As we saw last fall with the potential railway workers’ strike, railway owners and CEOs have spent years lobbying the federal government to relax safety regulations and exploit workers' labor in order to increase their profit margins. No one is more guilty of this than Warren Buffett.

Buffett is the Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Holdings which owns BNSF, the nation’s largest rail carrier. Railways like BNSF have been raking in record profits while denying railway workers time off -- they get one day off a month -- and even cutting back what were once five-person crews down to two. (They intend to cut back even further to unsafe one-person crews.)

In the first six months of 2021 -- while we were still in the thick of the coronavirus pandemic -- BNSF’s parent company, Berkshire Hathaway, spent $12.6 billion on stock buybacks and spent $80,000 lobbying Congress about “railroad competition issues.” They have demonstrated a willingness to shell out billions to make shareholders richer every year, but are fighting tooth and nail against spending a few million updating railway safety measures and working conditions for their employees.

We don’t want more communities to end up like East Palestine, Ohio.

Add your name now to tell the Senate Environment and Public Works committee to subpoena Warren Buffett to testify and answer questions about his push for more deregulation and lack of safety standards.