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Obama Ordered Rail Workers Receive Seven Paid Sick Days. Biden Must Do the Same.
Trains have a particularly sentimental place in our hearts.
There’s something idyllic about a by-gone era when the railroad was the most efficient and technological form of travel.
But with that romanticism comes a dark history of government time and again siding with the nation’s corporate railroad interests instead of the workers who literally keep the trains running.
In 1877, a West Virginia railroad strike protesting workers’ wage reduction ended when President Rutherford Hayes sicced federal troops on union activists.
Eugene Debs, the three-time Socialist presidential candidate, famously challenged the capitalist class when he organized a railroad strike in 1894 in response to the Pullman Company slashing workers’ wages while refusing to decrease rent on company housing or shares to stockholders.
The economic royalists’ response was predictable: activate the levers of power to crush Debs and the union.
Defying a court injunction, Debs and union leaders were arrested and jailed for six months without bail.
By the time the strike was over, 700 had been arrested, 30 killed, over 60 injured, and the Pullman Co. forbade further unionization through “yellow…
