- Source: 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
In 1926 the Railway Labor Executives' Association was founded as a federation of a number of the brotherhoods with the purpose of acting as a legislative lobbying and policy advisory body.
1930s onwards
One of the main challenges that railroad brotherhoods faced was growing calls for desegregation. Many railroad brotherhoods had maintained a color bar on membership. The 1944 Tunstall and Steele cases challenged this. A number of black led brotherhoods organised, most prominently the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters organised by the Socialist Party campaigner, A. Philip Randolph, which had ambiguous relationships with the older white brotherhoods, on the one hand fighting craft rules that were seen as discriminatory while on the other modelling themselves on the brotherhood's craft unionism, for instance by staying in the American Federation of Labor rather than the more socialist oriented Congress of Industrial Organisations.
Many of the Railroad Brotherhoods merged into other larger unions such as the Teamsters, the Transportation Communications International Union and the United Transportation Union.
The Railway Labor Executives' Association disbanded in January 1997, with its functions taken on by the Rail Division of the AFL–CIO Transportation Trades Department.
Main railroad brotherhoods
See also
Brotherhood of Railway Clerks
Brotherhood of Railway Carmen
Labor history of the United States § Railroad brotherhoods
References
Further reading
Arnesen, Eric. "'Like Banquo's Ghost, It Will Not Down': The Race Question and the American Railroad Brotherhoods, 1880-1920." American Historical Review 99.5 (1994): 1601–1633. online
Arnesen, Eric. Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (2001)
Bernstein, David E. "Racism, Railroad Unions, and Labor Regulations." The Independent Review 5.2 (2000): 237–247. online
Chateauvert, Melinda. Marching together: Women of the brotherhood of sleeping car porters (University of Illinois Press, 1997), on the auxiliaries.
Cupper, Dan. "Review of 'History of the BLET: Since 1863'" Railroad History (2013) #209 pp. 115–116 online
Gamst, Frederick C. "Railroad Craft Seniority: The Essence of Railroad Society and Culture (and Its 'State')." Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers (2003): 176-204 online.
Kelly, Joseph. "Showing Agency on the Margins: African American Railway Workers in the South and Their Unions, 1917–1930." Labour: Journal of Canadian Labour Studies/Le Travail: revue d’Études Ouvrières Canadiennes 71 (2013): 123–148, in the USA. online
McIntyre, Stephen L., "'The City Belongs to the Local Unions': The Rise of the Springfield Labor Movement, 1871-1912," Missouri Historical Review 98 (2003): 24–46. in Springfield, Missouri
Olssen, Erik. "The making of a political machine: The railroad unions enter politics." Labor History 19.3 (1978): 373–396, in 1922 in the Conference for Progressive Political Action (CPPA).
Osborn, Christabel. "Railway Brotherhoods in the United States." The Economic Journal 8.32 (1898): 577-579 online.
Stradling, David. "Dirty Work and Clean Air: Locomotive Firemen, Environmental Activists, and Stories of Conflict." Journal of Urban History 28.1 (2001): 35–54.
Stromquist, Shelton. "Enginemen and Shopmen: Technological change and the organization of labor in an ERA of railroad expansion." Labor History 24.4 (1983): 485–499.
Taillon, Paul Michel. " 'What we want is good, sober men:' masculinity, respectability, and temperance in the railroad brotherhoods, C. 1870-1910." Journal of Social History 36.2 (2002): 319–338. excerpt
Taillon, Paul Michel. Good, Reliable, White Men: Railroad Brotherhoods, 1877-1917 (U of Illinois Press, 2009).
Taillon, Paul Michel. "Americanism, Racism, and 'Progressive' Unionism: The Railroad Brotherhoods, 1898-1916." Australasian Journal of American Studies 20.1 (2001): 55–65. online
Troy, Leo. "Labor representation on American railways." Labor History 2.3 (1961): 295–322.
Walker, Mark. "Aristocracies of labor: craft unionism, immigration, and working-class households in West Oakland, California." Historical Archaeology 42.1 (2008): 108–132, on standard of living. online
Wetzel, Kurt. "Railroad management's response to operating employees accidents, 1890–1913." Labor History 21.3 (1980): 351–368.
White, W. Thomas. "Railroad Labor Protests, 1894-1917: From Community to Class in the Pacific Northwest." Pacific Northwest Quarterly 75.1 (1984): 13–21. online.
Williams-Searle, John. "Courting Risk: Disability, Masculinity, and Liability on Iowa’s Railroads, 1868–1900." The Annals of Iowa 58.1 (1999): 27–77.
Zieger, Robert H. "From hostility to moderation: Railroad labor policy in the 1920s." Labor History 9.1 (1968): 23–38.
External links
Bibliography of online resources on railway labor in late 19th century Archived 2015-08-01 at the Wayback Machine
"Railway Brotherhoods" . Collier's New Encyclopedia. 1921.
Kata Kunci Pencarian:
- Juru api
- Railroad brotherhoods
- List of American railway unions
- Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen
- Pullman Strike
- Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen
- Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen
- Brotherhood of Railway Carmen
- Gilded Age
- Labor history of the United States
- Progressive Party (United States, 1924–1934)
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