Railroad brotherhoods

The railroad brotherhoods are labor unions of railroad workers in the United States. They first appeared in 1863 and they are still active. Until recent years they were largely independent of each other and of the American Federation of Labor.

1863–1920

With the rapid growth and consolidation of large railroad systems after 1870, union organizations sprang up, covering the entire nation. By 1901, 17 major railway brotherhood were in operation; they generally worked amicably with management, which recognize their usefulness.[1] Key unions included the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (BLE), the Order of Railway Conductors, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, and the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen.[2] Their main goal was building insurance and medical packages for their members, and negotiating bureaucratic work rules that favored their membership, such as seniority and grievance procedures.[3] They were not members of the AFL, and fought off more radical rivals such as the Knights of Labor in the 1880s and the American Railroad Union in the 1890s. They consolidated their power in 1916, after threatening a national strike, by securing the Adamson Act, a federal law that provided 10 hours' pay for an eight-hour day.[4][5]

1920s

At the end World War I, the brotherhoods promoted the "Plumb Plan" for the nationalization of the railroads, and conducted a national strike in 1919.[6] Both efforts failed, and the brotherhoods were largely stagnant in the 1920s. They generally were independent politically, but supported the third-party campaign of Robert M. La Follette in 1924.

The Republican Party was dominant in Washington and it was generally hostile to the brotherhoods until it moderated its position around 1926.[7]

The Great Railroad Strike of 1922, a nationwide railroad shop workers' strike, began on July 1. The immediate cause of the strike was the Railroad Labor Board's announcement that hourly wages would be cut by seven cents on July 1, which prompted a shop workers' vote on whether or not to strike. The operators' union did not join in the strike, and the railroads employed strikebreakers to fill three-fourths of the roughly 400,000 vacated positions, increasing hostilities between the railroads and the striking workers. On September 1, a federal judge issued a sweeping injunction against striking, assembling, picketing, colloquially known as the "Daugherty injunction".

Unions bitterly resented the injunction; a few sympathy strikes shut down some railroads completely. The strike eventually died out as many shopmen made deals with the railroads on the local level. The often unpalatable concessions—coupled with memories of the violence and tension during the strike—soured relations between the railroads and the shopmen for years.

Main railroad brotherhoods
Union Date organized Comments
Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers 1863 Journal: Locomotive Engineers' Journal
Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen 1873 Now part of United Transportation Union. Journal: Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen's Magazine.
Order of Railroad Conductors 1868 Journal: The Railroad Conductor
Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen 1883 Journal: The Railroad Trainman
Order of Railroad Telegraphers 1886 Journal: The Railroad Telegrapher
Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes 1887 Journal:
American Federation of Railroad Workers Journal: The Railroad Worker
Railroad Yardmasters of America 1918
Brotherhood of Railway Employees 1901 Journal: Railway Employees' Journal
Order of Railway Expressment Journal: The Railway Expressman
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters 1924
Train Dispatchers Association Journal: The Train Dispatcher

See also

References
  1. Walter Licht, Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century (1983) pp 264-68
  2. In 1969, all except the BLE joined with the Switchmen's Union to become the United Transportation Union (UTU). In 2004 the BLE joined the Teamsters.
  3. Ducker, James H. (1983). Men of the Steel Rails: Workers on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, 1869–1900. University of Nebraska Press. pp. 41–42, 108–16, 134–38. ISBN 978-0803216624.
  4. Paul Michel Taillon, Good, Reliable, White Men: Railroad Brotherhoods, 1877-1917 (University of Illinois Press, 2009).
  5. Fink, Gary M., ed. Labor Unions (Greenwood Press, 1977)
  6. K. Austin Kerr (1968). American Railroad Politics, 1914–1920: Rates, Wages and Efficiency. University of Pittsburgh Press. pp. 164–65. ISBN 9780822975694.
  7. Robert H. Zieger, "From Hostility to Moderation: Railroad Labor Policy in the 1920s," Labor History (1968) 9#1 pp 23-38 online
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