Америка Құрама Штаттарындағы теміржолшылар кәсіби одағының тарихы

Former trade union of the United States

The American Railway Union (ARU) was briefly among the largest labor unions of its time and one of the first industrial unions in the United States. Launched at a meeting held in Chicago in February 1893, the ARU won an early victory in a strike on the Great Northern Railroad in the summer of 1894. This successful strike was followed by the bitter 1894 Pullman Strike in which government troops and the power of the judiciary were enlisted against the ARU, ending with the jailing of the union's leadership for six months in 1895 and effectively crushing the organization. The group's blacklisted and dispirited remnants finally disbanded the organization via amalgamation into the Social Democracy of America (SDA) at its founding convention in June 1897.

Volition for a formation of an industrial union uniting all branches of the railroad industry began in the early 1890s with the failure of an attempt at loose federation of several railway brotherhoods by Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen Secretary Treasurer and Locomotive Firemen's Magazine editor Eugene V. Debs. A new union bringing together all railway workers, regardless of craft or service, was constructed in a series of meetings held in Chicago, Illinois, beginning with a four hour session held at the Leland Hotel on February 9 and 10, 1893. Headquarters for the new union were to be rented in Chicago. This gathering formally elected officers for the new union, including Debs as president, Howard as vice president and Sylvester Keliher (Secretary Treasurer of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen) as Secretary Treasurer of the ARU. Day to day governance was by these three officers as part of a nine member Board of Directors, which also included W. S. Missemer of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, W. H. Sebring of the Order of Railroad Conductors, Frank W. Arnold of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Henry Walton of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, James A. Clark of the Railway Telegraphers and Louis W. Rogers of the magazine Age of Labor. A convention to introduce the new union to the broader public and to build organizational momentum was scheduled and held in Chicago on June 20, 1893. A mass meeting of railroad employees was held in conjunction with the gathering, meeting at Uhlich's Hall in Chicago at 8 pm, where it was addressed by Eugene Debs and others.

The ARU was to be divided into 12 regional districts, each of which maintained a headquarters office in a local urban center. These districts were to in turn be subdivided, apparently on a state basis, with the organization to be governed by annual state conventions and a quadrennial national convention of the entire organization. About 400 delegates were in attendance—too many for the venue, which caused the gathering to be immediately moved after convocation to the more spacious room at Uhlich's Hall. The American Railway Union organized all classes of employees of the road in a strike action lasting 18 days and forcing the company to arbitration of its unilateral wage cuts. The arbitrators, consisting of businessmen from St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota, found in favor of the Great Northern workers, thereby pressuring the company to roll back its wage cuts. It was the ARU's first and only victory.

Buoyed by the success of the Great Northern strike, railway workers on other lines sought similar redress of their grievances through strike action. Debs and other union officials were concerned that other disruptions were inopportune, with the union needing a brief respite to better organize itself and to restore its finances. However, this was not to be because on May 11, 1894, the workers of the Pullman Palace Car Company launched a wildcat strike against their employer.</blockquote>

An effort was made by the ARU to engage the Pullman Company and its workers in arbitration, but the officers of the company refused to submit to the proposal, instead claiming that they had nothing to arbitrate. On June 21, 1894, two days prior to adjournment of the convention, the Pullman Committee reported that the company continued to refuse to arbitrate its unilateral wage cuts. The committee recommended that an ultimatum be delivered that unless the Pullman Company began arbitration within 5 days, a boycott of railroad workers should be launched under which no member of the ARU would handle a train to which Pullman cars were attached. The ARU established temporary strike headquarters in Chicago to keep more closely abreast of the situation. When one switchman would be fired for insubordination, all the others in the shop would quit, in accord with a previously agreed upon plan. After Debs got out of jail, he merged the ARU with the Brotherhood of the Co operative Commonwealth to form the Social Democracy of America (SDA). In 1900, Elliott ran for Congressman in Montana and Debs ran for President heading the SDA ticket. Elliott was later elected to the Montana Legislature while Debs ran unsuccessfully four more times for the presidency as a socialist.