Rail freight carrier and passenger train companies have been finding ways to get their workers to do more for less for the past few decades. Considering how much the economy of the U.S. depends upon the massive amount of freight moved by trains, one would think the unions representing those workers to be very powerful. However, there are a dozen different unions, divided among craft, representing the various workers in the several rail companies in this country. To counter the divisive race to the bottom caused by cross-union fighting in the industry, rank-and-file rail workers of every craft have joined together to form RAILROAD WORKERS UNITED.

The National Transportation Safety Board’s ruling last week on the need for cameras recording locomotive engineers as they work is an attack upon all working people.

This is the lead off article of the Union Democracy supplement for the RWU Winter 2010 newsletter, The Highball.

The failure of rail labor to stick together and to build a common strategy and a common platform has historically been one of the greatest impediments to railroad workers achieving their goals.  Read more about the co-ordinated bargaining campaign in the Fall 2009 Highball. 

Heather Boehlke, widow of Jared Boehlke, locomotive remote control operator, who was killed on Mother's Day, 2009, appeals for support. Send your letter to Congressman James Oberstar, head of the House Transportation Committee.

Linda Grant Niemann.  Railroad Noir: The American West at the End of the Twentieth Century.  Photographs by Joel Jensen.  Indiana University Press, 2010.  Pp. 168.  ISBN-13: 978-0-253-35446-4

"When You're Dying You Explore Radical Medication"

By JoANN WYPIJEWSKI

Ten years ago a major shipping company based in Denmark called Nordana brought in a nonunion contractor to supplant union workers on the dock in Charleston, South Carolina. Not an uncommon event in the anti-union South of anti-union America, it was extraordinary enough at the port of Charleston that three locals of longshore workers, two of them black and one white, protested together, and one night in January of 2000, police attacked them with clubs, gas and racist slurs.