Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Railroaders' Next Step, Amalgamation (1922).djvu/35

Rh broke out and the whole situation was revolutionized. The railroads were taken over by the Government; DirectorGeneral McAdoo issued his famous order No. 8 guaranteeing railroaders the right to organize; the workers streamed into the unions; local, system and divisional federations were hastily organized, and the shop unions fairly leaped even beyond the point of development reached by the brotherhoods in their great eight-hour movement of a couple of years before. They not only carried out national campaigns for hours, wages, etc., but in addition succeeded in negotiating a national agreement covering the whole six shop crafts upon all the railroads of the United States thereby taking another long stride towards firmly uniting the great body of railroad men in one organization.

To recapitulate: So far as we have gone we find the sixteen railroad unions operating as follows: First, the four transportation unions, consisting of the Engineers, Firemen, Conductors and Trainmen, acting in close cooperation upon a national scale. Second, the six miscellaneous unions, consisting of the Telegraphers, Clerks, Switchmen, Signalmen, Stationary Firemen and Maintenance of Way Workers, each proceeding separately, but all working upon a national basis. Third, the six shop unions, consisting of the Machinists, Blacksmiths, Boilermakers, Carmen, Electrical Workers and Sheet Metal Workers, all working under a single national agreement.

This situation was a far cry from the primitive type of unionism described above. But evolution could not stop there. The same forces that had brought the organizations to this stage of development must continue to operate until there is complete solidarity among all railroad workers. It was inevitable that the two compact groups of transportation and shop unions and the scattering group