Welcome to the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast.

I'm Tom Keene, along with Jonathan Farrell and Lisa Abramowitz.

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Now, with the Secretary of Labor here on a jobs day in the shock of good employment,

are John Farrow.

I'm Jonathan Ferro.

I'm pleased to say that joining us now from Washington is the U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh. Secretary Walsh, fantastic to catch up with you, sir. Another strong jobs report. As you know, this has been a very, very strong labor market in America. And Labor is meant to have the leverage in this world. And Secretary Walsh, we've got to go to the union question. Should unions have the right to the union question should unions have the right to strike

absolutely unions have the right to strike i think unions have the right to strike in almost every

collective bargaining agreement in this particular case the next question will probably be about the

rail so i'm going to anticipate it the national railway act has a provision in it that allows

the president to get involved in negotiation when asked,

and the unions asked him to get involved in this. He put together a presidential emergency board.

They came back with some recommendations. I had that 20-hour negotiation in my office.

We added some more benefits to the contract. It went in front of the members.

State of the unions voted for it, for the unions, vote against it. I tried to get both sides to stay at the table and negotiate over sick time and there's some work condition rules as well. They weren't able to get to an agreement. And the next step in the Railway Act is Congress to take action and that's what they did yesterday. Well, I'm pleased you anticipated it because you said it all at once for us.

On the one hand you think they should have the right to strike and on the other hand you take away their right to strike. Can you make sense of that for us? Yeah, well I mean it's the way the law is, the Railway Act is. And you know, when I look at this contract, we spent a lot of time, I spent a lot of time myself, myself but the unions in particular spent a lot of time at the negotiating table and

and there's some very good provisions in the contract. It wasn't like

it was a bad contract. 24% increase, 85, 15% split on health care, which they preserved. They

were able to get some work rules changes. They were able to get three unpaid days off. The issue of

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