Word: switchmen
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...clamped over upper, knuckles on his desk, Harry Truman faced his questioners. He had just declared the railroad tie-up "intolerable in an emergency" (see Labor), and announced that he had told the Army to "take appropriate action." Had he any news of progress in the dispute between the switchmen and the railroads? a reporter asked. Truman said that they were still talking with each other, that, as the reporters knew, an agreement had been signed. Harry Truman paused, then burst out angrily: the railroad union leaders acted like a bunch of Russians; they went back on their signature...
...sick" switchmen played out their hand to the bitter end. Some of the strikers responded to Charles Wilson's appeal to return (TIME, Feb. 12). But it took Harry Truman's stinging rebuke and the threat of a club to get the rest of them back and the trains running. The Army, theoretical boss of the roads since they were seized last summer, did what no private boss can do: it ordered the workers to work or be fired...
...second time in seven weeks, U.S. railway unions used a swindler's trick in their tangled, two-year contract fight. The key switchmen who make up trains in pivotal rail yards began reporting sick again in droves-first in Chicago and Detroit, then in dozens of other cities, east, west and south, around the nation. The effect was even more devastating than it was last December when Christmas packages piled...
Gone But Not Forgotten. Early this week, as the switchmen were joined by increasing numbers of other railway workers, a creeping paralysis gripped the nation. Passenger service almost everywhere was erratic or nonexistent. A fourth of the nation's 800,000 loaded freight cars were stuck on sidings all over the country. Industrial workers were laid off by the thousands. The most severe embargo in history was clamped down by the post office: nothing moved by first class mail which weighed more than eight ounces. Planes, trucks and buses were jammed with mail, freight and passengers...
Before the President took to the radio, the wildcat strike of railroad switchmen and yardmen threatened to be one of the ugliest in U.S. history. It was timed cunningly, to put the best face on it. The strikers were out to delay a maximum of Christmas mail and hold up deliveries to Korea, thus win higher pay. The strike started in Chicago, where 8,500 members of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen reported "sick" and refused to work. Within 24 hours, 50,000 trainmen were idle in ten U.S. cities, and traffic was snarled on 30 of the nation...