Railroad Workers and Organized Labor

Railroad workers occupy a singular place in United States history. Working in the nation’s first “big businesses,” they numbered in the hundreds of thousands, came from a wide range of ethnic and racial groups, included both men and women, and performed a wide range of often esoteric tasks. As workers in an industry that shaped the nation’s financial, technological, and political-economic development, railroaders drove the leading edge of industrialization in the 19th century and played a central role in the nation’s economy for much of the 20th. With the legends of “steel-driving” John Henry and “Cannonball” Casey Jones, railroad workers entered the national folklore as Americans pondered the benefits and costs of progress in an industrial age. Those tales highlighted the glamor and rewards, the risks and disparities, and the gender-exclusive and racially hierarchical nature of railroad work. They also offer insight into the character of railroad unionism, which, from its beginnings in the 1860s, oriented toward craft-based, male-only, white-supremacist forms of organization. Those unions remained fragmented, but they also became among the most powerful in the US labor movement, leveraging their members’ strategic location in a central infrastructural industry, especially those who operated the trains. That strategic location also ensured that any form of collective organization—and therefore potential disruption of the national economy—would lead to significant state intervention. Thus, the epic railroad labor conflict of the late 19th century generated the first federal labor relations laws in US history, which in turn set important precedents for 20th-century national labor relations policy. At the same time, the industry nurtured the first national all-Black, civil-rights-oriented unions, which played crucial roles in the 20th-century African American freedom struggle. By the mid-20th century, however, with technological change and the railroads entering a period of decline, the numbers of railroad workers diminished and with them, too, their once-powerful unions.

Effect of Diesel Exhaust Exposure on Railroad Worker Health and Mortality

Hazardous work conditions expose employees to health and safety risks, and employers to potentially higher expenses including the possibility of a prolonged series of expensive litigation. Indeed, recognition of this in individual and organized (collective) bargaining over higher pay and health benefit coverage, and of course, government regulation involving improved safety measures and equipment design is common. It is easier for all to deal with such risks when they are recognized, and the extent of that risk known. Often, though, risks may appear uncertain, with contradictory evidence supporting opposing views. Such is the case for the exposure of railroad workers to diesel exhaust, a subject that has been investigated for decades with considerable disagreement. This paper contains a focused survey of published studies in the past thirty-five years using observational data and epidemiology (laboratory studies on animals) to review the extent to which disagreement has or not been abated.

The Railroad Giveth and the Railroad Taketh Away

Continued railroad investment and the development of national highway transportation infrastructure factored heavily into the development of American communities during the twentieth century. Seligman, Arizona, is one of these communities, located on a major railroad route (Santa Fe Railway) and a former U.S. federal highway (U.S. Route 66). The town of Seligman was created by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway as a service stop and switchyard. At its founding, few roads served the community. Seligman later became a community linked to others by an auto-trail, the National Old Trails Road, and then by a paved federal highway. Through much of the postwar period, Seligman was a thriving travel center hosting significant Santa Fe Railway operations and a robust auto-traveler and tourist service industry. In the early 1980s, however, the community experienced a rapid decline. Looking at the period from 1910 to 1985 and examining what caused this dramatic transformation, this article argues that just as the construction of railroad operations birthed Seligman, the dismantling of railroad operations in the town delivered a death blow to its economy while benefiting larger communities like Barstow, California. Although the diversion of highway travelers off of Route 66 and away from town by the I-40 bypass hurt Seligman businesses, it was the loss of railroad workers’ local spending that put its economy in decline. This argument is discussed within the additional context of the social history of the community, the effects of infrastructure disinvestment on communities, and the limits of successor industries (like tourism) to support these communities.

Worklife Expectancies of Railroad Workers Based on the Twenty-Seventh Actuarial Valuation Using Competing Risks/Multiple Decrement Theory and the Markov Railroad Model

This paper contains worklife expectancies (WLE) of railroad workers based on the Twenty-Seventh Actuarial Valuation (Bureau of the Actuary, 2018), thereby updating the previous study of railroad workers' WLE based on the Twenty-Fifth Actuarial Valuation (Bureau of the Actuary, 2012). The main results of this paper are shown in a set of tables.11The tables in this paper provide worklife expectancies and standard deviations for every five years of service and five years of age and are referred to as abridged tables. Readers may interpolate as appropriate—e.g., a 23-year-old railroader would have a 60%/40% weighted average between the age 25 and age 20 entries. In addition, a more accurate calculation is available. The Association of American Railroads has requested that we provide it with complete unabridged tables that may be distributed to its members and posted on its web site. We have done so under a contract with the Association of American Railroads, which provides that those unabridged tables may be posted on the Journal of Forensic Economics web site. They appear there as supplemental materials to this paper, along with other supplemental content which includes Excel worksheets and additional statistical characteristics.

Disaster: Student Massacre, 1968 to Earthquake, 1985

The 1968 Tlatelolco Student Massacre and the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake—two catastrophic, “watershed” events—are generally thought to have defined recent Mexican history in leading to great change, especially sociopolitical democratization. In the historiography of modern Mexico, 1968 and 1985 have become gigantic milestones in fomenting demands for social–political transformation. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, however, this interpretation neglects formative precursors of the struggles prior to 1968 and significant developments after 1985. Strikes and protests by railroad workers, doctors, and teachers in the cities as well as the resistance forces in the campo pointed to the underbelly of the Miracle long before 1968. And, after the sismo, it would take another long and contentious fifteen years to bring the PRI’s seventy-year rule to an end.Drawing on this scholarship, “disaster” is used as a guiding framework to chronicle the major sociopolitical changes in Mexican society without privileging a linear-progressive, teleological model. Instead, it offers an analysis centered on trauma and popular memory to gauge the transformative power of these disasters. The trauma produced by disaster—whether man-made or natural—can give rise to palpable contestations and negotiations in which people draw on memory to challenge official histories. Hence, 1968 and 1985 (and their consolidation into powerful discourses) can be understood as rallying points, rather than stand-alone dates in history. Framed by the narrative arc of disaster, the period spanning the end of the student movement and the start of urban grass-roots organizing proves crucial in contemporary Mexico because of the power of memory.