Railroad Unions Research Articles

Legal Boundaries, Organizational Fields, and Trade Union Politics: The Development of Railway Unions in the US and the UK

AbstractThroughout the nineteenth century, powerful railway unions in the USA and the UK cultivated an expansive system of voluntary sickness, death, unemployment, and superannuation benefits. By the early twentieth century, the movements had diverged: while the British Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants relinquished its commitment to voluntarism in favor of state healthcare and pensions, the American Railway Brotherhoods persisted along voluntarist lines, resisting social insurance in favor of exclusive schemes for their white male membership. What accounts for these diverging orientations? I highlight the importance of organizational forms as a lens for understanding comparative trade union strategy, emphasizing the role of law in designating legitimate forms of working-class association. I demonstrate that governing elites in both countries promoted voluntarism as a benign form of working-class organization throughout much of the nineteenth century. Consequently, I argue, early American and British trade unions adopted benefits in part because they enabled them to mimic the far more respected and legitimate friendly and fraternal mutual benefit societies. Toward the end of the century, the context had changed: while alternative organizational avenues were opened for trade unions in the UK, benefits presented an ongoing organizational lifeline for American unions. In defining and redefining the boundaries of legitimate forms of workers’ associations, legal decisions in both countries shaped not only trade union organizing strategies in the short run but also their positioning in broader social struggles.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Fellow Travellers: Communist Trade Unionism and Industrial Relations on the French Railways, 1914–1939

Fellow Travellers: Communist Trade Unionism and Industrial Relations on the French Railways, 1914–1939

Unions and compensating wage differentials for workplace accident risk: the English and Welsh railway industry, 1902–12†

AbstractThe effect of unions on workers’ wage premiums for accepting on‐the‐job accident risk is a prominent subset of compensating differentials research. This article contributes to the literature by using a newly‐constructed balanced panel of railwaymen working in the traffic departments of three prominent Edwardian railway companies with operations in England and Wales. It avoids previous issues of endogeneity by controlling for a number of variables correlated with the risk rates, notably individual fixed effects. The results show that the largest railway union of the time, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, was able to transform growing union density into power that increased wage premiums for fatal accident risk, although railwaymen's wages did not compensate them for non‐fatal accident risk. This article also considers how this relationship differed by varying levels of company‐specific human capital as measured by tenure. It finds a non‐linear relationship for both risk rates across the tenure cohorts.

Efectos sindicales de la nacionalización ferroviaria (1947-1950): la Unión Ferroviaria vs. la Confederación del Personal Civil de la Nación

The article is an analysis of the relationship between trade unionism and Peronism in the post-1947 period and a description of the process of mobilization of railway workers prior to the strikes of the late 1950 and early 1951. It expounds on the effects produced by the nationalization of the railways in Argentina, in the union of the Railway Union and in its relationship with the Peronist government. In a detailed way, it analyzes the dispute over the union representation of a sector of the railway workers with the new Confederation of Civilian Personnel of the Nation, in a context of intensification of the internal conflict of the Peronist movement and, in parallel, of strengthening of the will of governmental order. To end this representation dispute, the railway union's negotiations with the government included defining the position of the railroad leaders (and a large part of the leadership of the General Confederation of Labor) regarding the reform of the power plant's statute, whose project included the faculty to intervene subsidiaries and the adoption of the Peronist doctrine.

The 1946 Railroad Strike: Harry Truman and the Evolution of Presidential Power

The author looks back at the dramatic events that gripped the nation in the spring of 1946 when the country’s two most powerful railroad unions, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, declared a strike and, within hours, 250,000 members had walked off their jobs. Reaction to the strike on the part of President Harry Truman was swift and dramatic. While never granted, his request to Congress for emergency executive power to draft the striking workers into the army remains to this day the single most radical proposal ever publicly made by any American President in relation to a lawfully organized labor action. The outrage of the Congress to the strike resulted in the passage of the Hartley Act in 1947, a harsh anti-labor legislation that redefined the relationship between labor and the United States government and whose effects reverberate to this day. Sixty three years after its passage, it remains the law of the land.

Las disputas del sindicalismo revolucionario por los gremios ferroviarios durante la primera posguerra

El presente artículo explora las disputas del sindicalismo revolucionario en torno a la organización de los gremios ferroviarios durante los primeros años de la década de 1920. Nos centramos en los debates sobre la personería jurídica y el modelo de sindicato industrial centralizado o federativo. Sostenemos que estas disyuntivas derivaron en la fragmentación de la corriente en tres sectores a los cuales proponemos denominar sindicalismo rojo, sindicalismo forista y sindicalismo pragmático.

