Who was involved in the Great railroad strike of 1922?
The Big Four unions included the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen and the Order of Railway Conductors.
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The strike wave impacted just about every major railroad in the United States, and elected officials and railroad companies responded by deploying local and state troops and privately hired militias. In addition, President Rutherford B.Hayes deployed federal troops to attack workers.
In June of 1922, this nationwide labor conflict saw over 400,000 railroad shopmen and maintenance workers locked in a bitter struggle against deep wage cuts sanctioned by the Railroad Labor Board. These railroad workers faced the grim possibility of losing their jobs to new hires willing to accept lower wages.
The railroad brotherhoods suffered a crushing defeat. Strikers went back to work, on management's terms, and others were blacklisted. During the Great Depression, the union movement would just begin to unite skilled and unskilled workers, something not done during the 1922 strike.
Eugene V.Debs was the president of the American Railway Union (ARU), which represented about one-third of the Pullman workers and which had concluded a successful strike against the Great Northern Railway Company in April 1894.
In 1887 Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, making the railroads the first industry subject to federal regulation. Congress passed the law largely in response to decades of public demand that railroad operations be regulated.
In 1862, Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act, which designated the 32nd parallel as the initial transcontinental route, and provided government bonds to fund the project and large grants of lands for rights-of-way.
Beginning in 1863, the Union Pacific, employing more than 8,000 Irish, German, and Italian immigrants, built west from Omaha, Nebraska; the Central Pacific, whose workforce included over 10,000 Chinese laborers, built eastward from Sacramento, California.
Still, many skilled workers were leaving the cash-poor railroads to work in the booming armaments industry or to enlist in the war effort. By the end of 1917, it seemed that the existing railroad system was not up to the task of supporting the war effort and Wilson decided on nationalization.