The Strength of Our Union The Members

Summer 1999
Volume 106 - No.2

BLE President Edward Dubroski Our Brotherhood has seen much turbulence over the past year and a half. Some people forecast that the organization would not survive the past five months, which culminated in the recall of President Monin and my election by over 80 percent of the voting membership to succeed him.

That forecast will not come to pass, for the very reasons why the BLE is the oldest trade union in North America. In reaching the age of 136, we have already survived:

being founded at a time when unions were illegal conspiracies in restraint of trade;

strikes, undermined by the presence of Pinkertons and other spies, in which BLE members were killed by government troops;

nationalization, and then privatization, as a result of World War I;

near bankruptcy, as a result of speculative investments, when the Great Depression struck;

President Truman's threat to draft BLE members in the late 1940s to break a strike that sought to restore buying power lost due to war-time inflation;

large numbers of jobs lost due to the introduction of the diesel locomotive;

the bankruptcies of nearly a dozen Northeast and Midwest railroads;

deregulation, and the ensuing creation of a few mega-carriers and hundreds of shortlines; and the federal government stripping us of legislated protective rights and the sanctity of our collective bargaining agreements when mergers occur.

We survived these challenges for several reasons. In times of crisis, the BLE's leadership has come together and done what was necessary to protect the organization. The membership has supported the Brotherhood with heart and soul ... and, sometimes, by digging deep into their pockets. But, to me, the most important reason we have prevailed in all these struggles is because our internal law forces the institution and its officers to be responsive to the membership.

Over the past decade-and-a-half, the rank-and-file membership has dramatically changed the course of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers ... from broadening the right to ratify contracts, to joining the AFL-CIO, to giving each Division its own delegate to the International Convention, to reducing the number of International Officers.

These exercises in democracy are not always pretty, and they can slow down the pace of the union, but they keep the BLE responsive to the needs of the men and women who pay the bills. So, I firmly believe that we will emerge from the recent turmoil stronger, rather than weaker.

In the first few weeks of my presidency, I personally met with more than 100 leaders of our Brotherhood from the International level to the Divisional level and I told them two things. First, I told them that I am the president of all BLE members: those who supported me; those who supported former President Monin; and those who supported neither of us.

Second, I told them that, in serving all our members, we had more work than workers, and that we need to put the election behind us and move forward. We need to get back to the business the members elected us to handle.

I can proudly tell you that every officer I've spoken with has responded that you come first. In other words, the tradition of BLE leadership that has steered us through so many crises in the past is alive and well in the present.

Our challenges are many, and some are very serious. However, I can report to you that the spirit of unity and commitment to serving the membership has, again, taken firm root among the people in whose hands you have entrusted your union.