the proposal given to unions still allows the company to have the ultimate say over which workers are protected and provides no guarantees for employees against being transferred to jobs hundreds of miles away or from having their lines sold to short line railroads that pay less.
“We don’t believe anything Vena says about how workers would be treated in the Supersized Union Pacific,” said Tony Cardwell, president of the BMWED. “The agreements reached with some other unions related to job protections post-merger have loopholes big enough to traverse freight trains through. We refuse to accept the same terms in return for our unions’ support for the merger.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Ben & Jerry's Co-Founder Steps Down in Protest of Corporate Owner's Attempts to 'Silence' Duo's Gaza Activism
"Ben & Jerry's has been silenced, sidelined for fear of upsetting those in power," said co-founder Jerry Greenfield.
Sep 17, 2025
Jerry Greenfield, the lifelong political activist and co-founder of the ice cream brand Ben & Jerry's, is quitting the company in protest against what he says are efforts by parent company Unilever to "silence" his advocacy for progressive causes, particularly for Palestinians amid Israel's genocidal war in Gaza.
"I can no longer, in good conscience, and after 47 years, remain an employee of Ben & Jerry's," Greenfield said in a statement posted Tuesday by his longtime partner Ben Cohen. "This is one of the hardest and most painful decisions I've ever made."
The Vermont-based ice cream company was acquired by Unilever, a British conglomerate, in 2000, at which time Greenfield says the company "guaranteed" him and his partner the "independence to pursue our values." Though the pair no longer had a financial stake in the company, which they founded in 1978, they remained on as board members and brand ambassadors.
"For more than twenty years under their ownership, Ben & Jerry's stood up and spoke out in support of peace, justice, and human rights, not as abstract concepts, but in relation to real events happening in our world," Greenfield said. "That independence existed in no small part because of the unique merger agreement Ben and I negotiated with Unilever, one that enshrined our social mission and values in the company's governance structure in perpetuity."
The relationship between Ben & Jerry's and its parent company began to fracture as Cohen and Greenfield became increasingly outspoken advocates against Israel's human rights abuses in Palestine.
In 2021, the duo announced that it would stop selling its ice cream in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in protest of Israel's occupation of those territories, which is widely recognized as illegal under international law. Several US states with laws punishing boycotts of Israel began to pull their investments in Unilever, which rushed to reaffirm that it was “firmly committed” to Israel.
In order to bypass the pair's boycott, Unilever sold the Israeli portion of Ben & Jerry's to a distributor in the country, which promptly resumed distribution in the Occupied Territories. The duo launched a lawsuit against their parent company in hopes of stopping the deal.
The rift would intensify further after October 7, 2023, when, following Hamas' attack against Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government responded with a crushing military onslaught against the Gaza Strip that has now resulted in at least 220,000 casualties according to one former Israeli general.
Ben & Jerry's would file another lawsuit in 2024 alleging that Unilever, on several occasions, used threats and intimidation to stop them from speaking out on the conflict, which they referred to as a "genocide."
They said Unilever threatened to dismantle the company's board if it issued statements calling for "peace" and a "ceasefire," imposed restrictions on their statements in support of pro-Palestine student demonstrators, and stopped them from donating company funds to human rights organizations. Ben & Jerry's would later claim that Unilever fired its CEO, David Stever in March 2025 in retaliation for the brand's activism.
This past May, Cohen was arrested, along with six others, for disrupting a US Senate hearing in protest of Washington's continued sale of weapons to Israel, which at that point had begun outlining plans to fully remove Palestinians from Gaza with support from President Donald Trump.
Unilever distanced itself from Cohen's actions, saying they were "on his own as an individual and not on behalf of Ben & Jerry's or Unilever."
Greenfield's departure comes as Unilever plans to fold Ben & Jerry's into a new entity known as the Magnum Ice Cream Company, which is set to be listed on the stock market in November. In response to the merger, Ben & Jerry's called for its brand to be "freed" from the conglomerate.
"They're ripping the heart out of Ben & Jerry's," Cohen said last week while brandishing a picket sign. "All we're asking is for them to sell the company to a group of people who support the values of Ben & Jerry's."
