![]() Job cuts included railroad shops being shutdown from Livingston, Mont., to Paducah, Ky. Hardly 200,000 workers have railroad jobs today. railroads employed more than 2 million workers. This wave of racist attacks and lynch mobs fueled the growth of the Universal Negro Improvement Association whose membership also numbered in the millions under the leadership of the Honorable Marcus Garvey.ĭuring the 1920s, U.S. One year before the railroad strike, white racist mobs, led by the KKK, destroyed 35 blocks of a thriving African-American neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Okla., killing hundreds of people. Supreme Court Chief Justice and former President William Howard Taft threw out a law that limited child labor.Ĭorporations also funded the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which experienced a rise in membership to more than 3 million during this period. Supreme Court upheld “yellow dog” contracts that forced workers to agree not to join a union. Most strikes and organizing drives were defeated. ![]() Many of the striking workers were immigrants.Ĭorporations and their government struck back. Among them were 365,000 steel workers led by future communist leader William Z. In 1919 one out of seven industrial workers in the U.S. The 1922 rebellion of railroad workers was the last chapter in a strike wave that followed World War I and the Russian Revolution. One of the prisoners was John Henry, who was worked to death by the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad, now part of CSX. Ironically, railroad companies had used enslaved Africans to lay 9,000 miles of track in the South before the Civil War and Black prisoners to build more miles afterwards. Harris “from 1928 to 1949, not a single black person found employment on a class 1 railroad as fireman, brakeman, trainman, or yardman.” (“The Harder We Run: Black Workers Since the Civil War) Philip Randolph.Īccording to historian William H. It wasn’t until 1937 that the Pullman Company signed a contract with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, led by A. Eugene Debs wasn’t able to get the American Railway Union, which led the 1894 Pullman strike, to allow African Americans to join. Black workers were kept out of railroad unions. ![]() The worst scabbing came from racism in the labor movement. The defeat of the 1922 strike helped lead workers to form industrial unions in the 1930s, instead of being split up into different crafts. Many engineers and conductors wanted to support the workers in the shops. Union misleaders forgot that “an injury to one is an injury to all.” Instead of fighting together against the railroad companies, leaders of the better paid workers in the “operating crafts” ignored the rest of rail labor. Railroad management was able to split the workers. While workers in the railroad shops went on strike, workers operating the trains - locomotive engineers and firemen, conductors and brakeman - continued to work. It wasn’t just the Harding administration that broke the 1922 strike. ![]() Instead of negotiating with union workers, Rea hired over 16,000 gunmen to break the strike of nearly 20,000 employees at the company’s shops in Altoona, Pa., the largest in the world.Īlthough the railroad workers were finally defeated, their great struggle forced the capitalist government to pass the 1926 Railroad Labor Act. With skilled machinists striking, 71 percent of locomotives failed monthly inspections from August through September 1922. Safety meant nothing to railroad bosses like Pennsylvania Railroad President Samuel Rea. Daugherty was later forced to resign because of the Teapot Dome scandal. Union leaders were forbidden from even giving newspaper interviews. At least 10 workers were killed by the National Guard and private detectives across the country.Īttorney General Harry Daugherty got federal Judge James Wilkerson to issue a sweeping injunction against the workers. Harding and his incredibly corrupt administration smashed the strike. Nearly 400,000 workers walked off the job on July 1, 1922. 1922.Ninety-one years ago railroad workers employed in shops and roundhouses revolted against a 12 percent wage cut. Railroad workers walking off the job in the July 1922 strike.
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