Weathering a railway strike

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/06/2012 (3941 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

During a recent strike by CP rail employees, the federal government forced them back to work with emergency legislation. Labour Minister Lisa Raitt said the strike was harming the country’s economy and its reputation.

For those with an eye on history, though, that stance seemed a little over-the-top.

A massive rail strike in 1950 showed what economic consequences to a country could really look like.

The strike dominated headlines for 10 days. With freight stalled, fresh food become a worry. Telegraph operators worked for the railways, so they were off the job, too, and telephone switchboards became overwhelmed with long-distance calls — some taking an hour to connect. The government thought seriously about temporarily nationalizing the airlines, if only to get the mail through, at least.

Gasoline shortages were almost immediate. In Brandon, some customers were limited to two gallons at a time and Sun editorialists howled that casual drivers needed to stay off the roads and save the precious fuel for farmers, who needed it most.

But what were they going to do, walk? The city ran out of cement, and sidewalk paving was shut down. In turn, a low-income housing development was also delayed.

Parliamentarians hustled back for an emergency session — relying on a special government air lift through the defence department, since they couldn’t very well use their normal free rail tickets.

There, they introduced back-to-work legislation for the first time ever. And even that was a fairly measured response. There were rumblings of using the War Measures Act. South of the border, as American unions also struck, U.S. President Harry Truman sent in the army to seize control and keep the trains running.

But at Brandon’s Prince Edward Hotel, where the employees were also railway workers, and thus on strike, management and guests coped as best they could — with good humour.

“They’re making their own beds, but they seem to like it,” hotel manager H.L. Morgan told the Sun about his guests. Managers had stepped in to run the main desk and the switchboard, and the union “made some provision for elevator service,” the paper wrote.

Mostly, it was permanent residents of the hotel who were sticking around, despite a parade of pickets around the hotel every day from 8 a.m. until noon. Temporary guests had fled to other establishments.

Ironically, although hotel workers were included in the strike, they weren’t going to benefit from it very much. In general, railway workers were asking for both more money and a shorter workweek. But hotel employees were expressly excluded from the demands.

Under the union proposal, all they’d get was a two-cent-an-hour raise.

But more than a week later, when the feds finally forced strikers back to work, it turned out that the government had legislated them a four-cent-an-hour raise. Undoubtedly, that helped things at the hotel get back to normal quickly.

Telegraph operators started “clicking” in Brandon that same night, the Sun said. And for the first time in 10 days “breakfast was served today in the (Prince Edward) hotel dining room … and full service has been resumed for all guests.”