![]() In Wheeling, the city where the strike began, a militia assembled and paraded before approaching the striking workers. In Chicago, “in an impressive display of cross-ethnic unity, Czech and Irish workers fought the police at the Halstead Street Viaduct”. Overall, however, the response of the state militias and National Guard to follow orders was mixed, and the strike quickly escalated into a heated class battle. The governor of West Virginia made an early call for federal troops, for example, when it became clear his state militia would not use force against the strike supporters at Martinsburg, many of whom included local allies who blocked the tracks to prevent scabs from running trains”. Sympathy for the workers was even evident among the militia members called out to protect rail property from angry protesters. ![]() State governments responded to the strike by calling the local militias and the National Guard, but many sympathized with the strikers: “From the beginning, the strike was remarkable in its strong popular support from other non-rail workers and city residents. Widespread support and worker militancy defends strike Philip Foner wrote that the strike was, since the Civil War, the closest the country came to a social revolution. It was also an action that disseminated socialist ideas throughout the U.S. The strike was not only significant in terms of its size and breadth, as it was one of the largest strikes of workers in the U.S. Within a week, a total of 15,000 railway workers were on strike and, eventually, over 100,000 joined in the action. Strikes extended rapidly to New Jersey, Michigan, Kentucky, and Missouri. Rapidly, “the strike spread to Philadelphia and Altoona, Pennsylvania Cleveland and Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio Syracuse, New York Terre Haute, Indiana Chicago, Illinois and numerous other cities along the way”. Their refusal transformed into a strike, as they were quickly joined by the rest of the crew. In mid-July of 1877, two brakemen working for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in Martinsburg, West Virginia, refused to work a double-engine load after taking a third pay cut. The pay cuts were so severe that “between 18 wages in the industry as a whole were reduced by almost half.” While wages rapidly declined, “deaths and maiming were everyday occurrences in railroad yards and on city streets.” “During the 1870s pay cut followed pay cut in the industry, as railroad workers were forced to work longer hours in a very dangerous workplace,” Mark Kruger documents. These were some of the working conditions for railroad workers in 1877. How would you respond if you were told that you had to work double shifts for the same pay? If your wages were cut in half for a six-day, 12-hour weekly shift? If you had no such thing as sick days, unemployment insurance, pension, or health care? If you were sent out of town for four days and paid for only two, while you had to pay for your own room and board that, by themselves, exceeded your pay? The spontaneous refusal that led to a historic strike ![]() ![]() working-class history: the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. In this latest great betrayal, it is worth recalling one of the most heroic and historic strikes in U.S. It is not the litany of unrelated facts that so often bore students in the classroom it is the history of the class struggle of working people. ![]() Working-class history is a living testament because what happened before can happen again, under new circumstances and with lessons learned. Fortunately, our class has a rich history on which to draw as we build such a movement. It is clear the ruling-class parties won’t support the working class and that a militant and well-organized fight back is needed to do so. The Democrat-led attack on railway workers is egregious in that the contact it imposes denies workers even the ability to take sick days. In Joe Biden’s statement supporting legislation to force egregious terms on railway workers, he framed his decision as one made in the interests of the country as a whole, as if the country was not overwhelmingly composed of the very working class he was sacrificing for corporate profits. ![]()
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