Rail workers confront strikebreaking by gov't

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At 7 a.m. on Wednesday morning, April 17, unions representing 235,000 rail workers nationwide went on strike against the 10 largest railroad carriers and 88 other smaller lines.

Less than 24 hours later, the Democratic Party-dominated Congress (renowned for neither its decisiveness nor its swiftness) rammed through a joint resolution forcing striking workers back on the job. A new "special board" was set up, which was empowered to impose a contract on the rail unions within 65 days.

The 19 hours of this nationwide rail strike were pregnant with many lessons. First, in effectively shutting down the entire U.S. rail system, the strike decisively demonstrated the enormous power of rail labor when it engages in job action.

In recent years, many pundits inside and outside the industry claimed that the rail unions and their members had become divided and weak, that union consciousness and solidarity had eroded, and that any attempt to shut the carriers down would be at best an embarrassing failure and at worst a disastrous demonstration of weakness on the part of the unions.

The carriers openly boasted that they could and would maintain rail service with replacement workers, union members who crossed the picketlines, and management personnel—on whom they had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in training programs to prepare them to operate the trains through a strike.

All of this proved illusory, however, as rail workers from 10 different craft unions, in a demonstration of union solidarity virtually without exception, shut the railroads down from coast to coast.

Are railroads "marginal?"

It has also become popular in recent years to picture railroads and railroad workers as (continued on page 6, in “Debate erupts in Black community over affirmative action programs”)