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Keeping Eyes on the Track

January 31, 2025 • The Socialist

A Review of RWU’s Public Rail Campaign and SPUSA’s Solidarity Response

In Summer 2024, Rail Workers United, a cross-craft inter-union solidarity caucus of railroad workers across North America, launched–along with a number of environmental, labor, and political partners–Public Rail Now, a campaign to bring the nation's privatized freight rail network back under public ownership.

Two recent events pointed to the urgency of such action, and laid the foundation for the Socialist Party USA’s support for the Public Rail Now campaign, as well as the development of an agenda that stands in solidarity with but goes beyond what RWU and their partners have so far offered.


The most recent was the derailment disaster in East Palestine, Ohio in February 2023. Dozens of freight cars carrying toxic chemicals set off a crisis in the small town in which many were forced to evacuate. The event highlighted the failure by the handful of companies that control the freight rail system and their willingness to put workers and communities in danger through policies such as precision scheduled railroading, in search of every possible profit, regardless of the cost to people and the environment.


Prior to this the railroad workers were shown just how much esteem they and their concerns merited among the political leadership in this country, in particular the Democrats. In late 2022, a number of rail worker unions were prepared to strike over serious issues with the owners of the rail lines. Rather than support their efforts, President Joe Biden and the Democrats in control of Congress–including every member of the largely Democratic Socialists of America-backed Congressional “squad,” with the exception of Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan–passed legislation forcing down those workers’ throats a compromise that can only be viewed as a major win for the freight rail-controlling capitalists.


Taken together these incidents showed the need for an outside effort to grapple with the crisis created by private ownership of freight rail in this country. Not only were these capitalists able and more than willing to do tremendous damage to people, communities, and workers but they would be allowed to do so by Democrats willing to back-stab labor to maintain the status quo.


RWU’s program for public ownership has been ongoing for a few years now. Even before being forced to capitulate by Congress and Biden in 2022, the organization had released a statement in October supporting the move to bring the freight rail system back under public control. Allied support soon followed. SPUSA noted their support for the call for public ownership in a broad statement of support for rail workers during the strike efforts in 2022. By the end of 2023 other labor groups, such as United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America and the Labor Network for Sustainability, had declared their support as well.


By early 2024 SPUSA’s Labor Working Group was communicating with RWU about plans to launch a national campaign around the call for national public freight rail. Those plans solidified with the release in July of a white paper, "Putting America Back on Track: The Case for a 21st Century Public Rail System.” The paper’s author, academic Maddock Thomas, outlined the broad arguments and background for a move to take the nation’s freight rail system away from private ownership.


The struggle over ownership of the nation’s rail system goes back to its creation. Early railroads made capitalists wildly rich through the exploitation of labor and public subsidies that helped spread the new transport system from coast to coast. By the early 20th Century rail was king. Yet the U.S.’s entry into World War I found a national interest in moving equipment and troops quickly for the war effort undermined by the unwillingness of the capitalists running the nearly 200 rail companies at the time to cooperate.


In 1917 and 1918 Congress and President Woodrow Wilson took steps to bring the railroad systems under federal control, if only temporarily. The United States Railroad Administration quickly took control to move rolling stock where it was needed most, repair existing stock being neglected, and set standards for new stock that ensured compatibility and lower maintenance costs. Additionally, federal control took a hands-off approach to labor organizing, “led to the organization of hundreds of thousands of previously unorganized non-operating employees on the railroads.”


With these upgrades and improvements to the overall rail system, capitalists were eager to regain control over their “property” at the war’s conclusion. The newly empowered rail workers, however, saw public ownership for what it was: a boon for workers, communities, and the nation as a whole. In a referendum more than 300,000 rail workers–99.5 percent of those polled–supported continued public ownership of rail.
Into this debate entered a plan for public ownership that came closest to succeeding, and now heavily informs RWU’s Public Rail Now campaign vision. Attributed to Glenn E. Plumb, general counsel to the rail unions, the Plumb Plan earned major labor support. As Thomas notes, by 1919 the plan was backed by “every railway union along with the United Mine Workers of America and a number of other national unions.”


