A labor history of "automobilization"
“The railways were thus unique by virtue of their giant corporate size, financial resources, and enormous workforces. The railway working class, one million strong by the end of the century and alone possessing the capacity for coordinated national strikes, emerged as the ‘social vanguard’ of the entire American proletariat. It was no accident that the class struggles of each decennial business cycle between 1870 and 1900 culminated in national railway strikes supported by the riotous solidarity of hundreds of thousands, even millions of other workers and sympathetic small farmers.”
–Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream
This post is going to be a little different – instead of the usual screaming at YIMBY psychos, instead I’m going to take a bit of a longer look at the “automobilization” of American cities from a labor history perspective. From at least 1868 (the year of the Knights of Labor’s “Great Southwestern Strike” against Jay Gould’s Missouri Pacific rail lines), running to about 1926 (the year of the passage of the great concordat of the Railway Labor Act), the United States experienced regular, organized, and phenomenally crippling strikes on railroads and streetcar systems. It is my argument that this sustained labor unrest made the advent of the automobile not inevitable, but a gleefully accepted transit alternative to what had long been an intractable labor issue, and effectively allowed for a beheading of rail labor as the “‘social vanguard’ of the entire American proletariat”.
Rail labor from 1868 to 1926 enjoyed particular strength due to its curious economic position with respect to other employment sectors. The sheer size of the initial expansion of the US rail system included, of course, a massive levy of rail workers; many of these were immigrants who had memories of 1848 Europe still. These also found solidarity and support in citizens of cities and towns who perceived the railroads as they essentially were – grotesquely bloated landlords who happened to nominally be rail companies – and thus placed themselves on the side of the rail workers in a strike.
Finally, the particular conditions of work in rail meant that traditional workplace open shop control via foremen was essentially impossible. The simple fact of distance between depots along any given line coupled with the inherent mobility of any given worker or team of workers meant that direct labor control was fleeting at best; the workers’ specialized knowledge of their machines gave them relative leverage over their running, and unionization and organizing efforts managed to escape censorship and crackdowns of the type that permeated factory settings. Melvyn Dubofsky and Foster Rhea Dulles, writing in Labor in America: A History note that in the 1850s “the National Typographical Union, the National Molders’ Union, and the Machinists’ and Blacksmiths’ National Union were organized, and a National Protective Association was founded by railway engineers with delegates representing fourteen states and fifty-five railways”.
The rail industry
This National Protective Association never amounted to much in terms of militancy, however, surviving for only 5 years, and like many of the early unions, was really more of a fraternal benefit society (which, given its rather banal function as a sort of proto insurance company, allowed these less outright hostility from management). The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (née “The Brotherhood of the Footboard”, founded in 1863, fared better, and persists to this day. The Brotherhood of Conductors was organized in 1869; the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen in 1873, the Brotherhood of Railroad Brakemen in 1883, the Switchmen's Union of North America in 1894, the Order of Railroad Conductors in 1868 and the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen in 1890. The latter two of these consolidated to form the American Railway Union (ARU) in 1893, briefly transcending the narrow, profession-based craft unionization that had previously defined the industry after the 1868 crushing of the Knights of Labor in the Great Southwestern Strike. The ARU won an early victory in the Great Northern Railway strike but was decimated after its involvement in the infamous 1894 Pullman Strike in Chicago. Additionally, there was the 1877 rail strikes which, beginning on the Baltimore & Ohio line, drew the entire country into weeks of armed confrontations between strikers and the army, deployed to nominally ensure the “free flow of mail” against strikers’ attempts to completely shut down all rail traffic.
The high period of rail investment saw, including during the supposed interregnum of the Civil War, a hugely beneficial partnership between capital and the US government with the singular purpose of capital accumulation qua territorial expansion (leading to a slew of distortions, propagated mainly by Michel Aglietta and the “social structures of accumulation” or regulationist school, that the period of rail expansion was backed by absolute surplus value expansion to the detriment of relative surplus value gains, which I won’t get into here, but I wanted to take a potshot). This period began in earnest a mere month after the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, when a charter was granted for a rail link between the Delaware and Raritan Rivers and US Army engineers were loaned out to do planning work for it. In 1850, the first land grant charter was bequeathed to the Illinois Central Railroad, granting it lands in Mississippi and Alabama which it quickly began selling in a real estate frenzy. Land sales were the most expedient way to fund the enormous capital outlays required for tracklaying; the other was the creation of a joint stock company or delayed issuances of stocks and bonds, ensuring both a continuous supply of money and a wide distribution of risk, described here by Mark Twain:
“We’ll buy the lands,” explained he, “on long time, backed by the notes of good men; and then mortgage them for money enough to get the road well on. Then get the towns on the line to issue the bonds for stock, and sell their bonds for enough to complete the road, and partly stock it, especially if we mortgage each section as we complete it. We can then sell the rest of the stock on the prospect of the buisness of the road through an improved country, and also sell the lands at a big advance, on the strength of the road.”