The Impact of Union Amalgamation on Membership

In 1980s and 1990s, Australian trade unions tried to combat declining influence and membership numbers by amalgamating with other unions in the same or related industries. Much has been written on union mergers, but little on how these affect the membership. This article aims to contribute to the literature of the impact of mergers and amalgamations on members but studying just one union, The West Australian Locomotive Engine Drivers, Firemen’s and Cleaners Union (LEDU; 1898-1999). In 1993, the three federal railway unions—the Australian Railways Union (ARU), the Australian Federated Union of Locomotive Employees (AFULE), and the National Union of Railworkers (NUR), and one bus and tram union, the Australian Tramway & Motor Omnibus Employees Association (ATM)—amalgamated to become the Australian Rail Tram and Bus Industry Union (RTBU). The LEDU reluctantly joined the RTBU in 1999. This article examines rank and file reaction to the initial proposals and ultimately to becoming part of a larger union, covering workers with many different interests. The article concludes that, irrespective of whether or not amalgamation was inevitable, given the circumstances in Western Australia at the time, its impact upon the rank and file membership was devastating.

Command and control at work: the evolution of the rules of work on Mexican railroads, 1883–1923

This article examines the evolution of written work rules on the railroads in Mexico from 1883 to 1923, looking at three sets of work rules from the Porfiriato and three from the Revolution. Just as foreign investors, British and American, and foreign skilled workers, mostly American, played an important role in the establishment of Mexico’s first railroad companies, these same foreign businesses brought their written rule books, necessary for the impersonal management of labor in companies with large, diverse, and a far-flung labor force like the railroads, to Mexico. The first rules are often Spanish translations of the English-language originals and paid no attention to the workers’ opinions. Through the Porfiriato, however, Mexican railroad workers unionized, in part following the pattern of the American Brotherhoods, and their unions, through labor activism and strikes, fought to transform work rules from company commands to negotiated terrain, with some success before the Revolution broke out. When the Revolution did break out, however, it radically transformed the terrain of work rules, first because railroad companies, even before they collapsed in the face of revolutionary violence, lost the support of the state that they so needed to impose their work rules, and second, because the new state that emerged from the Revolution allied with organized workers to provide them with many of their revolutionary demands: legal trade unions, mandated work benefits, and collective bargaining. Thus, newly powerful railroad unions through strikes and activism and in alliance with the new state made work rules not only negotiated terrain between companies and workers, but terrain in which workers and their unions held the upper hand. As a consequence, the work rules of 1923, where unions are powerful and impose significant benefits to workers, bear little resemblance to those of 1883, where unions are not recognized by the companies, which felt no obligation to provide any benefits at all.

En nombre del hogar proletario: Engendering the 1917 Great Railroad Strike in Argentina

Abstract This article explores working-class families’ modes of collective action in Argentina’s first national railroad strike in 1917. While historical literature has largely focused on the role of railroad unions in labor politics, insufficient attention has been paid to community mobilization and family support in this labor protest. This study offers a fresh approach to this massive social conflict by reconstructing female public participation in its events. The study also takes gender as a category for analyzing the cultural meanings of sexual difference, which shaped both the political sociability of working-class families and their language of rights. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as trade-union journals, the left-wing press, major national newspapers, company documents, official records, and memoirs of labor militants, the essay contends that the great railroad strike was in essence a family enterprise. It represented a landmark in the making of the railwayman as the male breadwinner at the same time that it prompted an acknowledgment of working-class women’s rights in the public domain.

The New South Wales Railway Commissioners' Strategic Pre-Planning for the Mass Strike of 1917

There is evidence to suggest that senior management in the New South Wales railway service pre-planned for the waged staff's withdrawal of labour in early August 1917, which preceded the mass strike. The aims of this strategic pre-planning were to break the power and resolve of the railway unions. The article examines two strategies adopted by the senior management; the stockpiling of coal prior to the dispute as a means of weakening the capacity of a coal miners' strike to disrupt the railway service; and the creation of a pool of conservative salaried railway staff within the Locomotive Branch, devoted to intensifying the productivity of waged labour and to eliminating rank and file militancy.

Arthur Rae: A 'Napoleon' in Exile

Arthur Rae (1860-1943) was a New Zealand shearer and labourer who moved to Australia in 1889. The son of a long-serving official in the New Zealand railway's union, he became an organiser and later a prominent leader in the Australian Workers Union (AWU) during the 1890s and into the early years of the twentieth century. In 1891 he began his somewhat sporadic career in Labour politics as one of the first Labour members to be elected to the New South Wales Parliament in 1891. Rae's activism was informed by his deep commitment to late nineteenth socialist ideals and to ameliorating the condition of working people. His commitment to these socialist ideals and his refusal to compromise them were the determining factors in his labour movement career. It eventually cost him his career in, and membership of, his union and relegated him to the periphery of Labour Party politics. Rae's struggle was to find the ways to proselytise his socialist vision for Australian workers despite his marginalisation within mainstream labour institutions. That he was able to do this over a period of almost three decades is a testament to the powerful role individuals can play making labour history.

