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Jamelle Bouie

The Story Behind the Averted Rail Strike Is About Employers and Exploitation

State troopers were sent to maintain order in Illinois in 1922, when seven of the 16 railroad unions went on strike around the country.Credit...Bettmann, via Getty Images

Opinion Columnist

The short story behind the now-averted railroad strike is this: The largest freight railroad carriers in the country were willing to cripple the transportation infrastructure of the United States rather than allow their workers to take the occasional day off to see a doctor or attend to their families.

Here’s the longer story: This week, unions representing tens of thousands of railway workers were poised to strike in protest of poor working conditions and low wages. Their complaints were straightforward. The two largest freight railroad carriers — Union Pacific and BNSF Railway — were using attendance policies that punished workers for taking time off from the job. “Engineers and conductors face penalties for taking any time off,” The Washington Post explained in its report on the labor dispute, “including weekends, outside of holidays and preplanned vacation, even in the case of emergencies.”

The fact of the matter is that a decade of corporate cost-cutting, including smaller crews for longer trains, has placed railroad workers under incredible pressure. Not only are they unable to take time for emergencies or sudden illnesses, but they are almost always on call, with just a few hours’ notice before they have to take a shift. For them, the tight schedules and stiff punishments translate to strains on their finances, families and health.

What makes these conditions worse is that they come at a time when rail carriers are posting record profits as a result of demand during the pandemic. As NBC News reports, BNSF had a net income of nearly $6 billion in 2021, up 16 percent from the previous year. Union Pacific, likewise, had a net income of $6.5 billion, which was also up 16 percent from the previous year. Other freight companies, like CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern Railway, have posted large gains as well. But this windfall has not stopped the carriers from trying to wring as much labor as possible out of a steadily shrinking work force.

The White House has been struggling to resolve the impasse for fear of what a strike could do to the economy (and to Democratic chances in November). According to the Association of American Railroads, which represents the freight industry, a rail shutdown would be “devastating” for the transport of consumer goods, industrial chemicals, agricultural products and motor vehicles. “If these and other rail shipments were halted,” the association estimates, “the loss in economic output would likely be at least $2 billion per day.”

On Thursday morning, President Biden announced a tentative settlement between the rail companies and rail unions. “It is a win for tens of thousands of rail workers who worked tirelessly through the pandemic to ensure that America’s families and communities got deliveries of what have kept us going during these difficult years,” Biden said in a statement. “These rail workers will get better pay, improved working conditions and peace of mind around their health care costs: all hard-earned.”

It remains to be seen, of course, whether union membership will vote to ratify the deal (there are 12 unions involved). For now, however, we can say something that bears repeating: This standoff demonstrates the power and importance of unions and collective bargaining for ordinary workers.

As always, there is a history here. This year happens to be the centennial of the beginning of one of the largest railroad strikes in American history. During the months of the strike, hundreds of thousands of railroad workers refused to work in protest of low pay and dangerous conditions, in a direct challenge to one of the most powerful (and lucrative) industries in the United States.

Those workers stood at the heart of what was one of the central enterprises of industrial capitalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Their numbers included, as the historian Colin J. Davis notes in “Power at Odds: The 1922 National Railroad Shopmen’s Strike,” “machinists, boilermakers, blacksmiths, electricians, sheet-metal workers, and railway carmen — the work force that repaired and refitted locomotives, freight cars, and passenger cars.” And “their workmanship underlay the critical movement of rolling stock and thus, the operating revenue for the railroads.”

Then, as now, they faced owners who “notoriously squeezed the maximum profit at the smallest cost from their lines.” And in the reactionary backlash that followed the end of the First World War — embodied in the Red Scare and Red Summer of 1919 — railroad management “embarked on a campaign to destroy union representation on their roads.” The risk of unemployment, Davis writes, “was exploited as management sought to instill fear in railroad workers” in order to cut wages and change work rules.

In 1920 and 1921, railroad companies slashed jobs, reduced pay and began to outsource work to subcontractors in order to dilute the strength of railroad workers. By the summer of 1922, worker anger with the railroad companies reached a boiling point. On July 1, leaders of the skilled and semiskilled railroad unions announced that more than 400,000 workers had walked off the job.

What followed was months of violence and industrial unrest. Backed by the Railway Labor Board — established in 1920 to arbitrate between employers and workers but effectively a tool of the employers — railroad companies hired strikebreakers to replace skilled and semiskilled laborers as well as private security forces to protect rail lines and repair shops. In multiple cities, armed company guards opened fire on striking workers, killing several and escalating the conflict even more. Governors in several states called out the National Guard to assist strikebreakers, and President Warren G. Harding’s attorney general, Harry M. Daugherty, directed federal agents to assist the railroads.

The strike all but ended in September 1922, after the reactionary Daugherty won a sweeping federal injunction against the striking workers. They had been beaten, but not entirely and not for good. The experience of the 1922 strike would help inspire workers over the next decade to build the kind of political power needed to regain lost ground. The successful industrial organizing of the 1930s owes a good deal to this labor rebellion of the 1920s.

Today, even with the surge of union activity in fast-food and other service-related industries, private-sector unionization is still at its lowest point since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. And yet, as we’ve seen, where unions are strong — or at least where they have strength — they are still able to challenge the rapacious and exploitative behavior of business owners and employers.

This more recent episode, then, is a potent reminder that the single best thing President Biden and the Democratic Party can do for workers is to give them the tools and support to build power for themselves. Which is to say that while Democrats do not have the votes to overhaul labor law and protect the right to organize in this Congress, if and when they do, they must.

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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: A Story About Employers and The Employed. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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