After the Civil War, the original unity between military-engineering expertise and private profits ostensibly split; on one side, governments from municipal to Federal level avidly continued to participate in investment and the wholesale creation of a suitable business environment for newly liberated corporate entities to run, albeit with the provisos that they offer preferential rates of transit to soldiers heading West to genocide ahead of the rail lines or for mail delivery. Though the last rail land grant was given in 1871, Manu Karuka in Empire’s Tracks notes that by this time the Federal government had given 170,000,000 acres of land to around 80 different railroads. Regardless, this was not enough to save the dramatically overcapitalized and debt-ridden railroads from the Panic of 1873; the Northern Pacific Railroad collapsed completely, and fell into Federal administration; the pressures of the depression forced the surviving railroads to push down wages and the marginal workplace protections which did exist while also extending hours, leading ultimately to the 1877 strikes where, as mentioned previously, it was the interference with Federal transit (delivering both mail and the National Guard to quell the strikers) that prompted the severest and most lethal anti-strike responses.
These strikes, usually for wages and shift limits but also for union recognition, ultimately created a very different employment landscape by the 20th century. In a now rather familiar story, the increasing stature of the union was often coupled with a reactionary backslide, and unions began to function more as hiring halls working closely with rail companies rather than antagonists to them. This culminated in a grand detente in rail in the form of the Railway Labor Act of 1926, which effectively anticipated the National Labor Relations Board by building in a system of arbitrage and effective strike notification between unions and corporations which allows Congressional intervention into strikes due to rail’s importance to “national security” and other shit like that, stopping short of a full nationalization of rail like that which occurred 1917-1920.
This tightly controlled labor environment has survived into the ongoing “logistics revolution”, which, if anything, transcends the wage-suppression problem that clawed at rail’s profits by remaking the original, crude rail lines into a nationwide transmodal system of shipping and warehousing. The meager benefits of mobility and expertise afforded rail workers have now been replaced by entirely new infrastructural systems of which rail is but one part, along with trucks, planes, ships, etc., and the nature of employment in the industry has been entirely deskilled – from the logistics centers in Chicago, New York, and LA (each with at least 100,000 workers) to the main hubs of UPS and FedEx in Kentucky and Tennessee, splitting the procedure of shipment has broken what was once an industry dominated by long-haul transcontinental trips into a series of smaller point-to-point moves from more centralized locations, and the jobs themselves have been further specialized in accordance with this fact. This allows for transit and logistics companies to dip extensively into the reserve army of labor, seasonally calling workers up and casting them back into unemployment, as needed to soothe the rapacious and mercurial humours of the logistical spider – no longer do qualification exams and strict seniority rules of the type that dominated the early 20th century in rail have any purchase, because, as in all things – when capitalists collectively confront a labor problem, such as the social vanguard of the labor unions, alternative routes around the issue are celebrated and pressed into service with a shocking rapidity. As logistics waxes, promising a fully-curated shipping experience with a minimum of labor intrusion and a maximization of turnover time (thus, as Marx notes in Capital Volume 3, diminishing the unprofitable “idle portion of capital compared to the whole”), passenger rail has suffered from an equal destitution.
Streetcars
Not all passenger rail is, of course, regional. It’s essential to note that intra-urban transit of any kind is a significant latecomer to the scene. Horse-drawn streetcars (on rails) were essentially the only option in larger American cities until about the 1880s, whereupon they were rapidly replaced by the electric streetcar. Here the same issues of labor control appear. The first round of streetcar operating corporations mostly operated on a franchise basis with the local municipal government. As David Jones writes in Mass Motorization and Mass Transit, these franchises granted rights to install and operate service on a specific route, and “franchises were granted route by route, and many franchises were necessary for an operator to assemble a network that could provide citywide service and convenient connections in a large city”. Nevertheless, the scattershot nature of this sort of initial build was potentially highly lucrative: Kevin Phillips notes in Wealth and Democracy that by 1900 3 of the 50 richest Americans were streetcar magnates. The margins of any given streetcar company were a rather simple sprint to pay off initial outlay costs for track, and given many franchise agreements came with built-in fare caps, this left the company with its only real source of revenue to be found in wage suppression, which on average was about 75% of the average manufacturing wage and otherwise driven down further by extremely long shifts. A period of mergers and acquisitions often followed the original line buildout as firms overcapitalized and found themselves unable to turn a profit, resulting in the consolidation of many surface lines under a single corporation. Many corporations remained tethered to local governments on the basis of loans made for trackbuilding and physical plant well past the terms of repayment dictated, and kept docile by strict controls on fare increases and often required hours of operation (in 1902 1/3rd of all street rail companies had their fares capped at 5 cents). Investment began flagging as regulating corps more or less seized the entire transit systems of the major US cities and newer lines were met with unwilling loan conditions or abandoned due to sinking ridership – essentially, the market became saturated, building out faster than the extremely rapid pace of urbanization. Emerson P. Schmidt, in his Industrial Relations in Urban Transportation, writes of rampant overcapitalization and debt mismanagement: where, in 1896, “the average capitalization of street railroads was about $95,000 per mile of track, as compared with only $46,000 per mile of track for the steam railroads”. The writing was already on the wall. This was often blamed on the regular need to replace tracks, cars, powerplants, etc. but ultimately resulted in an enormous deficit held by any given streetcar corporation which, ultimately, often passed to the city by way of receivership. Thereby insulated, capital firms invested in streetcars often would suspend system maintenance, collect fares, suppress wages, and ride this out to the end. By 1910 there was widespread acknowledgement in industry literature the glory days were gone, and 1916 saw sustained disinvestment set in.
