This week, Congress passed a bill that effectively prohibits U.S. rail workers from going on strike. We dig into the history of an industry where previous work stoppages have turned deadly.
This week, Congress passed a bill that effectively imposed an agreement between rail workers and their companies and prohibited a strike. Politicians feared that any work stoppage would cripple the U.S. economy for the holidays, costing the country billions of dollars.
Today, we talk about the unique, violent history of rail workers trying to fight for better union contracts. Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: University of Rhode Island history professor Erik Loomis
More reading:
Senate moves to avert rail strike amid dire warnings
Biden calls on Congress to head off potential rail strike
Big rail unions split on contract deal with railroads, raising possibility of a strike
Gustavo: The days when railroads dominated transportation in American life are long gone, but they’re still a crucial way to move goods throughout the country, to the tune of billions of tons of cargo every year. It's a vital part of the American economy.
The nation's rail workers want more job protection, higher salaries, more days off. Freight companies aren't budging.
And for now, the federal government has stepped in to tell workers: “Get back to work.”
I'm Gustavo Arrelano. You're listening to “The Times: Essential News from the L.A. Times.” It's Friday, Dec. 2, 2022.
Today, the federal government just prevented a possible rail strike that would have crippled the U.S. economy. They imposed an agreement between workers and their companies — and this isn’t the first time the feds have done such a move.
We look at what happened during previous transportation strikes in the United States, and what that can teach us about the American labor movement in the present.
Erik Loomis is a professor of history at the University of Rhode Island and author of “A History of America in 10 Strikes.” Eric, welcome to “The Times.”
Erik: Well, thank you so much.
Gustavo: Before we got to this point, there was a tentative deal that the Biden administration brokered back in September that kept a strike from happening then. What were the issues that they agreed on?
Erik: Well, they agreed, primarily on financials. The wages in this contract are really quite good. Provides a significant pay raise, so, you know, this puts the average wage well into over a hundred thousand dollars a year, which is a skilled job. It's a hard job. It's very much worth it. But there are a lot of issues around sick leave and time-based management that have been a real problem here, and the deal doesn't really impact those in a positive way.
Gustavo: Yeah, Congress has voted to enforce that deal to the dismay of tens of thousands of rail workers. What was the biggest disagreement between them and their employers?
Erik: The biggest disagreement is over leave time. The rail companies, which are tremendously profitable and are just raking in the money, they have created a system by which they only have two people per train. They want to reduce that to one.
Gustavo: Wow.
Erik: Which, you know, opens up the world to potential disastrous accidents. Where there's no backup for human error and things like this. They don't have any sick leave and, in recent years, they have moved it toward basically forcing workers to remain on call all the time. So like you're celebrating your kid's birthday party, the train company calls you, you literally have to go to work and don't have an option not to. And so it's been a real problem, this issue of time management, of overall employment. But really just the treatment of these workers and their ability to control their own time, and to even have time to control, is really the core issue here.
Gustavo: And that's the interesting thing. President Joe Biden has called himself a proud pro-union president, but in a statement, he said, quote, “Let me be clear. A rail shutdown would devastate our economy.” And Congress members also agreed with him. Here's Republican Michelle Fischbach.
Michelle Fischbach: Our country's economy can't handle a strike that reports would say would cost $2 billion a day. A rail strike would mean halting transportation of raw materials, food, beverages, and not to mention passengers trying to visit their families.
Gustavo: And here's Democrat Jim McGovern.
Jim McGovern: Chemicals that purify water and provide safe drinking water across the country would become scarce. Gas prices will go up. Commuter rails that carry tens of thousands of people to work each day would no longer run. Uh, there will be shortages of nearly every kind of food in our grocery stores, as well as shortages of all kinds of products in retail stores. Packages and online orders will come to a halt just before the holidays.
Gustavo: So, Eric, why is the federal government even involved? Isn't this just like any other strike, something between an employer and their employees?
Erik: Transportation strikes shut down the entire economy, and we don't often think about the railroads these days because we think about trucks. We think about airplanes, maybe container ships, but we really don't think about railroads. A shutdown that would last more than a couple of days could have really intensive implications on things such as inflation, supply chains, the ability of people to get products. Several of the most iconic and important moments in American labor history have been around transportation strikes because they have such power over the economy, in a way that not only, that makes business uncomfortable, but ultimately makes leaders of both political parties uncomfortable. I think it's almost for certain that any president probably would've done the same thing. Even pro-labor presidents of the past, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Harry Truman, that have strong pro-labor reputations, had engaged in activities like this in key industries that many people did see as anti-labor. They're just forgotten about today.
Gustavo: The response to the Biden administration's actions comes from the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees Division, but part of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. And they said they're deeply disappointed by the president and they also say that calling on Congress to pass immediate legislation, quote, “denies railroad workers their right to strike, while also denying them of the benefit that they would likely otherwise obtain if they were not denied their right to strike.” So how did the federal government this week pass Biden’s legislation so quickly?
