Our first, and most central demand, is this: On 12:01 AM, September 16—the instant that the final “cooling off period” expires—nationwide walkouts across all Class I railroads must begin. If we are to reverse decades of declining conditions, there’s only one way to do it: by using our strength to fight for it.
The railroads claim that “labor does not contribute to profits.” But let us go out on strike and see how long corporate profits at both the railroads and the country hold up.
We have no choice but to fight. This is not about what we want, it is about survival. It is impossible to live this way, on call constantly, with one day off a month, operating three-mile-long trains on only a couple of hours a sleep, missing time with our spouses and children. Tens of thousands have gotten fed up and left already. The railroads welcome this so they can save money piling work on the crews who are left. It also gives them ammunition for their campaign to move to one-person crews.
We must never underestimate the ruthlessness of the union bureaucracy, but experience shows that workers can defeat them. Workers at Volvo Trucks last year formed a rank-and-file committee that was central in organizing the defeat of three successive sellout contracts from the United Auto Workers and forcing a month-long strike. This was repeated again at John Deere the following fall, where a committee helped force a strike and defeated two sellouts.
We call on all our brothers and sisters, regardless of union or railroad or job classification, to join us in building this committee as a network embracing workers across the entire industry. We intend to build this committee to put the power into the hands of the rank and file, in order to prevent the unions’ sabotage of our struggle. It will be a means of communication for working out strategy and joint actions outside of the control or the prying eyes of scab union bureaucrats and corporate stoolpigeons, and of appealing for the widest possible support from workers across the country and around the world. This will put us in the most powerful possible position to defeat any attempts at injunctions, management retaliation and other strikebreaking measures.