Historical antecedents to the RLA

After the national railroad strike of 1877, which was only put down with the intervention of federal troops, Congress passed the Arbitration Act of 1888, which authorized the creation of arbitration panels with the power to investigate the causes of labor disputes and to issue non-binding arbitration awards. The Act was a complete failure: only one panel was ever convened under the Act, and that one, in the case of the Pullman Strike, only issued its report after the strike had been crushed by a federal court injunction backed by federal troops.

Congress attempted to correct these shortcomings in the Erdman Act, passed in 1898. The Act likewise provided for voluntary arbitration, but made any award issued by the panel binding and enforceable in federal court. It also outlawed discrimination against employees for union activities, prohibited "yellow dog" contracts (employee agrees not to join a union while employed), and required both sides to maintain the status quo during any arbitration proceedings and for three months after an award was issued. The arbitration procedures were rarely used. A successor statute, the Newlands Act, passed in 1913 proved more effective, but was largely superseded when the federal government nationalized the railroads in 1917.

The Adamson Act, passed in 1916, provided workers with an eight hour day, at the same daily wage they had received previously for a ten hour day, and required time and a half for overtime. Another law passed in the same year gave President Wilson the power to "take possession of and assume control of any system of transportation" for transportation of troops and war materiel.

Wilson exercised that authority on December 26, 1917. While Congress considered nationalizing the railroads on a permanent basis after World War I, the Wilson administration announced that it was returning the railroad system to its owners. Congress tried to preserve, on the other hand, the most successful features of the federal wartime administration, the adjustment boards, by creating a Railroad Labor Board with the power to issue non-binding proposals for the resolution of labor disputes, as part of the Transportation Act of 1920.

The RLB soon destroyed whatever moral authority its decisions might have had in a series of decisions. In 1921 it ordered a twelve percent reduction in employees' wages, which the railroads were quick to implement. The following year, when shop employees of the railroads launched a national strike, the RLB issued a declaration that purported to outlaw the strike; the Department of Justice then obtained an injunction that carried out that declaration. From that point forward railway unions refused to have anything to do with the RLB.