>Indeed it was the union that managed to circumvent the need for collective bargaining by going the "legislative route" in 1948 at the state level. However, at the Federal level, the unions continued to use legislative fiat after 1964. The usual tactic was to strike all railroads at once, an otherwise stupid tactic in any fight, usually doomed to failure.

"Striking all railroads at once" is modeled after the General Managers' Association insistence on negotiating with the unions "all at once", a practice which dates from the 1880s. It has most certainly not been "usually doomed to failure". The General Managers' Association is now more or less the National Carriers' Conference Committee, and it's been only in the last two decades that the united front of that Committee has broken down, but not by all that much.

A lot of union working conditions were seriously altered, for the worse from the union standpoint, by the railroad bankruptcies of the 1930s.

>But this was strategically smart (at the time), as it always provoked Presidential reaction. The President would then order a "cooling off period" and appoint a presidential commission. This commission would issue a "recommended" settlement, which by some strange coincident, was always in favor of the unions on the fireman issue. This was then passed by congress as law.

The system of injunctions, cooling off periods, arbitration (binding and/or non-binding), PEBs, and what not, came to be in 1947 with the Taft-Hartley Act, which was a reaction to the UMW going on strike during the 1940s (national defence! national security! sound familiar?). Now /that/ was a stupid move by the unions because the only thing which has happened since is the steady deterioration of union agreements. There hasn't been only one large scale rr stike of significance ever since. Not being able to go on strike "right away", so to speak, seriously undermines the unions' posititions at the negotiating table. The carriers, therefore, have everything to gain by just twiddling their thumbs because the RLA (Railway Labor Act of c1920, as amended) says to use the existing agreement until a new one is reached. Amtrak labor relations did this very thing from 1998 through 2008. They didn't get away with it because a Bush-appointed PEB slapped Atk's wrist and awarded 18-20 years back pay to something on the order of 9-11 unions (2 others got it too but weren't part of the PEB process).

Normally all a PEB (Presidential Emergency Board) recommends is what an arbitrator had recommended in a previous step. If the issue ever reaches Congress, which it has, Congress usually passes an Act which more or less says the same thing as the arbitrator.

>Thus legislative fiat, rather than collective bargaining, settled almost all railroad labor issue for several decades, almost exclusively in favor of the unions.

Hardly at all the case.

>The problem (unhappily for unionism) is now, that the public, by vast majorities simply does not seem to support them. In my view this is not so good, as something is needed to counter the often draconian economic power of employers.

FRD's "legitimizing" unions in the 1930s forestalled serious violence and revolt, like the SF general strike of 1934. It wasn't widely recognized then nor is it in this day and age. By doing so, he gave the working man a stake in the ["capitalist"] system, which has done far more to raise the average person's standard of living than the Alternative to the East, which collapsed under it's own dead weight in 1990. The CCCP was little more than Nazi Germany on a much grander scale. Although making some tentative progress, the PRC is in about the same boat.