Erik: Yeah. Well, actually the House passed two bills. The first bill is the bill that President Biden wanted to implement this contract. That passed by a large margin. The second bill, also just passed by a very narrow margin, would expand the sick leave to seven days. It doesn't have to be just implementing the deal on the table. Congress can go in and implement whatever it wants to.
Gustavo: Yeah, the Senate passed one bill, but voted down another bill that would have given rail workers seven days of sick paid leave. While this bill prevented any possible rail strike, past rail strikes concluded differently — and violently. We’ll have more after the break.
Gustavo: We're back with historian Erik Loomis. Erik, you specialize in labor history, and one of the things that we learn in school is how railroads helped to create the modern-day United States, but we never really learn about labor strife, period. So how has it played out in the railroad industry historically?
Erik: Two of the biggest strikes in American history have come out of the railroads and they're somewhat telling here. One is the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, in which was a kind of a general rebellion against the railroads, started on a local level in West Virginia with a pay cut, but quickly expanded across the nation, and became a kind of overall revolt against the power railroads had over the economy and people's lives. And then in 1894, the Pullman strike, which again started as a small strike of people who made the fancy rail cars that people slept on, became a broader strike when Eugene Debs’ American Railway Union joined that strike and made it more of a general strike. Both of these strikes shut down the railroads and really, went along with shutting down the economy. In both of these cases, the presidents of the United States, Ruthford B. Hayes and Grover Cleveland, called out the military to violently crush those strikes. And so that's this historical use of violence against railroad strikes.
Gustavo: And when you say crush, you're talking violence.
Erik: Yeah. I'm talking death, right? I'm talking opening fire on workers. That's right.
Gustavo: Wow.
Erik: Now, later down the road, the people who then later own the Pullman Sleeping Car Co., as George Pullman's long dead, move to hiring African Americans to be the porters on these cars. Basically a servant's job, but also about the best job that an African American male could get in the United States during these years. And the legendary organizer, A. Philip Randolph, begins the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union in 1925 to build the power of these workers. It becomes the first Black union chartered by the American Federation of Labor that had usually been very anti-immigrant and quite racist in many ways. And Randolph remains a critical part of the American labor movement, really for the next 40 years.
Erik: So the Great Railroad strike, the Pullman strike. These are these kind of big, broad, sort of rebellions, but most railroad worker unions, who were the ancestors of the modern unions that we see today, were these railroad brotherhoods, They tended to be pretty politically conservative, very much craft-oriented, and without, like, really large-scale political agendas. These were not unions that were attempting to overturn capitalism. So we don't really learn very much about them, generally, because they don't do romantic stuff, like engage in a lot of strikes or…
Gustavo: A lot of great songs.
Erik: Yeah, yeah. No, no, definitely not. They're trying to stop this stuff from happening. And so Congress basically goes to the rail union lawyers and says, “What would be a fair system where we could not really have these strikes?” And provide some level of mediation between the companies and the workers so we could have a smooth running operation. And so basically this is what became the Railway Labor Act, is the ability of Congress to create a special category of worker by which they are going to, you know, have a mediation board that's gonna make decisions, try to get both sides to agree. And then if they can't agree, then to have the ability to go in and simply implement an agreement. Yes, that does take away the right to strike effectively, but it also can take away the corporate ability to just set conditions, too. Now, this is a hundred years ago. Have corporations gained a lot of power, figured out how to kind of rig this? Yeah, sure they have. But that is the history here and, and it's at least worth noting that at the time, it made a lot of sense for unions to have this system.
Gustavo: Is that law the same one that President Ronald Reagan used against air traffic controllers in the ’80s?
Erik: No, he didn't have to do that. Because while the airlines are covered under the Railway Labor Act, it was expanded for the airlines for similar reasons. In the case of the air traffic controllers as federal workers, it was actually illegal for them to strike.
Reagan: Government cannot close down the assembly line. It has to provide without interruption the protective services, which are government's reason for being. It was in recognition of this that the Congress passed a law forbidding strikes by government employees against the public safety.
Erik: So if the pilot struck, let's say, or the flight attendants, then the Railway Labor Act could be used. But in the case of Reagan's infamous firing of the air traffic controllers in 1981, which it should be said, he definitely did not have to do, that was technically an illegal strike, which was the justification Reagan used to fire them.
Gustavo: In that case, can Biden still invoke the railway labor law that you mentioned?
Erik: I mean, that's effectively what he's doing here by asking Congress to intervene. By asking Congress to pass that bill, he is implementing the Railway Labor Act.
Gustavo: More after the break.
Gustavo: Erik, you always hear about the power of unions. My mom was a Teamster, by the way. She was a tomato canner in the ’70s and ’80s. What was the height of the union movement and when did it start declining and why?
Erik: The height of the union movement was the years after World War II, between the mid-’40s and the mid-’50s. But even then, a majority of American workers were never union members, which is part of the reason it was able to decline.
