Rewarding Railway Strikers

May 17, 1948

For many years the Railway Labor Act of 1926 was popularly regarded as a model labor law. It had bought peace and prevented strikes. What the general public did not see was that this peace had been bought at an exorbitant price, not merely in open wage increases, but in government-sponsored growth of the most fantastic set of featherbed rules to be found anywhere.

Beginning seven years ago the elaborate machinery of mediation, arbitration, and “fact finding” in the act was repudiated by the very railway labor unions in whose interest it had been set up. First President Roosevelt and then President Truman conspired to undermine the prestige of that machinery and to render it useless.

The crucial precedent was established in 1941. The railway unions then rejected the pay-increase recommendations of President Roosevelt’s emergency factfinding board. In an editorial in The New York Times, the present writer posed the question: “If either the managements or the President under the threat of a strike grant the railway workers more than the President’s fact-finding board recommended, what will be the use of such boards in future?” President Roosevelt was at least aware of this dilemma and made a technical effort to escape it by referring the question to the board a second time. Ostensibly it was asked to reconsider its decision because of “new evidence,” but everyone knew that in reality the most important piece of new evidence was that the unions had rejected the first award of the board and had threatened to strike. As the present writer commented after the decision had been changed upward:

“Government boards have once more been put on notice that if they want to keep the appearance of prestige, they had better bring in the first time a decision that the union leaders are going to like. . . .

“This whole incident has proved once again that not only as against employers but as against governmental recommendations it is not a disadvantage for a union to threaten to strike, but an advantage. The railway unions were not penalized for threatening to hold up the national defense; they profited by that threat.”

The pattern was repeated with minor variations in 1943. This time, confronted with another strike threat, President Roosevelt did not even bother to resort to the fiction of “reconsideration” by the board. He simply by-passed and outbid all his own officials by personally granting the railway unions bigger increases than either his own emergency board or his own Stabilization Administrator had offered them. He thereby destroyed the authority of his own appointees and encouraged the unions to ignore them altogether in the future.

As a result of such government surrenders, the railway unions really began to feel their oats. In 1946 they not only rejected as a matter of course the decision of President Truman’s fact-finding board, but they even rejected the President’s personal offer of better terms. The final outcome of that episode was commonly described at the time as a “defeat” for the striking unions. But the union members themselves noticed that they were better off as a result of their strike and defiance than they would have been without it.

So here we are at the 1948 pattern. President Truman’s emergency board, after hearing evidence for 33 days, has recommended a wage increase of 15½ cents an hour. Three railway unions—the engineers, firemen, and switchmen—refused to accept this decision and voted to strike.

The only solution open to the President, if he wished to retain the Railway Labor Act, was to warn these unions that the government had no further concession to make; that if they struck railway management would be free to discharge them and to hire other permanent workers to take their place; and that essential trains would be kept running. The melodramatic, unnecessary, and dangerous device of government seizure, so often regarded as a “strong” action, has usually served in the past merely as a cloak for government surrender to union demands.