For such a major part of the American transportation system and economy, the Plumb Plan is fairly simple. It proposed establishing a fair price owed to the capitalists. The federal government would issue bonds that it would be used to buyout ownership. In its place would govern a non-profit public corporation that Thomas states “was to be democratically managed—overseen by a board of directors with appointees representing labor, management, and the public in equal proportion.” The rail system rates, set by a federal commission, would go to cover both operational and capital costs, and any surplus would be split: one half to management and workers in the form of dividends, and the other half “the public in the form of infrastructure investments and lower freight rates (which would benefit consumers by lowering the cost of goods).”


The Plumb Plan ultimately failed to pass Congress. Within a generation motor vehicles would begin their ascent as the dominant form of transportation in America, and with them the rise of global warming as well as the fall of the rail system. By the 21st Century the freight rail system, while still massively important, was consolidated down to a handful of owners, making it a virtual monopoly. It’s worth noting passenger rail fared even worse, being saved from complete collapse only by federal action, with the creation of what we now know as Amtrak–a national public transit corporation that charges fares to maintain its operational and capital budget.


Now the Plumb Plan, and with it the framework for bringing the nation’s dangerous and inefficient privately held rail system under public control, has returned to light with the launch of RWU’s Public Rail Now program.


Yet, certainly within SPUSA’s Labor Working Group, concerns were raised about this core piece of the public presentation, which would require a substantial shift in public resources into the hands of capitalists that have run the freight rail system into the ground. And while other aspects of the Public Rail Now program were seen as largely supportable–including the focus on high-speed rail, the conversion to electrification, and other goals–the campaign’s sights were limited, in some ways understandably, to focusing on the freight rail system. A number of LWG members rightly noted that considering freight rail as separate from passenger rail was not only missing a major policy opportunity, but fails to address the real world problems of too few rail lines being used by both systems.


Given both the desire to support the core goals of the Public Rail Now campaign–that is, to see the nation’s freight rail system go from private to public ownership–as well as the recognition that doing so in a principally socialist way meant addressing raised concerns, a plan developed to do both.


In TKTK, the Labor Working Group brought a proposal before the SPUSA’s national committee to form a solidarity campaign, in support of RWU and the Public Rail Now efforts, while expanding the set of goals to address the larger interconnected environmental, economic, labor, and other issues. What is now SPUSA’s “Track to the Future: A Campaign for Public Rail” envisioned a four point program, beginning with the ongoing support for RWU’s efforts to date and going forward, even as the need to provide a critical evaluation of the Plumb Plan was broadly acknowledged.


Track to the Future then goes beyond the focus of solely the freight system, calling for a fully integrated national rail system–both freight and passenger rail–that would do away with the inefficient, costly, and undemocratic Amtrak model. Only in doing so can a reality of train travel operate at-scale, with the resources necessary to make it the most compelling option for getting people and things from one part of the country to another, revolutionizing our economy and society. By adding a focus on the transition from any fossil fuels to sustainable electrically powered train operations, as well as a commitment to a massive expansion of the network of local and regional rail systems feeding into a national one, the Track to the Future campaign builds out the natural necessary steps to come from the success of RWU’s initial vision of public rail.


Under the current political and economic system in America RWU’s plan faces an incredibly challenging path, let alone a broader vision that seeks to challenge the stranglehold of accumulative capitalist interests in maintaining America’s morbid dependency on fossil fuels, single-owner motor vehicles, and private ownership of major industries. Embarking on this campaign, even in solidarity, requires building alliances and making tough strategic and tactical decisions. For SPUSA, the need to present–and demand–a principled vision of what ultimate success should look like is an imperative, to help ensure the scope of what is at stake remain undiluted from the beginning.

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