(Radio Iowa) – Iowa Senator Joni Ernst has voted to block a strike by railroad workers and impose the labor agreement negotiated at the White House in September, but Ernst says she would have preferred to keep congress out of it. Ernst, a Republican, says President Biden could and should have done more to ensure a fair deal for employees, including her brother, who works for a railroad. Eight unions approved the contract offer, but four unions representing tens of thousands of rail workers rejected it.

Ernst says workers have valid concerns regarding quality of life and attendance policies that are not addressed in the contract and negotiations should have restarted. However, Ernst says a strike would have been catastrophic for the economy, so she voted to block the strike.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley also voted to intervene in the labor dispute and prevent a strike. Both Grassley and Ernst voted against a proposal to force the railroads to provide seven days of sixk leave to employees — it got just 43 “yes” votes in the Senate.

(Radio Iowa) – The economy usually perks up with year-end holiday shopping, but there are few signs of optimism heading into December in the latest survey of business leaders in Iowa and eight other Midwestern states. Creighton University economist Ernie Goss says for the first time in recent years, the region’s overall index — or business barometer — plummeted below growth neutral, and it’s now fallen six of the past eight months.

“The Mid-American economy, at least according to the November survey, is not good at all,” Goss says. “It dropped to 48.0 which is the lowest reading we’ve recorded since the early days of the pandemic. That would be in May of 2020, right after the pandemic began, so this was not a good reading.” The individual business barometer for Iowa fell even farther during November. On the zero to 100 scale, where 50 is growth neutral, Iowa dropped two full points, from 49.8 in October to 47.8 in November. In the Creighton survey, supply managers in Iowa and the eight other states were asked about the biggest threats they see looming for the rest of 2022 and into 2023.

“Number one, by far, was higher input prices, so inflation is still rearing its ugly head out there, according to supply managers,” Goss says., “Number two was recession, that’s first time we’ve recorded that in some time. Supply chain disruptions came in number three, and then labor shortages, which is a big issue in this part of the country, and then higher interest rates.” While labor shortages ranked fourth out of five on that list, the survey finds employers across the region are still having significant trouble finding qualified workers to fill vacancies.

“Sixty-five percent of the supply managers are reporting shortage of applicants out there, so they have job openings and not many are coming in to fill those positions,” Goss says. “Regional employment is still down from pre-pandemic levels, that was being February of 2020. We’re off 32,000 workers across the nine states.” There were a few bright spots. Goss says the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows in the past 12 months, private wages of all workers in Iowa expanded by a little over five-percent, while manufacturing wages climbed by almost eight-percent.

(Radio Iowa) – President Biden is asking national Democratic Party leaders to make changes for the 2024 campaign — bumping Iowa’s Caucuses out of the lead-off spot and putting South Carolina’s Presidential Primary first. Biden finished fourth in the 2020 Iowa Caucuses, but won the South Carolina Primary a few weeks later. Biden’s list for state contests in 2024 starts with South Carolina on February 5th, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada a week later, then Georgia on the 19th and Michigan on the 26th of February.

Iowa Democratic Party chairman Ross Wilburn says Democrats cannot forget about entire groups of voters in the heart of the Midwest without doing significant damage to the party for a generation. He also emphasizes that Iowa law requires that both major political parties hold Caucuses before any other state votes. New Hampshire also has a state law that requires its primary to be held before a similar election in another state and New Hampshire’s Democratic Party chairman says his state’s primary will be held first in 2024. The Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic National Committee is meeting in Washington, D.C. to recommend which states will hold the early voting contests in 2024.

The full Democratic National Committee will meet early next year to vote on its calendar for state primaries and caucuses. In the past, states that did not follow the party’s schedule were penalized with a reduced number of delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

(Clarke County, Iowa) – A car traveling in the wrong direction on Interstate 35 in Iowa, collided head-on with a semi tractor-trailer, Thursday, killing the driver of the car. The Iowa State Patrol reports a 2008 Chevy Impala driven by 82-year-old Larry Wayne Ross, of Osceola (IA) was traveling south in the northbound lanes at around 6:27-p.m., near mile marker 33, when the car struck a 2015 Peterbilt semi. The driver of the semi – 50-year-old Alsson F. Battin, of Rock Island, IL, tried, but was unable to avoid striking the vehicle.

Larry Ross was transported from the scene by Clarke County Ambulance to the hospital in Osceola, where he died from his injuries. He was not wearing a seat belt. The truck driver was transported to the hospital to be checked-out. The Patrol says he was wearing his seat belt.