Conversation with Mark Barbour
	Organizing   on the Railroad
Leaders of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees decided earlier this year to commit some resources to organizing their own members into the Labor Party. BMWE, which represents workers who maintain railroad beds, has been affiliated with the Labor Party since our founding convention two years ago. The union put a full-time organizer to work on the job for the months of May and June. The person they chose to do the job was Mark Barbour, a rank-and-file union member and local officer who lives in Blacksburg, Virginia. We talked to Barbour recently about his experience.

September, '98 Labor Party Press

I’m rank and file all the way. I’m also a local union officer. I’m the chairperson of our local – that’s like the grievance person. I love doing it, but sometimes it can get a little crazy. There are 200 people in my local.

Southern Pacific Railroad workers in Texas. Photo © BMWE.

I work for Norfolk Southern, better known as Nazi Southern, as a machine operator. I started out in 1974 as a track laborer. We used to hammer the ties and do everything else by hand. But nowadays there’s all this technology, and that’s one reason why our membership has dwindled. I’m now on a machine that took a lot of jobs.

Last year I worked in South Dakota, Florida and Georgia to do some organizing for the union. I’d always thought it would be a great thing to go out there and help other people get what I’ve had for the past 23 years – good union representation. We had some wins and I was pretty proud of that. But it wasn’t really due to me. I didn’t have to go down there and teach people about unity – they already had it, because they had been taking such abuse from the boss and having to stick together. All they needed was the contract.

The BMWE wanted to assign someone from the organizing department to go into the union and organize for the Labor Party in the months of May and June. Since I’m a big Labor Party supporter and I had just been doing all this organizing, they asked me if I wanted to do it. And I said ‘Hell, yeah.’

With the funding I had, I couldn’t make a lot of plane trips. So we decided that I needed to do a lot of the work by phone. BMWE breaks down into federations, which cover one railroad company area, and within that, there are the locals. The idea was to reach as many federations as possible and try and get them to affiliate with the Labor Party. And then I went on to ask the federation to give me the names of people I could contact in their locals.

The first week I started this assignment I got an invitation to go speak at a meeting of one of our locals in this area. I was a little shaky. But I just drew from the Labor Party organizing manual and tried not to run off my mouth too much, and those guys affiliated. The very next morning I went to talk to another local in the area and got them affiliated. And that same night I got the president of our federation to agree to affiliate. I was really raising hell!

The next week I just started calling, and by the end of the next two weeks I had met with two more locals and got four or five more affiliations. By the end of two weeks I had every federation in the Southeast affiliated – a total of six federations. By the end of the two months, the union had 36 federations and locals affiliated.

I’m a big talker – not that I’m a great speaker or anything – I just talk a lot. But I had to tame that when I started doing this Labor Party work. Because I don’t want people to feel like I’m pushing stuff down their throats. So I just make a 5-minute presentation and then leave it for questions and answers. The main thing I needed was the sign-up sheet.

Some of the federation people would agree to affiliate right away. Others had some objections. Some people said, ‘All the Labor Party’s going to do is put other bad people into office, only running on the Labor Party ticket.’ And I said, ‘One thing I really like about the Labor Party is that we haven’t jumped right into running candidates. We’re doing it one step at a time. We have to get enough numbers and get people affiliated and involved.’ But everybody knows that the two parties aren’t doing anything for us at all – whether they want to affiliate or not.

You know, rail and airline workers are governed by what you call the Railway Labor Act, and that’s what keeps us from striking when we want to. Back in ‘91 when we had our big 18-hour national strike, only six members of the whole House of Representatives voted against forcing us back to work. And I would always strike a nerve with people when I’d say – ‘Wouldn’t it have been nice if back in ‘91, we’d had more than six members voting our way? Wouldn’t it have been great if we’d had the Labor Party there to really give us a voice back then?’ They’d all say, ‘Yeah, yeah.’

I’d make the point that the Labor Party isn’t just for union members, that they can go out and recruit anybody who thinks we need a party for working people. I said, ‘One thing all working people have in common is the boss, whether you are in the union or not. And the boss is really not being fair these days. And they get away with it because of who we have in office.’

We’re going to try to come up with a few more weeks of funding to send me around to talk to the federations and locals who have affiliated about attending the convention in November. And I think I’ll get a half dozen more affiliations when I get a chance to follow up.

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