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.

[3] The line was conservatively managed and profitable, paying its largely Boston-based[4] investors healthy annual dividends of 8 percent throughout the decade of the 1880s.

[2] The profitability of the Burlington line rested on the twin pillars of maintenance of high shipping rates through pricing agreements with competitive lines[5] 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.

[7] 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.

[9] 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.

[13] 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.

[13] 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.

[14] 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.

[15] 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.

The summary rejection of the change to a mileage-based system by the unyielding General Manager Stone via a circular letter dated February 22, reaffirmed in a series of face-to-face negotiations over subsequent days, set the stage for a work stoppage.

[20] The brotherhood chiefs sent a telegram to President Perkins declaring their men to be "determined to strike" but "we want to prevent it" and offering to accept the "same terms as made with the Chicago and Alton Railroad and Santa Fe system — that is, 3.5 cents per mile for passenger trains and 4 cents per mile for the slower freight trains for engineers, with firemen receiving 60 percent of these rates.

[22] This vague offer proved unsatisfactory, however, and the joint committee of engineers and firemen, in consultation with the brotherhood heads, voted to strike for the new methods and rates of pay.

[27] The loss of CB&Q freight service was particularly damaging to the massive Chicago meatpacking industry, with the road the number one importer of live cattle into the city for slaughter.

[30] Ultimately union officials were more correct, with only 22 engineers out of 1,052 and 23 firemen out of 1,085 remaining on the job after the strike deadline, barely 2% of the company's enginemen.

[35] One was striking engineer George Watts, fatally shot in the temple by a deputized Burlington foreman on March 3, in Brookfield, Missouri.