Rail Unions in the U.S. are in bad need of consolidation, democracy, and militancy
By Carey Dall
Blaming Joe Biden diverts attention from the real problem…
In November 2019 – precipitously close to the Christmas holiday – Teamsters Canada shut down the Canadian National railroad. The Canadian Parliament has similar powers to the U.S. Congress to intervene in rail strikes. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came under incredible pressure from business groups to pass “back-to-work” legislation, but he refused. The strike plowed on for 9 days, and the workers largely won the struggle.
Why did Canadian rail workers get to strike in 2019 and U.S. rail workers not in 2022? It certainly isn’t because Trudeau is any more pro-worker than Joe Biden. It is because Trudeau and the Liberals feared the Canadian Labour Movement, whose militant willingness to expand strikes recently forced Ontario Premier Doug Ford into a dramatic policy reversal.
The 2022 Freight Rail beef in the United States has received incredible coverage. Everyone from Newsmax to the New York Times to The Onion produced stories warning of crippled supply chains already at the breaking point due to overreliance on Just-In-Time inventory management, skeletal staffing levels, and lack of infrastructural investment by the private sector. This attention is a good thing, specifically as a new generation of leftists are now realizing that transportation and logistics are vital vectors for societal change. However, an alarming number of commentators are grafting their ideological purity and baseless suspicions on the situation as they restate half-truths time and again: Joe Biden is in bed with corporations. The Democrats and Republicans screwed over rail workers by taking away their right to strike. And so on.
Obviously, Joe Biden and both parties are in hock to corporate elites. However, Biden’s performance in this case will surprise many.
Rail Labor leadership makes a key mistake
When Sean O’Brien was seated as Teamster General President in March 2022, one of his first acts was to visit the White House and plead with Biden to release Rail Labor from Mediation and form a Presidential Emergency Board. The Teamsters Union includes two of the twelve rail unions – the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees [BMWED] and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers [BLET]. They are both totally autonomous from each other, and have a long history of not working together, to put it kindly. Each union has approximately 25,000 members – down alarmingly in the past 7 years as the industry has gone aggressively lean under the false moniker “Precision Scheduled Railroading” or PSR.
Biden’s administration, which includes O’Brien’s longtime Boston ally Marty Walsh, was nervous that ending Mediation would enable a national strike just before the 2022 midterms. But O’Brien’s legendary charm won the day – he even got the President to let Rail Labor name the majority of the PEB! Unfortunately, the Rail Labor leaders offered up the names of career arbitrators when what was called for were progressive social scientists, economists, or other labor leaders.
Arbitrators are infamous for splitting the baby. And that’s what the PEB 250 did. That’s not Biden’s fault, nor the fault of the two political parties. It’s Rail Labor leadership’s fault.
A Rail Strike was never intended by Rail Labor leaders
In truth, a railroad strike was never in the cards. Anyone with an appreciation of American Rail Labor History knows this. To back Congress off with their Constitutional right to intervene in anything that endangers interstate commerce, Rail Labor would have needed to wage a multi-year comprehensive contract campaign in advance of the round of bargaining, which began in January 2020. Comprehensive contract campaigns involve internal organizing, communications strategy, legislative strategy, regulatory strategy, legal strategy, and bargaining strategy – all in an intricately synchronized dynamic that puts the members, their escalating actions, and their stories at the center of the struggle.
If at the beginning of the round the union suspects that the negotiations will not go smoothly – and they never go smoothly these days – it is important to envision what amount of public support will be needed if striking becomes necessary. In the context of endangering the national transmission of life sustaining cargo, this requires intense communication and coalition development across society in an effort to help communities understand that the union is bargaining for the common good. The Nurses excel at this by forcing the issue of nurse-patient ratios at the table, and then positioning themselves as healthcare warriors in the public sphere.
Rail Labor has been unwilling to implement such a campaign centered on the members and the common good which is unfortunate given that the Railroads are actually sitting ducks: their safety record is so bad that inevitably a train with explosive or poisonous cargo will derail in or near a large population center unless strident re-regulation and re-staffing take place; their record of environmental destruction is on the scale of other mass industrial bad actors; their record of racist and misogynistic hiring practices is legendary; their price gouging is a key element behind the soaring inflation which has enraged Americans.