"It Ain't Your Color, It's Your Scabbing": Literary Depictions of African American Strikebreakers

I wonder why They are so shortsighted As not to realize That every time They keep any worker, man or woman, White, yellow, or black, OUT of a UNION, They are forcing a worker To be a SCAB, To be used AGAINST THEM? --from Negro Worker These lines of verse, published in The Messenger in July 1919, make a point about strikes that is frequently disregarded in the hundreds of pages of fiction by social realists who addressed the major labor struggles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: [A]ny worker / man or woman, / White, yellow, or could be a strikebreaker. In the West, for example, railroad and mining company managers used workers from countries such as China, Italy, Greece, Japan, and Mexico to break strikes, fully aware that these immigrants would have no allegiance to the ethnic groups who had thrown down their tools in protest. Surprisingly, strikebreaking even crossed class lines as upper and middle class male college students also took on the role of strikebreaker to express their antagonism toward workers. (1) The variety of sources of strikebreakers is not fully reflected in the fictional response to the strike. In some of the most significant radical fiction of the early twentieth century, black workers--more than any other group--are curiously cast in the villainous role of scab. In the span of a few decades, these literary depictions ranged from collective racist stereotypes to sympathetic psychological portraits of the pressures faced by the African American laborer. Ample evidence of friction between whites and blacks can be found in some of the U.S. labor movement's key strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (2) The use of black troops offers the earliest examples. Black soldiers used against striking miners in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in 1892 and 1899, because African Americans were believed much less likely than white troops to fraternize with the strikers (Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation, 85). In addition, black troops guarded trains and railroad property during the Pullman Strike of 1894. Regarding African American civilians, the Knights of Labor and the newly developing American Federation of Labor (AFL) successfully attracted African American workers, and examples of interracial unity both in the workplace and during strikes can be found. But as the lines from Negro Worker also imply, some unions excluded black members. If blacks welcomed as members, they faced discriminatory policies under a second-class status. Blacks denied work on union projects despite membership, or they denied better jobs despite seniority. Unions failed to protect blacks from racial hostility, and blacks charged union leaders with ignoring their complaints of discrimination. The development of segregated locals was another sign of trouble. Before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass wrote in favor of labor unity between African American and white workers; however, when he realized that labor was doing little to lessen racial animosity, he came out in favor of blacks taking the jobs of strikers: Colored men can feel under no obligation to hold out in a 'strike' with the whites, as the latter have never recognized them (qtd. in Foner, Organized Labor, 7). As America's industrial revolution picked up steam, this issue came into greater prominence in most mass production industries in cities in the North. Racism fueled an African American labor force ready and willing to break strikes. One of the earliest and most significant fictional treatments of African American strikebreakers is found in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). The labor struggle in the canonical novel is based on the unsuccessful stockyard strike by thousands of packinghouse workers and mechanical tradesmen of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen in Chicago in 1904. African Americans had been used as strikebreakers in the meat packing industry at least as early as 1894, in response to a sympathy strike by packing and slaughterhouse workers who supported Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union during the Pullman Strike. …

Beth Bates, The Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xvi + 275 pp. $45.00 cloth; $18.95 paper; Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. 332 pp. $45.00 cloth; $18.95 paper.

These two books add to a growing body of scholarship connecting the tactics and strategies of the modern civil rights movement to the black protest campaigns of the New Deal and Second World War. While historians such as Harvard Sitkoff and Cheryl Greenberg have demonstrated the influence of New-Deal policies on African-American protest politics, Bates and Arnesen explore the important role that black unionists played in shaping the civil rights agenda. Bates focuses on A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP). Arnesen examines the struggles of several black railroad unions. Ultimately, both authors skillfully demonstrate black unionists' influence over the race's struggle for equality, drawing particular attention to early civil rights activists' insistence that economic and political democracy were inextricably linked. But while the authors share similar assessments of African American railroaders' political significance, Arnesen's focus on multiple unions presents a more complete picture of the complex forces shaping black politics.

