In 2022, railway workers were increasingly agitated by the increasing use of “Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR)” which cut staffing and brought speed-ups to dangerous levels, and “Hi-Viz” sick policies which is a point system to restrict the number of days workers can take off when sick. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) president, Dennis Pierce, called the High Viz policy the “worst and most egregious attendance policy ever adopted by any rail carrier.”
After the failure of two years of National Mediation Board debates to produce a new contract, President Biden used the Presidential Emergency Board to impose a cool-down period of 30 days of no strikes or lockouts. After the cool-down period and the rejection of the rank-and-file railway workers to ratify the tentative agreement, over 100,000 workers represented by railway unions such as BLET, International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers – Mechanical Division (SMART-MD), Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees (BMWE), Brotherhood of Teamsters(Teamsters), and others overwhelmingly voted to strike. This strike, aimed at railroad monopolies such as Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, CSX, BNSF, Kansas City Southern, and Canadian National, would have begun on December 9, 2022.
On December 2nd, the Democrat-led US Senate voted 80 – 15 to ban a railroad strike, which would have caused 30 percent of US shipments to halt and $2 billion a day, and force the tentative agreement which did not include the main demand from labor, sick days, onto the workers.
This anti-democratic attack on labor is all the result of the century-old Railway Labor Act. So how did it come into being in the first place?
The position of railway labor was not always in such a weak position. During the 1910s and 20s the railroad unions, especially the Big Four: The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (BLE), Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen (BRT), Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes (BMWE), and Order of Railway Conductors (ORC), became formidable opponents to the bosses and their monopolies of railroading. This strength did not come from thin air. The strength of these unions, which numbered over a million members combined, grew from hard struggle from the 1870s until the 1920s. During WWI, the railway workers experienced great hardship when they were overworked and put under deadly working conditions to meet the needs of the war. In 1916, with the threat of an earth-shaking strike looming, President Woodrow’s government passed the Adamson Act which guaranteed an eight-hour day for the railway workers. The next year, the railroads in the US were then taken under public management as a public service rather than monopolies that ran inefficiently to maximize profits.
All the hard-earned achievements that cost the blood, sweat, and tears of the organized railway workers were all being thrown away starting in 1920. The leadership of the railway unions such as Bill Lee of the BRT, Edward Fitzgerald of the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks (BRC), E.F. Grable of the Brotherhood of BMWE, and Warren Stone of BLE took the path of treachery. The downward spiral came when the leaders adopted policies of class collaboration with the monopoly bosses. These policies led to the re-privatization of the rails and the creation of the Railway Labor Board, the rejection of the federation of the railway unions and instead the breaking up of the existing unions, betrayal of Shopmen’s Strike of 1922, the adoption of the B&O Cooperation Plan which allowed companies to enact speed-ups with the blessing of reactionary trade union leadership, and finally the passing of the Railway Labor Act (RLA) which put extreme restrictions on railway labor’s collective power in favor of arbitration which puts labor at the mercy of the railway monopolies, reactionary union leadership, and government administrations that are heavily lobbied by the railway monopolies.
The argument for the Railway Labor Act, which expanded its jurisdiction to airline labor relations in 1936, is that interstate commerce is too important for the national economy and that any freezing of the railways would be catastrophic to the United States. This is a fact, however, does that mean the RLA is the solution to this crisis? No, it is even more of a threat. This is because arbitration forced upon labor by the government does not resolve the conflict between labor and the bosses but rather kicks the can down the road. All it does is aggravate the problem until it cannot be contained any longer. So if the Railway Labor Act is not the solution, what is? Nationalization of the rails. Numerous countries such as Germany, France, Argentina, Ireland, and even massive countries with land areas similar to or even greater than the United States such as India, China, Russia, and our neighbor to our north, Canada have public rail. The United States should learn from these countries put railways under public ownership and organize for the development of the welfare of American citizens. We must follow the leadership of the rank-and-file Railroad Workers United organization in its campaign to nationalize rails called Public Rail Now.
Be First to Comment