What it’ll take for Rail Labor to win next time
Unfortunately, Rail Labor is in no condition to wage a militant struggle. Aside from the BMWED in recent years under the visionary leadership of Freddie Simpson, none of the Rail Labor unions have done strategic internal organizing at all. Most of the unions are small and spend the majority of their dues-income on the bloated salaries and benefits of their officers.
In the case of Rail Labor, 12 craft unions represent 85% of the freight railroad workforce. You’d think they could stomp on the employers. But the craft union model – where each department has its own union – has historically led to self-interested selling out of each other. Furthermore, the Railroad “Brotherhoods” are oligarchic – in the rare cases where members directly elect their officers, incumbents have total control of the election machinery, making it all but impossible for reform candidates to win assuming they can get on the ballot at all.
Railroad workers know full well how much economic power they have, but they have rarely been organized nationally to wield their power at the point of production. These workers are suffering horrendous work schedules, occupational sickness, and death rates, and in some cases grinding poverty. The rampant greed of the Railroad Corporations is not new, nor is the willingness of the political elite to suckle at their teats. But in the past 100 years, the Rail Brotherhoods have been unwilling or unable to conduct well-organized, militant strategies to maximize results in bargaining. As a result of all of this, workers are taking advantage of the tight labor market by fleeing the freight railroads for better union jobs. The American public will suffer crippled supply chains and continued horrific rates of train derailments as a result.
The Teamsters Union can play a unifying role here. Sean O’Brien has already shown the capacity to intervene in rail issues and get results – had it not been for his early intervention, Rail Labor would still be moored in Mediation. The Teamsters have the resources and experienced staff to construct a broadly comprehensive strategic plan, then implement it nationally with the long-abandoned rail union members and their communities. The Teamsters Union is the natural home for all rail workers – Eugene Debs’ dream of an industrial union for rail workers can be achieved under the Teamster banner if enough will and perseverance are drummed up. The Teamsters will need rail workers to win big at UPS in 2023, or to organize Amazon – both key priorities for President O’Brien.
No one else is coming to save railroad workers – not the AFL-CIO. Not the well-meaning DSA chapters, and not the self-styled left-wing commentators. And certainly not the Rail Labor leaders – one of whom is so right-wing that he’s been on Steve Bannon’s show TWICE in the past week.
It’s time for President O’Brien and the mighty Teamsters Union to step up. The future of railroaders, Amazon workers, and UPS workers is at stake.
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The struggle to unite railroad workers into a single powerful industrial union has been ongoing since the 1890s. Most railroad workers know intuitively that a “union” means just that: one-for-all and all-for-one. Not a collection of “clubs” organized along craft lines as some sort of fraternal order, which is what we have been historically stuck with to this day. (Witness the absurdity of this system on display these past few months while these 12 unions attempted to reach a new national master freight agreement). But it is rare for any of the leaders of these conservative and parochial unions (which includes former president Simpson of the BMWED) to lift a finger to change this backward system. Here’s what Eugene Debs had to say more than one hundred years ago: “Why should the railroad employees be parceled out among a score of different organizations? They are all employed in the same service. Their interests are mutual. They ought to be able to act together as one. But they divide according to craft and calling, and if you were to propose today to unite them that they might actually do something to advance their collective and individual interests as workers, you would be opposed by every grand officer of these organizations.”
Carey Dall said on December 10, 2022 at 4:31 pm :
Many thanks to Brother Ron for his leadership of the RWU over the years. Intuition aside, railroaders clearly need to be organized into an industrial union. They will not spontaneously create a single rail union, RWU or otherwise.
Perhaps Brother Ron has forgotten that under the “conservative” President Simpson, the BMWED spent millions organizing its membership, and then organizing cross-craft coalitions of railroaders in 27 cities across the U.S. In the ILWU we say: Talk is cheap, it cost money to buy whiskey. Simpson didn’t just talk – he put programs into motion that brought workers together. For his efforts, he was met with the rage of business unionists and self-styled reformers.
I was disappointed that in the generally perceptive piece no mention was made of the Railroad Workers United, which has been trying to get the unions to pursue the strategy the article advocated. Also, the lead picture IS of the Great Railroad Strike, but it was in 1877. 1886 was the year of the national strike for 8 hours and the year of Haymarket bombing in Chicago which, a few years later, was forever memorialized in May 1st being made the international workers’ holiday. Keep up the good work.