Erik: The union movement declines, first due to things such as automation, which certainly reduced the number of workers that even in these highly-unionized facilities, such as steel for instance, needed.
Erik: It declines, in part, because the labor movement sort of stops organizing. It gets a little fat and happy. And it doesn't engage in the kind of wide-scale organizing that it had in the ’30s.
Erik: It declines because factories start moving overseas, which was basically a bipartisan consensus for free trade that really goes back to the 1960s. And factories begin to move, first to Mexico and then to Central America and Asia. But also because the United States is such a complex nation, with really like 50 little countries inside of it, states were already leaving unionized workplaces like New Jersey or Illinois or even California and moving to, uh, Louisiana and Alabama, South Carolina, where they didn't have to have unions. And so because the states have so much control over this stuff, that was already beginning to undermine unions.
Erik: In the 1970s, a big strike wave and militancy that comes out of the broader militancy of the ’60s. But after Reagan fires the air traffic controllers in 1981, which really is an open invitation for industry to bust its own unions, then you see a full-fledged war on the American labor movement that we're still trying to recover from today.
Gustavo: We're hearing more and more about labor unions forming in industries and corporations that people historically thought were impossible to organize. On the podcast, we've talked about how baristas across the country, especially at Starbucks, are organizing. What do you think is happening that we're seeing this resurgence of people wanting to go on strike or people wanting to create unions?
Erik: I think there's a lot of dissatisfaction by workers in the American economy. It's not just your traditional working-class workers either. It's college graduates, right? It's people who have been told, by a lot of society, stand up for your rights. Give your preferred pronouns, wear a Black Lives Matter button, you know, oppose racism. And a lot of young people especially have taken advantage of that. But it's not a big step forward to say, you know, I'm standing up for my rights in all these other ways, but I have no rights on the job, right? I'm making a very low, minimum wage with very few benefits, and I have all this student debt. This is terrible and I want to stand up for it. And so the idea of a union has been quite popular. You know, if you look at these early attempts now to organize Starbucks, but also at places like REI and Apple as well as, of course, the Amazon facility in Staten Island, I think you're seeing a broader trend of especially younger people who are making more demands on their employers.
AP TAPE: Union busting’s gone too far. Give us help behind the bar. Union busting’s gone too far. Give us help behind the bar.
Erik: And importantly, building the labor movement into new industries, where it really hasn't been before. Because, let's face it, while something like the rail unions have been around for a long time, because we still use railroads, the core of the mid-20th century labor movement, those industries are gone. Auto, steel, rubber, they're either a shell of themselves or they're effectively totally gone. So it really is critical to expand the labor movement into new sectors. And I think there's a lot of reason, uh, to feel pretty optimistic about where this is going.
AP TAPE 2: Get that contract signed, come stay out on the line until we get that contract signed. Come stay out on the line till we get that contract signed. Get it signed. Get it signed. Get it signed.
Gustavo: What lessons do you think that new wave of labor organizing can learn about the history of rail unions?
Erik: Each union you know has different structures, different politics, different ideals. You see that just within the many rail unions that exist. And there are many models of organizing in American history. The bigger lessons from these strikes, in 1877 and in 1894, even if they’re sort of a long time ago, that certain workers were going to have a tremendous amount of power in the American economy and are able to take advantage of that. And also that, that doesn't necessarily mean that the government's not going to crack down on them or the government's not going to do what they say. That the rail unions represent an over-century-long struggle for economic rights in this country. And these things aren't won overnight. And so, you know, a kind of combination of patience, but also insistence, I think is a really strong lesson from these rail unions.
Gustavo: Finally, what's next for these rail workers? Is history just going to repeat itself and we can expect to see another impasse asking for these same things again in a few years down the road? Or in this case, uh, down the train tracks?
Erik: You know, I think that one thing that this has done is placed a much greater awareness on the problem of sick leave. The fact that the United States doesn't have just a federal paid sick leave law is outrageous. Effectively every other country has things like this. So the fact that you could even have a scenario in which you are an incredibly highly-skilled, well-paid worker — only after a huge struggle, a single day of sick leave or personal leave? — is totally outrageous. And so I would certainly not be surprised if we don't look at another impasse when this contract ends. But I also think that there is a real chance that there will be a greater emphasis on sick leave and that Congress could move and potentially again, in this contract, to implement more sick leave and perhaps that builds up to a broader movement for more sick leave across this country, which we desperately need as a people.
Gustavo: Eric, thank you so much for this conversation.
Erik: Hey, thank you for having me.
Gustavo: And that's it for this episode of “The Times: Essential News from the L.A. Times.” Denise Guerra and Ashlea Brown were the jefas on this episode and Mario Diaz mixed and mastered it.
Our show is produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, Kasia Broussalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistants are Roberto Reyes and Nicolas Perez. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmín Aguilera, Shani Hilton and Heba Elorbany. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back next week with all the news and desmadre. Gracias.