Notes on America’s Railroads

Manhattan’s High Line is a must stop for any tourist looking for a complete New York experience. It knifes down the West Side from the shadow of the Javits Center to the front door of the Whitney Museum. It renders a view of the Hudson River. It also offers a glimpse of how railroads existed in an earlier time. From the 1930s until the 1980s the New York Central, and later Conrail, delivered railroad cars to warehouses, garment factories and meat packing plants along the High Line’s one and a half miles.

Just a few miles from the High Line’s southern terminus on Gansevoort Street, is where the action for today’s railroads can be found: Wall Street. Once Wall Street played the role of piper while railroad managers called the tune. By sometime in the early 2000s they switched places.

Railroads have always been about profits, and, of course they were not exempt from capital’s newest assault that began in the late 1970s. No industry and no community escaped capitalism’s brutal restructuring. But railroads presented several challenges to the iron heel of neoliberalism, it just took a little longer to bring it down on rail labor’s neck.

First, unlike some manufacturing, railroads cannot be moved to Bangladesh or Mexico. Second, it’s hard to bring uniform discipline to an industry that stretches across 140,000 miles of track. Although burdened with 12 inadequate craft unions, the major railroads are totally unionized, a situation built into the Railway Labor Act of 1926. Finally, there are rules, a glut of rules, some national, some specific to each carrier, some local. On their side, the bosses have technology.

My railroad career began in December of 1970 and ended in February of 2009. In the early years, just before the worst attacks by management, there was still enough slack in the system to make the life of a railroad worker bearable. Kim Moody describes the class relationship still prevailing in my first decade, the 1970s: “This was the era of rank and file rebellion, in which blue collar workers went on the offensive against their bosses, and often the union leaders as well, in a fight against speed up, deteriorating working conditions and real wages.”

I worked as a switchman, brakeman, yard conductor and occasionally as a foot-board yardmaster. I witnessed many of the changes – mergers, cutbacks, and downsizing – that marked those years. But, I doubt I would last a month on today’s railroads.

Glassdoor is an American website that allows current and former employees to review companies. In a 2020 survey Glassdoor rated the 17 worst U.S. companies to work for. Number five from the top – or bottom – was the CSXT Railroad, clocking in as number two was the Northfolk Southern (NS) and there, at number one, stood my old exploiter, the Union Pacific (UP). How did an industry that was once the gold standard of blue collar jobs become such a pariah? Before I can answer that question, and discuss the recent No Strike fiasco, we’ll need a little dive into history.

The past is never dead, it’s not even past. True for Faulkner, true for American railroad workers. Much of the defining class relations between railway labor and management has its roots in three historic defeats. The uprising of 1877, the Pullman Strike of 1894 and the Great Shopmen’s Strike of 1922. All over a century ago, all with consequences reaching into the present.

Almost from the dawn of railroading, workers used strikes to defend their standard of living. The first recorded railroad strike took place on the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) in June of 1831. Those early strikes were sporadic outbursts and rarely spread far from their origins.

1877 was different. It began when workers on the B&O Railroad in Martinsburg, West Virginia had their pay slashed. Militant actions soon hop-scotched across the country and were joined by workers in other industries. Coming just six years after the Paris Commune it scarred the bejesus out of the American ruling class. President Rutherford B. Hayes called out federal troops. Since 1877 was also the year when Reconstruction was prematurely ended, many of those troops were fresh from duty in the South. Over 100, mostly strike supporters, were killed in the 52 days the strike lasted.

The use of federal troops and the National Guard were one legacy of the strike. After the strike was crushed a wave of new National Guard Armories were built in cities across the country. I grew up across the alley from one such armory on the West Side of Chicago.

The Pullman Strike of 1894 was, in a way, the strike that came too soon. If the fledgling but rapidly growing American Railroad Union (ARU) had a chance to develop fully, American labor history might have been entirely different. Just two months before the Pullman Strike, the ARU won a stunning victory over the Great Northern Railroad. The ARU was something new on the block: an industrial union. There had been a few examples of industrial unions in the U.S., but nothing on the scale of the ARU.