In response to Joe Berry:
Thank you for your comment, and for your historical correction.
Regarding RWU: these Brothers and Sisters have doggedly kept Gene Debs’ dream of One Big Union on the American Railroad alive. Over the years, they have struggled to amass the vast resources needed to organize among the railroad workforces which are geographically dispersed across the lower 48 states.
In this round of bargaining, the RWU played an important role of updating folks via email about the goings-on in the industry. When the PEB moment came, they kicked into gear and filled the media-outreach vacuum left by Rail Labor to the best of their ability.
In the grand scheme of things, however, they are a tiny group lacking a mass following among railroaders. They have yet to launch any meaningful reform caucus in any of the craft unions. This important work is being done by other rank and file groups, most notably Rank and File United in the BMWED – bmwe Rank and File United
The author fails to consider how strong, early and unprecedented the intervention by the Biden administration was against the right to strike. Yes over the years Congress has intervened in railroad disputes but often it was to extend the cooling off period and allow further bargaining and/or require arbitration. And there was some uncertainty in the process as even in 1991 the union was allowed to strike for hours before Congress acted. Here, Biden officials made statement weeks or months in advance against the right to strike and in favor of intervention. They had no regard for the impact on bargaining.
Taking away the right to strike and imposing a contract upon workers which includes very few scheduling protections is not normal even here in the US. This article makes light of that in an effort to exonerate the Biden administration. Of course, the rail unions could have and should have done more of a campaign. But taking the right to strike away and imposing a contract is not acceptable.
In response to Joe Burns:
No Rail Labor union officer (or member, for that matter!) operated under the delusion that they’d be allowed to strike in this round of bargaining. In fact it is a common refrain EVERYWHERE in Rail Labor that, “They’ll never let us shut it down.” The “right to strike” is a fantasy at this point for rail workers – this right must be earned, as I pointed out in my piece, by comprehensively campaigning well in advance of any strike window opening.
The acceleration of the Just-In-Time model of cargo transmission since the early 1990s has only decreased the likelihood of the Federal Government allowing a freight rail shutdown. My goal was not to “exonerate the Biden administration,” but to make clear that we all knew the Biden administration’s role and were simply grateful at its willingness to release us from Mediation so we could get the contract done this year (i.e. before the certain GOP takeover of the House).
Another factor to consider is the fact that a strike does not automatically equate to a victory. In this case, the rail unions have given up the strike tool for so long that they no longer know how to pull one off. Virtually none of the members – or the leaders! – have had strike or lockout experience. The fact that zero effort was put into earning the public’s support clearly indicates that a strike would have, at best, earned the PEB’s recommendation. Congress can always legislate terms and conditions below the recommendations of the PEB.
The PEB’s recommendations are bitter-sweet. We certainly cannot take them at their word, but the Railroads are now moaning in DC that they lost this round and were dealt an unfair hand by Biden and Congress. Their ambitions for this round were roundly put down through the process. Now, the economics of the deal will do nothing to magnetize a new generation of workers to commit to the grueling experience of the American Railroad. The sick day beef was just the tip of the iceberg. But given the overarching weakness of the American working class, the weakness of the rail unions, and the Neoliberal tendencies of both parties, this wasn’t all bad. For starters, the BMWED was successful in obtaining the away-from-home expense reimbursement it had sought for almost 60 years.
Finally, a tip of the hat to Brother Burns! His writings have had a profound impact on my thinking as an organizer, for which I am very grateful.
So many Unions in the US and abroad are still operating under the old Business Union Top Down model.Involving the Rank-n-File members in their own struggles is not only rare but often discouraged By Some Union Leaders as they are worried about “Losing Control” of the Agenda . It even happens in so called “Democratic Militant Unions”!Thanks for this piece Carey!
In response to Jeff Engels:
Thank you Brother Engels – you make a very good point! Rank and File vigilance and participation are key to maintaining democratic and militant unions. Without constant internal organizing, vigilance and participation disappear providing openings for opportunistic control freaks to take over.
Nice read! I definitely feel that some drastic changes need to be made, especially for rail labor! I applaud you Carey!! SALUTE!!
In response to Ronald Ferrara:
Thank you, Brother RJ! Your leadership and self-less participation over the years is the example for all union members.