Moribund, saddled with loans and, once World War I began, further decimated by skyrocketing interest rates, the streetcar industry was also faced with major labor actions on par with those that rocked the larger rail lines, though obviously smaller in scope, limited to single cities. There were major streetcar worker strikes in Salt Lake City and Columbus in 1890, Indianapolis in 1892, Cleveland in 1899, St. Louis in 1900, San Francisco in 1907, Pensacola in 1908. The strikes continued during and after the war, notably in Atlanta in 1916, New York in 1918, Los Angeles in 1919, Denver in 1920. The majority of these were initiated by the Amalgamated Association of Street Railway Employees of America (AASREA), founded in 1892, formed at the initiative of the AFL under Gompers but formally unaffiliated due to the provenance of most early members with the Knights of Labor. AASREA strikes often found purchase as crowds mobbed the lines, or operators felled trees or put rocks on the tracks, or otherwise abandoned the streetcars themselves to block further traffic, and lasted weeks on average. Strikers also found support in local residents, who would block tracks and offer material support, viewing the streetcar companies as liars and grifters (for good reason).
The common move at this point for die-hard advocates of the type of twee, sanitized public transit option that streetcars or surface transit in general stands for in the mind of the addled American technokkkrat is to claim that the onerous low fares imposed by municipal governments alone killed the industry. The War Labor Board’s decision during World War I to raise wartime wages to rough parity with similar “skilled” labor sectors over the protestations of the streetcar companies finally dispelled any possibility of postwar recovery in the minds of investors. If anything, we may say that the streetcar industry did find itself in a “profit squeeze” scenario (how rare!) where, with their profits tightly regulated, could not survive labor militancy increasing wages – put another way, that these corporations were only profitable with labor exploitation built in, which improved in efficacy as lines and systems expanded. Following an aggregate loss in net revenues from 1912 onward coupled with a punishing loss in ridership localized in cities with populations under a million, we can see the primacy of labor exploitation at work: smaller systems by their nature had less employees, and thus a shakier stream of continuing revenues. Note especially the strikes by AASREA in smaller Midwestern cities; these low-functioning capitals with hairsbreadth margins did not enjoy the sheer access to larger commuting markets that New York City, LA, etc. did, and this spelled their doom, much as a manufacturing capital of, say, production capacity 5x enjoys far greater surplus value accumulation in the abstract than a capital with only x. Public investment in the lines came, but only as a half-measure after the systems had fallen into disarray, and their running by state and local governments only exacerbated the problem, pumping fares up in a blind attempt to close debt gaps and suspending services. To sum up: a lack of growth is crisis, growth rests on the exploitation of labor, and union activity directly frustrated streetcar growth.
Cars
The preceding two sections should give a rough gloss for the trajectories of rail and streetcar unionization: the former older and more wide-ranging in its militancy, but ultimately kneecapped by the preservation of craft-based unionization (especially as employment in the industry became more specialized: see American Railroad Labor and the Genesis of the New Deal, 1919-1935), the latter younger and more of a thorn in the side, up until the point that it became an immovable object set against the unstoppable force of streetcar companies’ malfeasance. In both cases, dramatic overreach by rail companies was responsible for, firstly, getting the initial lines built; but these absurd lendings of credit were also, of course, debt, and these weighed about their necks. In such a precarious investment environment, the rail companies were then open both to movements within the market and vulnerable to labor action.
Obviously, this was untenable for a country in a high period of industrial development, as noted by the US’s takeover of rail corporations periodically and the wholesale running of the national system during World War I. The advent of the car did not “solve” the problem (to say such a thing would impute far too much rationality on the part of any individual capitalist, much less the capitalist class as a whole) but did offer an attractive option with respect to routing around intractable labor issues. The reason is exceedingly simple: where rail and streetcar strikes directly attacked the operation of the system itself, in a public way – that is, they did not take place at the point of production – auto unions, though themselves no slouches, did not directly intervene in the functionality of a car or a paved road, or at least not in any way that matters. The rail system had been established with extensive choke points at basically every junction stop or port, especially those of East St. Louis and Chicago, which linked the Western and Eastern systems; a shutdown in either place effectively destroyed all traffic nationally until the strike was broken. This leverage allowed the rail unions their place of pride.
