How an Intersectional Coalition was Needed to Weaken a Segregated Railroad Division of Labor, 1971-1985.

Michael Calderon-Zaks, University of California, San Diego

This paper will demonstrate that the only gains racialized groups experienced were due to multiracial and intersectional coalition building, focusing on the case of Chicano/Mexican-American traqueros in the railroad industry. From its 19th century origins, track labor on railroads was among the most racialized occupations entering the 1970s. From the 1910s through at least the 1950s most of the track workers in the Southwestern states were Mexican (both immigrants and second generations). By 1970, track maintenance machines eliminated most of those jobs, yet those most affected were racially excluded from entering other divisions of labor, including as machine operators on the tracks. Only twice did traqueros improve their lot, and both times were due to forming coalitions. The first was a multiracial labor coalition with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the late 1940s/early 1950s, which led to a significant rise in wages (even as the division of labor remained racially segregated), only to be undermined by railroad companies purchasing labor-saving machines and eliminating eighty percent of track maintenance jobs over the next decade and a half. Technological changes in the transport industry had the most adverse effect on the two most racialized divisions of labor—track maintenance and porters. To counter the racial discrimination that limited them in a declining division of labor, a coalition of civil rights and women’s rights organizations sued railroad and utility companies, charging racial and gender discrimination, in 1971. The hard divisions of labor only softened by the end of the 1970s, with railroad companies and unions settling lawsuits by agreeing to allow more “women and minorities” into other divisions of labor.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 117. The Color Behind Collars: Race and Labor