Magnum rejected this request, saying, "Ben & Jerry’s is a proud part of the Magnum Ice Cream Company and is not for sale."
"It's profoundly disappointing to come to the conclusion that that independence, the very basis of our sale to Unilever, is gone," Greenfield said in his resignation note. "And it's happening at a time when our country's current administration is attacking civil rights, voting rights, the rights of immigrants, women, and the LGBTQ community."
"Standing up for the values of justice, equity, and our shared humanity has never been more important," he continued, "and yet Ben & Jerry's has been silenced, sidelined for fear of upsetting those in power. It's easy to stand up and speak out when there's nothing at risk."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump DOJ Gives Monopolist UnitedHealth a Green Light to Swallow Yet Another Competitor
"As a result, Big Medicine will profit at the expense of vulnerable hospice patients, some of whom will pay with their lives, and the workers who care for them."
Aug 08, 2025
The Trump Justice Department on Thursday paved the way for yet another corporate merger, this time settling a Biden-era legal challenge that aimed to block UnitedHealth Group from adding the home health and hospice care provider Amedisys to its eye-popping list of subsidiaries.
The DOJ's Antitrust Division, which is under siege by lobbyists connected to the White House, said the settlement would require UnitedHealth and Amedisys to "divest 164 home health and hospice locations across 19 states." The deal, which must be approved by a judge, would also require Amedisys to "pay a $1.1 million civil penalty to the United States for falsely certifying that it had provided 'true, correct, and complete' responses under the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976."
The settlement was announced on the same day that Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) launched an investigation into UnitedHealth, specifically probing the company's alleged practice of incentivizing nursing homes to slash patient care costs.
Warren was among those who criticized the UnitedHealth-Amedisys settlement, writing on social media that she "sounded the alarm about UnitedHealth's attempt to purchase this home health giant years ago."
"This is another half-baked merger settlement by the Trump DOJ—this time at the expense of the most vulnerable," Warren added. "The public deserves to know if this deal is based on political favors."
"It claims to divest home health and hospice care providers in overlapping markets but, in actuality, cedes them to similarly conflicted buyers, including a highly leveraged private equity firm."
The settlement came as the Trump Justice Department is under growing scrutiny for terminating or sidelining top antitrust officials and acquiescing to lobbyists fighting DOJ merger lawsuits.
Last week, as Common Dreams reported, the Justice Department dropped an antitrust case against American Express Global Business Travel, a company that has paid Ballard Partners—Attorney General Pam Bondi's former lobbying firm—hundreds of thousands of dollars this year to pressure the DOJ on antitrust matters.
Ballard has also been paid big money this year by UnitedHealth, far and away the most powerful healthcare company in the U.S. According to a recent analysis by the Center for Health and Democracy, UnitedHealth currently has around 2,700 subsidiaries, giving it a foothold in virtually every aspect of the U.S. healthcare system.
The legal challenge against UnitedHealth's proposed $3.3 billion acquisition of Amedisys was brought in November 2024 by the Biden Justice Department alongside the attorneys general of Maryland, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York, each of whom backed the Trump DOJ's settlement.
Upon announcing the challenge, then-Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter—the head of the Biden DOJ's Antitrust Division—warned that "unless this $3.3 billion transaction is stopped, UnitedHealth Group will further extend its grip to home health and hospice care, threatening seniors, their families, and nurses."
Emma Freer, senior policy analyst for healthcare at the American Economic Liberties Project, said in a statement Thursday that "the DOJ was right to challenge this deal, which would eliminate head-to-head competition that lowers costs, improves care quality, and betters working conditions for nurses and other caregivers."
"This settlement abandons that goal and caves to UnitedHealth Group, one of the most dangerous monopolists in American healthcare," said Freer. "It claims to divest home health and hospice care providers in overlapping markets but, in actuality, cedes them to similarly conflicted buyers, including a highly leveraged private equity firm."
"As a result," Freer added, "Big Medicine will profit at the expense of vulnerable hospice patients, some of whom will pay with their lives, and the workers who care for them."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular