After the Strike: A Century of Labor Struggle at Pullman

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Winter 2003/2004 by Nordhauser, Norman

After the Strike: A Century of Labor Struggle at Pullman. By Susan Eleanor Hirsch. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Pp. X, 292. Ill., appendix, notes, index. Cloth, $44.95).

Recent historians of labor in Chicago's leading industries, notably Lizabeth Cohen and Rick Halpern, have described the struggles to establish trade unions in meatpacking, steel, and farm machinery. Except for the famous strike of 1894 at its model town and the work of A. Philip Randolph organizing its African American porters, the Pullman Company which at the end of the 1920s was the country's largest manufacturer of railcars as well as the monopolist of sleeping car service, has received less attention. Drawing on company records at the Newberry Library, Susan Eleanor Hirsch's well researched monograph on Pullman from the 1890s to its decline in the 1970s now fills this gap. Like many contemporary historians Hirsch recognizes the importance of working class culture, but her focus is on workplace conditions, gender and racial issues, and corporate strategies.

After George Pullman's death in 1897, the company's management, led initially by Robert Todd Lincoln, continued an unrelenting fight against unions for the next half century with lockouts, spy networks, blacklists, and strikebreakers. More surprising is Hirsch's account of the company's positive response to the challenge of unionization. When, unions temporarily gained a foothold during World War One, the company offered certain of its employees pensions, insurance, and stock purchase plans and applied seniority in promotions, layoffs, and rehiring. Like the managements studied by Cohen and Halpern, Pullman executives introduced employee representation plans for airing workers' grievances and negotiating labor contracts. Although these company unions did not truly champion workers' rights, they did produce some corporate concessions and considerable loyalty to the company among their workers. Through statistical sampling of employee records Hirsch shows that Pullman workers remained at various plants an average of ten. to twenty-five years despite other industrial opportunities in the area.

While highlighting antiunion tactics and welfare capitalism, Hirsch also attributes the slow growth of unions at Pullman to the competition between organizations. By the 1930s Pullman had become a battleground for American Federation of Labor (AFL) railroad shop unions, the United Steelworkers of America, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and company unions. "One of the most ridiculous situations I have ever been confronted with," said one frustrated union leader in 1945 about the free-for-all competition over organizing the workers. (181) This lack of solidarity reflected the separation of workers along occupational lines as well as union leadership fighting over turf.

Hirsch contends that, by the 1930s, the racial practices of the company and workers' prejudices had become the major obstacle to unionization. From its earliest days Pullman took advantage of societal stereotypes and hired only black males as sleeping car porters and only white males as higher paid sleeping car conductors. No porter was ever promoted to conductor no matter how much seniority he accumulated. During the national strike of railroad shop men in 1922, the company hired black strikebreakers in the repair shops at Calumet. After the strike the company retained African American workers in its repair shops, promoted a number of them to skilled mechanics, and included them in the leadership of the company unions. Meanwhile the company employed very few black workers at its plant for building railcars because the white workers there had not participated in the strike. Pullman's racial strategy simultaneously rewarded the loyalty of white workers and threatened them with black replacement workers if they tried to organize a union.

The racism of the AFL railroad unions is familiar to historians of American labor, but Hirsch's study introduces readers to the specific ways in which union racism intersected with company goals. This helps explain why A. Philip Randolph attempted to organize all African American workers at Pullman into a separate union and why the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s tried to organize both black and white Pullman workers in one industrial union. However, by the 1940s, the CIO failed to prevent the "hate strikes" against black workers and did not strongly support the federal program of fair employment practices at Pullman. This again divided the workers along racial lines and, according to Hirsch's intelligently argued work, delayed full unionization until 1950. Unfortunately, by then railcar manufacturing and sleeping car usage were in permanent decline.

Norman Nordhauser is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His research interests are in U. S. Economic History and the history of the petroleum industry. He is the author of The Quest for Stability: Domestic Oil Policy, 1919-1935.