Narrow Gauge Politics: Railway Labor, Parties, Race, and the State Daniel Schlozman Assistant Professor Department of Political Science Johns Hopkins University 3400 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218 (410) 516-5882
[email protected] 1 Workers in the American railroad and air transport industries still belong to unions.1 Fully 65.2 percent of workers in the railroad industry held union membership in 2014; in air transport, the figure was 40.5 percent. Union density is higher among railroad workers than among postal workers or than among public workers in every state but two. A distinct legal regime – a “state within a state”2 – developed to protect white railroaders, and withstood the assaults that have devastated American labor. While workers in the rest of the private sector organize under the National Labor Relations Act, the Railway Labor Act governs labor relations on the railroads and the airlines. Its consensual subgovernment among railroads, white unions, and the state has proven remarkably stable. But that labor-relations regime achieved stability precisely by avoiding large-scale ideological conflict. Rather, at the roots of stability lie political quiescence and racial intransigence in the critical New Deal and Fair Deal era. This paper situates the case of railway labor, comparing rail unions both across time and with other American labor regimes. At the end of the nineteenth century, the state repressed worker militancy (including from railroad workers) in the North and, by the extreme means of Jim Crow, in the