The Burlington railroad strike of 1888 was a failed union strike which pitted the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (B of LE), the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (B of LF), and the Switchmen's Mutual Aid Association (SMAA) against the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad (CB&Q) its extensive trackage in the Midwestern United States. It was led by the skilled engineers and firemen, who demanded higher wages, seniority rights, and grievance procedures. It was fought bitterly by management, which rejected the very notion of collective bargaining. There was much less violence than the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, but after 10 months the very expensive company operation to permanently replace all the strikers was successful and the strike was a total defeat for them.
Background
The Burlington system of railroads was one of the great transportation networks of the 19th Century, operating about 6,000 miles of line in 1888, the year of the great strike. The system consisted of seven individual railroads, of which the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad (CB&Q) was the core unit, headed by company President Charles Elliott Perkins from 1881 and young General Manager Henry B. Stone. The line was conservatively managed and profitable, paying its largely Boston-based investors healthy annual dividends of 8 percent throughout the decade of the 1880s.
The profitability of the Burlington line rested on the twin pillars of maintenance of high shipping rates through pricing agreements with competitive lines and the suppression of wage rates, with President Perkins taking the view that wages were set by the simple market principle of supply and demand, leaving no room for misguided external intervention practices such as arbitration.
Perkins was hostile to the notion of unionization and to the strike movement, approving a local decision to terminate striking Chicago freight handlers in 1886 and seeking to "go for" the Knights of Labor (KOL) in the wake of that union's strikes upon other rail lines in that year. The company formally served notice on its workers that membership in the KOL and continued employment by the Burlington line was incompatible, forcing many members to quit the union to keep their jobs.
During the era of steam locomotion, operation of an engine was a two-person job, with an engineer controlling the throttle and responsible for the vehicle's safe operation, alongside a lesser-paid fireman, who broke coal into combustible-sized pieces and stoked the boiler which provided the train's motive energy. These two cab-dwelling operators were together known as "enginemen," with the typically young fireman subordinate to the engineer and generally an aspirant to later promotion to the rank of engineer. Despite their proximity in the workplace and their commonality of interests, these two groups maintained their own distinct craft organizations, which frequently stood a cross-purposes with one another, divided by jurisdictional jealousy.
Membership in these craft brotherhoods, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (B of LE) and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (B of LF), which were historically fraternal benefit-societies and which had taken a bleak view of the efficacy of striking, was still tolerated. These seem to have represented little risk to the company, with the B of LE having engaged in no strikes anywhere since its various local defeats in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, and the firemen a seemingly easily replaceable group of lesser skilled workers with a similar tradition of antipathy to strikes and collaboration with employers.
Strike
Cause
On January 23, 1888, a meeting of the grievance committee of the B of LE was convened at Burlington, Iowa, joined by the adjusting committee of the B of LF. the two bodies met individually for two days to identify their own specific concerns before holding a joint session on January 25, at which a negotiating committee of 14 engineers and 14 firemen was elected. The cause of an engineer terminated the previous week by the CB&Q, ostensibly for failing to maintain a schedule, which the B of LE believed was mitigated by a defective watch, was placed near the top of the joint committee's agenda. Adding fuel to the fire was the terminated engineer's important place in the B of LE as a member of the brotherhood's previous grievance committee.
A meeting of the joint grievance committee with General Manager Stone over the fate of the fired engineer was sought without success, and he left to Burlington to take a new position with the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad in short order. Bad will remained in the aftermath.