Railroad Labor Board

[1]: 6  With the continued functioning of the railways seen as a vital public interest, Congress had attempted to solve wage disputes through legislation as early as 1888, when an initial mechanism for voluntary arbitration was created.

[1]: 6 Various attempts at stopgap legislation proved largely unfruitful, although the Erdman Act of 1898 did establish a more precise mechanism for mediating disputes between employers and those workers engaged in train operation.

[1]: 8 The result this desire for permanent, professional mediation of railway wage disputes was the passage of the Newlands Labor Act in 1913.

President Woodrow Wilson issued an order for nationalization in 1917, and Congress affirmed the action in 1918 with the Railway Administration Act.

The 1920 law gave the board the power to oversee the wages and working conditions of more than 2 million American railway workers.

[7]: 174–5 Chairman Hooper found the situation faced by members of the Railroad Labor Board to be virtually untenable, likening the task of conciliating the demands of the "hardboiled railway executive" and the "radical labor leader" armed only with the "gentle, unenforceable admonitions of the Transportation Act" to pacifying a den of lions and tigers with bare hands.

On July 3, Hooper pushed through a so-called "outlaw resolution" which declared that all strikers had forfeited their arbitration rights guaranteed under the Transportation Act of 1920.

The RLB attempted to mediate an end to the dispute, bringing together union and railroad representatives on July 14 in a joint conference.