Conference charts course to defend railroad unions

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SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 1987 By J.D. CRAWFORD Defeating the U.S. rail industry's drive to extract unheard of concessions from rail labor and deunionize huge sectors of track through "shortlining" was the theme of the Upper Midwest Rail Union Solidarity Conference held on Sept. 11-12 in Minneapolis, Minn. In attendance were 100 rail unionists and their spouses from nine states and Canada.

The conference was organized by the Intercraft Association of Minnesota (ICAM), a coalition of rail unionists on various roads in this region. ICAM's purpose is to aid the dozen craft unions in the rail industry find ways to demonstrate solidarity in action in the face of what is shaping up as an historic confrontation between rail management and rail labor in the upcoming 1988 contract year.

Guilford strike recalled

The opening session of the conference focused on the great rail strike of 1877, which set the stage for organization of railworkers on a massive scale.

A high point of the conference was a report by George Lawson, Maine state legislative director of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way (BMWE), and Laverne Wagner, Minnesota legislative director of BMWE. They gave eyewitness reports on last year's strike against Northeast railroads owned by Guilford Transportation Industries, which was seen by all the major carriers as a dry run for 1988.

Guilford selected the BMWE, which they saw as the weakest union on their property, to be busted. Guilford's plan was to force the BMWE into a strike and force the other crafts to cross their picket lines. Their goal was thwarted when the other crafts defied threats and intimidation and honored the strike. When the BMWE struck Conrail for illegally aiding Guilford, the strike was brought to a close by government intervention.

The main strategy of the rail carriers is to break down the decades-long tradition of solidarity in rail by pitting the craft unions against each other. They want to duplicate what has happened in the airline industry, whose unions lacked this tradition of solidarity on the picket line.

For the last 60 years, rail strikes have been infrequent and normally last no more than a day or so with no serious attempt on the part of the carriers to try to operate trains, run in scabs, or try to force nonstriking crafts to cross the lines.

Speakers at the conference emphasized that those days are over. The Guilford strike showed that future strikes will require the maximum solidarity of all crafts to be successful.

Another weapon in the carriers' arsenal that received attention at the conference is "shortlining." With the full cooperation ot the Interstate Commerce Commission, major rail carriers are spinning off thousands of miles of track to so-called independent buyers who then cancel all labor contracts.

Carriers' ploys exposed

Through these paper sales, the carriers are assembling a transcontinental network of non-union railroads to be used in the event of a rail strike. Today 30 percent of all railworkers are employed by shortlines, the great majority of which are non-union.

The carriers have also been preparing for the 1988 national contracts by attempting to assemble a pool of unemployed railworkers to be used as scabs. A firm called "Rail Finders" has been traveling around the country quietly running ads and taking applications.

Rail Finders claims to represent railroads who expect to experience large numbers of retirements in the next two years, but their real function, which they even admit to when pressed, is to provide "replacement workers to carriers involved in labor disputes." Rail Finders was the primary supplier of scabs for the Guilford strike.

The conference produced some immediate results when returning conference attendees found Rail Finders ads in papers in Duluth and Eveleth, Minn., and Burlington, Iowa.

They immediately set up intercraft Finders in the motels being used. In a nonconfrontational way they talked to and distributed material to all applicants explaining who Rail Finders was and what their real purpose was.

In Duluth almost all applicants were turned away, and after the intercraft committee held a news conference explaining the nature of Rail Finders, the Holiday Inn asked Rail Finders to leave.

The next day in Eveleth, when Rail Finders arrived to find another intercraft committee operation waiting for them, they left without attempting to set up. The following week in Burlington, only one applicant went in and talked to Rail Finders after learning who and what they were.

Organizing solidarity

The conference also responded enthusiastically to speakers who pointed out that this country cannot function without railroads and who said that if the present companies cannot effectively do this while providing railworkers with a decent wage and safe working conditions, then the time has come for the railroads to be nationalized and turned into a public utility.

The conference ended with a call for the formation of intercraft groups to begin immediately organizing to counteract the carriers' divide-and-conquer strategy.

Rail unionists constitute the most powerful section of organized labor in any industry in this country. Furthermore we have powerful allies in the rest of the labor movement and potential allies among farmers and the public at large. This conference was an important first step in organizing the kind of solidarity that can win in 1988.