Gov't imposes concessions contract on rail workers
1991Lynn Henderson 1991-08Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 5 →
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SOCIALIST ACTION AUGUST 1991 5 DON'T DESERT STORM CONTRACT Last April, Congress ordered some 235,000 striking rail union members to return to work. A special board was set up at the time to settle the issues.
On July 19, the Congressional Board ruled against the workers and for the railroad companies on all issues that had led to the strike. This action represents a new stage of direct goverment intervention and control of the unions.
The unions had challenged some 40 recommendations that were made last January by the original Presidential Emergency Board set up under the Railway Labor Act. These contract recommendations had given the rail owners virtually everything they demanded:
1) They shifted the financial burden of health, medical, and hospital benefits onto the workers.
2) They drastically changed work rules, which would within months eliminate 20,000 jobs and further erode already dangerous safety conditions.
3) They would reduce the real wages of rail workers by 20 percent to 30 percent over the course of the contract.
The Congressional Board has now denied all the union challenges and reaffirmed in total the original recommendations of Presidential Emergency Board 219, which had provoked the April strike.
The government has, in effect, written and imposed a contract on rail workers over which the unions, officers, and membership have no say. This goes beyond anything sanctioned in the Railway Labor Act.
Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers International President Lawrence McFather expressed the stunned reaction of all the rail "They've taken us to the cleaners!"
But McFather is hardly blameless in the disaster. He and all the other international rail union heads have, ever since the end of World War II, followed a path of entirely relying on the politicians and Democratic Party "friends of labor" to barter a good deal for them.
The growing anger and frustration of rail union members was expressed at the international convention of the largest of the rail unions, the Transportation and Communication Union (TCU), representing railroad clerks and carmen, which was meeting in San Francisco the same week of the board's voting. The delegates took the virtually unprecedented action of removing President Richard Kilroy from office and voting to freeze all international officers' salaries.
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