A “cooling off” period imposed by the Biden administration to help settle the dispute between railroad corporations and 150,000-member-strong labor unions ends on Sept. 16. If no deal is reached, unions are threatening a strike — the first since 1992 — and workers say they will quit an industry already facing staff shortages, reports The Guardian.

A strike could cost the U.S. economy $2bn a day, according to a recently issued Association of American Railroads report.

BNSF and Union Pacific, the two largest railroad corporations in North America, reported record profits in 2021. BNSF is owned by billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate. U.S. railroads have paid out $196bn in stock buybacks and dividends to shareholders since 2010.

But workers argue the industry is in crisis. Between November 2018 and December 2020, the railroad industry lost 40,000 jobs in the U.S., according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The U.S. railroad industry’s workforce dropped from more than 1 million workers in the 1950s to fewer than 150,000 in 2022.

“These railroads are making billions of dollars. In the past, we’ve been well compensated for being on call 24/7, 365 days a year. That’s been eroded over the course of my career in the last two decades to where it’s just not appealing enough to attract people into the workplace,” said Ross Grooters, a locomotive engineer for Union Pacific in Iowa and co-chair of Railroad Workers United.