Race and Labor in the Twentieth Century

I've read a thousand books and a million journal articles but I really learned American history from my father, and most of it before I was ten. I learned these things: Teddy Roosevelt was a Boy Scout, Gene Debs a saint, and Walter Reuther a mensch. Jefferson was to be admired, Washington respected, Lincoln revered. Captains of Industry were likely to become Robber Barons unless checked by the George Norrises, Bob La Follettes, and John L. Lewises. The New Deal stole the Socialist program. In my house, it was Robert Ingersoll si, Bishop Sheen no; Darrow over Bryan; the CIO, not the AFL. Indeed, when it came to labor, heroes and villains were vividly etched. None stood so starkly condemned as the injunction judges who crushed labor's hopes. Almost equally vile were their colleagues who struck down reform legislation. Employers who imposed contracts were as bad as slave mongers. And at the bottom of the pile, loathsome to all decent people, was the most degraded and pathetic creature of all, the job-stealing scab.1 With these early history lessons in mind, consider the message of David E. Bernstein's challenging new book, Only One Place of Redress. His account of the motivation for and impact of post-Reconstruction labor law turns the received wisdom on its head. Far from being powerless and victimized, earlytwentieth-century organized labor was a potent political force. Craft and railroad unions were especially successful in gaining passage of laws that benefited white workers and strengthened their grip on jobs. The jurists who issued injunctions and overturned protective legislation were benefactors of African American workers. The unions that injunctions crushed were racist organizations; their demise provided black workers with a foothold in industrial work. So-called yellow dog contracts stopped unions from interfering with the freedom of contract that alone offered minority workers industrial opportunity. African Americans who braved violent picket lines in an effort to provide for their families were risk-taking heroes.

Racism, Railroad Unions, and Labor Regulations

Unlike earlier generations of labor historians, the current generation recognizes that racism suffused, and to some extent even motivated, organized labor from the post-Civil War period through at least the late 1930s. However, labor historians continue to largely ignore the significant role progressive labor laws played in giving racist labor unions the power to exclude African-Americans and other minorities from the labor market. This article, based on chapter 3 of my book, Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal (Duke University Press 2001), discusses how labor laws granting railroad unions monopoly power ? especially the Railway Labor Act ? were crucial to the exclusion of African-Americans from many railroad occupations.

“As Harmless as an Infant”: Deference, Denial, and Adair v. United States

In 1908, the Supreme Court struck down Section 10 of the Erdman Act of 1898 in the notorious case of Adair v. United States.1 Section 10 made it a misdemeanor for employers in the railroad industry to blacklist members of railroad unions or to require employees to sign “yellow-dog” contracts, that is, contracts promising that the employee would not join a labor union. The Court ruled that Section 10 was unconstitutional because it interfered with the “liberty of contract” allegedly protected by the United States Constitution.

The Pullman case: the clash of labor and capital in industrial America

When the American Railway Union went on strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1894, it set into motion a chain of events whose repercussions are still felt today. The strike pitted America's largest industrial union against twenty-four railroads, paralyzed rail traffic in half the country, and in the end was broken up by federal troops and suppressed by the courts, with union leader Eugene Debs incarcerated. But behind the Pullman case lay a conflict of ideologies at a watershed time in our nation's history. David Ray Papke reexamines the events and personalities surrounding the 1894 strike, related proceedings in the Chicago trial courts, and the 1895 Supreme Court decision, In re Debs, which set important standards for labor injunctions. He shows how the Court, by upholding Debs's contempt citation, dealt fatal blows to broad-based unionism in the nation's most important industry and to any hope for a more evenhanded form of judicial involvement in labor disputes-thus setting the stage for labor law in decades to come. The Pullman case was a defining moment in the often violent confrontation between capital and labor. It matched wealthy industrialist George Pullman against Debs and gave a stage to Debs's fledgling attorney Clarence Darrow. Throughout the trial, capital and labor tried to convince the public of the justice of their cause: Debs decrying the company's treatment of workers and Pullman raising fears of radical unionists. Papke provides an analytically concise and highly readable account of these proceedings, offering insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the law at the peak of industrial capitalism, showcasing Debs's passionate commitment to workers' rights, and providing a window on America during a period of rapid industrialization and social transformation. Papke shows that the law was far from neutral in defending corporate interests and suggests what the Pullman case, by raising questions about both the legitimacy of giant corporations and the revolutionary style of industrial unions, can teach us about law and legal institutions in our own time. His book captures the passions of industrial America and tells an important story at the intersection of legal and cultural history.

What if Labor Were Not White and Male? Recentering Working-Class History and Reconstructing Debate on the Unions and Race

During World War Two Alexander Saxton, the great historian of race and class, was a young activist working in the railroad industry. In a lengthy article for theDaily Workerhe caught the complexity of racial discrimination among railway unions. The brotherhoods which organized railroad labor inculded several unions which had historically established the worst records of attempting to enforce what one commentator called the “Nordic closed shop” in their crafts. By the time Saxton wrote, however, the railwayunions had joined in campaigns against the poll tax and against lynching. What they avoided was agitation against “alleged” racism in their own workplaces. When the Fair Employment Practices Committee canceled hearings inquiring into discrimination in railroad employment, the unions rejoiced. Their newspaper observed that in any case such hearings would be illegitimate if African Americans joined in the deliberations. “Thereshould be on the Committee,” according to Labor, “no representative of any race or special interest.” Saxton added, “Apparently white men belongto no race.”

The Pullman Strike of 1894

The Pullman Strike of 1894