More than just burying labor activity in the more furtive sphere of production, a move to private automobiles created further “multiplier effects”, not least of which was the triggering of an entirely new national network of infrastructure outlays, especially under the interstate system, which arrived in 1956. Typical accounts of the car’s arrival place it as an obvious development following along after suburbanization, itself a result of the Sixteenth Amendment, signed in 1913, which provided for federal income taxes, and further cite that by 1927 state and local authorities in California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin were already planning highway systems. However, these ignore the fact that streetcars, in their ravenous expansion, had already laid the groundwork for suburbanization (especially in the Midwest) by turning satellite cities into bedroom communities, separated by, commonly, large gulfs of still-undeveloped land which the streetcars ran through. This was answered by a microcosm of the country-wide speculative boom in real estate from the 1890s into the 1900s, but developers were hampered in their suburbanization efforts due to the lack of availability of consumer credit at the time, and thus usually built houses one-by-one in a slow but inexorable tide. The pace increased in 1914 once income tax on mortgages was assured to be tax-deductible. Homes became, for the first time, a mass market, aided by the railroad, which nevertheless restricted their development in aggregate along narrow lines (literally) tightly controlled by their owning companies. Curiously, the control exerted by these rail lines, and their unwillingness or inability to expand, became a roadblock, for a period, of the continued development of mass consumption – in the age of rail, it simply made no sense to build at any great distance from the station (transit oriented development was all there was).
Relatively contemporaneously, Ford’s “revolutions” at the River Rouge plant in automobile production allowed for a dramatic change in the price point of cars, moving them from a “sporting” luxury good to mass transit. Ford’s particular contributions don’t really need much introduction. Simon Clarke nicely summarizes the salient points: “the decomposition of tasks, the specialization of tools, the assembly of tools into the machine, and even of machines into the machine system, were all typical of the transformation of craft production into large-scale industrial production”. The process of mechanization entailed here resulted, as it ever does, in the dramatic decimation of relative workers required for the creation of a specific automobile (even if the absolute number of workers increased to create more cars overall). The volume of production enabled by Ford’s innovations essentially demanded a rapid sea change in consumption in both shipping and individual use, foremost the development of a road network. However, at the root, was the interminable issue of capitalist private property, and in particular property in land. Whereas rail had, if anything, strengthened and multiplied the traditional form of the city as an agglomerated smear surrounded by less developed “countryside”, the creation of a viable road network established a new system of dense interlinking between land parcels which was more readily recognized for its utility in shipping and logistics than it was for personal use.
What does this mean? Well, essentially, that we can say two things: firstly, that labor, and in particular a dramatic wave of strike activity, is responsible in no small amount for the curtailment of rail’s (streetcar and otherwise) staggering profits in their heyday, and thus represented a katechonic block on further expansion and profits which may or may not have enabled the greater expansion of rail to a particular level refinement which would have “freed” personal consumption from the tightly channelized suburbanization which was already underway at the twilight of the rail system; secondly, that the rise of the automobile was assured not just because of its incredible explosion into the consumptive universe off the back of fine-tuned labor exploitation in production, but this was made further attractive for investing capital (not for any technocratic planners) because labor disruption was less of an issue, being consigned to the “background” (firmly in the sphere of production and the walls of the factory) even before the great labor-capital agreements such as the 1951 Treaty of Detroit. Even a radical UAW could be well tolerated if their actions were contained to the point of production, their impact could be modified by the clever machinations of industrial policy, and their deliberators and organizers could be dealt with singularly without the intrusion of supportive parties of the citizenry.
As a final note, is necessary to draw out a particular element of the statements above: there is and never has been a concerted plan to “destroy” public transit. The infamous activities of GM’s National City Lines, which bought up derelict streetcar systems for their dismantling, cannot be blamed here; it was buying investments far past their prime and putting them down. The entire story can be attributed to labor’s role in frustrating surplus value extraction, elevated into a particular position and suitably organized, to introduce into markets a sort of aggregate aversion to investment in a particular sector. To be clear, however, the aftermath of the story, in which we are now living, spells out the limits of such activity – because even the most militant labor organizations, contained within a single sector, making itself anathema – will only introduce disinvestment and an existential stress to push capital into more profitable sectors which will maintain a general level of social reproduction (re: transit). In production, this takes the form of the great flight of factories to the Sunbelt through the 60s and 70s, and in transit, it took the form of the creation of an entire new sector.