Railroad Unions Seek Retention of WW I-Era Labor Agreements; Fear Return to Workers’ “Slavery”
R.P. Dee, Vice President of a major railroad workers union (representing freight handlers, clerks, and other workers) appealed to the Railroad Labor Board to maintain the World War I-era national railroad agreements (in effect, government-supported union contracts).
During the war, the national agreements had gone into effect on January 1, 1918, ending labor strife and ensuring efficient operations in support of the war effort. Mr. Dee warned of a return to the “shackles of industrial slavery” and “continuous strife” if the agreements were ended, and a revival of the old conditions of “armored trains, private detective agencies, and all the evils for which they stand.”
In the end, the national railroad agreements were ended, as part of a broad assault on the rights of organized labor in the decade of the 1920s. On September 1, 1922 a federal judge issues a sweeping injunction against a nationwide strike by railroad workers. The injunction essentially stripped railroad workers of all their First Amendment rights, effectively making union organizing impossible. The injunction broke the railroad strike and set in motion a serious decline in union membership through the end of the 1920s.
Working people did not gain full legal protection of their right to organize unions until passage of the 1932 Norris-La Guardia Act, which guaranteed workers and union organizers free speech rights, and the 1932 Wagner Act, which guaranteed workers the right to organize “unions of their own choosing.”
Learn more about the pivotal railroad strike and injunction: Colin J. Davis, Power at Odds: The 1922 National Railroad Shopman’s Strike (1997)
Read the classic work on labor injunctions: Felix Frankfurter and Nathan Greene, The Labor Injunction (1930)