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Chuca Choo, Chuca Choo. Several other railroad unions had the same kind of origin as the Firemen. Working on the railroad was a hazardous way of making a living in the 19th century. Many a fireman was scarred by a boiler explosion, many a yardman was mashed between cars. So often did brakemen fall from atop moving cars that one in three would be injured or killed in the course of a year. Understandably, insurance companies were reluctant to insure railroaders. In the railroad workers' need for insurance the first rail unions had their beginnings, as fraternal insurance societies. The unions still show traces of their small-scale, fraternal antecedents. There are 21 major rail unions today, and some of them still like to think of themselves as "brotherhoods" and "orders" rather than ordinary labor unions.
The long history of railroading in the U.S. has seen only one even partly successful attempt to gather all railroad workers into a single industrial union. That was the American Railway Union, founded in 1893 by fiery Socialist Eugene Debs. The A.R.U. rapidly became the biggest union in railroading, with 150,000 members. It was a boisterous, confident organization, and at meetings members liked to sing a rousing fight song that began
The union train is coming fast,
Chuca choo, chuca choo, and ended
Our engineer is E. V. Debs,
On him there are no spider webs,
And no one now the fact denies
That on our union are no flies.
But there was trouble around the bend. On May 11, 1894, Debs called out the workers in Chicago's Pullman shops, and the result was one of the bloodiest strikes in U.S. history. The A.R.U. was among its many casualties.
Since then, railroad labor has remained fragmented (see box), despite occasional merger talks between various rail unions in recent years. The older railroad unions long steered clear of the main line of U.S. unionism. Of the five "operating" rail unions, only three have joined the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and two of those did not enter the federation until recent years.
Creeping Obsolescence. Both the Brotherhood and the railroads reached their peak in the decade before 1920. Since then the companies have been afflicted with competition from trucking, and the rail unions with creeping obsolescence. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen had 126,000 members in 1920, has only 78,000 today, and if it were not for "work rules" that the railroads want to get rid of, the union's membership would be much smaller.
The railroads, acting jointly, have announced their intention of revising the work rules and the wage-base formula that the unions won over the course of generations. The old rules and formulas, largely antiquated by technological changes, hinder them with additional and unnecessary costs of $600 million a year, the railroads claim. Under the work rules that foster featherbedding, many thousands of railroad workers do little or no necessary work.