Formerly known as BRAC (Brotherhood of Railway, Airline and Steamship Clerks, Freight Handlers, Express and Station Employees), the TCU's roots can be found in Missouri, where the Order of Railway Clerks was founded in 1899. Railway clerks, like other workers at the turn of the century, toiled long hours for pitiful wages which barely afforded a subsistence-level standard of living. Workers suspected of union organizing activity were fired and blacklisted with other employers. Violence against members was common. In this atmosphere of repression, growth was slow. The fledgling union tried to organize several strikes and negotiations; results were discouraging. By 1905, there were fewer than 1,000 members in the union, which had changed its name to the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks the year before. In the face of employer threats and reprisals, the union adopted a secretive structure, with Inner and Outer Sentinels standing guard at every meeting to prevent detection by management, secret handshakes, passwords and other rituals designed to protect the anonymity of the members. If the period before the First World War was rough on union organizers in the United States, the situation was mirrored in Canada. There had been attempts to organize Canadian railway workers, by both the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Station Employees and the American-based Brotherhood of Railroad Station Employees. In 1912, the Canadian Brotherhood organized a small number of eastern Canadian freight shed workers on the Canadian Pacific Railway and had called several local strikes. But with a weak, scattered organization and too few members to make them effective, the strikes failed. Railway workers in the west also tried to form independent, locally-based unions. Alf Mose, a long-time BRAC member and one of those early organizers, recalled before his death in 1979 that early meetings in Alberta were surrounded and broken up by armed mounted police. But the situation changed dramatically with the First World War. Wartime labour shortages gave railway workers the upper hand for the first time. In 1917, the independent western unions decided they needed stronger representation and approached the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks to help organize clerks across Canada. The objective was to achieve a wider-based contract to replace the patchwork of local agreements which existed at the time. The effort paid off in 1918, with an agreement covering the western lines of the CPR. As a result of this achievement, the western Canadian workers came under the protection of the McAdoo Award, which had recently been promulgated in the United States. The award set basic standards for wages and working conditions which gave railway labour its first great achievements. McAdoo, who was Director General of Railroads in the United States, also ruled that "no discrimination will be made in the employment, retention or condition of employment of employees [sic] because of membership or non-membership in labour organizations." With the impetus of the McAdoo award, organizing efforts blossomed. Eastern CPR workers signed on and the first agreement covering workers on the CPR's eastern Canadian lines was signed in 1920. At the time, improvements ordered by the US Railroad Labour Board were automatically applied to workers organized by US-based unions in Canada. As a result, Canadian railway workers achieved the eight-hour day and time-and-a-half for overtime in 1920. Even though the so-called Chicago award in that year was the last to be applied to both Canadian and American workers, it helped the union to build solid foundations for future growth. The importance of the war and the intervention of the American government in running that country's railroads was quick to be felt by the union. From a membership of about 6,000 just before World War I, the BRC grew to number more than 200,000 strong by 1920. The Canadian section of the union grew strongly in the 1920's, as workers in the grain elevator, steamship and stevedoring industries joined railway unions en masse. Grainhandlers in present day Thunder Bay were among the large groups which came to the international union. It was the first example of the Brotherhood expanding beyond the boundaries of its traditional industries and was to set a pattern that was followed in the years to come. The 1930's were a time of retrenchment for the union. International membership dropped by more than half. The union struggled to maintain the standard of living of its members, as wages dropped. The bright spot of the decade was the establishment in 1932 of a Joint Negotiating Committee of Railway Unions. Government commissions were dealing with the consolidation of the industry, especially in view of the collapse of several major carriers and the founding of Canadian National Railways several years previously. The Joint Committee was to survive intact until 1949, when the running trades pulled out because they were not affected by the five-day 40-hour week issue. The period after the Second World War was another one of growth for the union. Membership in the international reached the 350,000 mark by the early 1950's. Again, new industries were coming under the umbrella of the Brotherhood. A contract was signed in the 1940's for ticketing and reservations employees of the newly-created Canadian Pacific Air Lines. In the early days of air transportation, workers came under the jurisdiction of railway labour legislation. Under the iron grip of the BRC's Canadian leader, Frank Hall, the union led the historic 1950 railway strike, which resulted in the establishment of the 40-hour week on the railways, setting a precedent which benefits millions of Canadian workers today. The Brotherhood in Canada expanded into the trucking industry, with the absorption in 1953 of the 7,000-member Brotherhood of Express Employees. But this period of growth also had its dark side, in the form of inter-union rivalry between the BRC and its all-Canadian counterpart, the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Employees. As the Cold War progressed, the rifts between the two sections of the union movement widened. Frank Hall had been an officer of the BRC since 1920, when he was elected General Chairman of the union's eastern CPR System Board. Elected as Canadian Vice Grand President in 1925, he kept a dictatorial grip on the union for almost 40 years. Under Hall, agreements were imposed, not ratified. Union affairs were run in an autocratic manner and dissent was not tolerated; decisions were often sealed with a shot of whisky from a bottle Hall kept in his desk and passed around the office at meetings. Hall was a prime example of the iron-fisted business unionist coming out of the craft union tradition of the American Federation of Labour. In this tradition, unions stuck to bargaining and grievance handling; little attention was given to wider social issues. At least one group of workers rebelled. Stevedores in the port of Montreal bolted ranks and joined the newly-formed Confederation of National Trade Unions (CSN). (Under the CSN, the former BRAC members fought one of the most bitter strikes in Canadian history at Montreal's Ogilvie Flour mills in the 1970's.) Despite his business union approach, Hall was deeply involved in politics at the highest level. His most infamous intervention was in the 1950's, against the Canadian Seafarers Union. Hall led the drive to have CSU organizer Hal Banks deported. The all-Canadian CSU was smashed and the more conservative International Longshoremen's Association was encouraged to pick up the pieces. Again, there was violence involved in a union organizing drive; but this time it was union against union, worker against worker as the battle between the CSU and the ILA coloured the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway. As one of the prominent officers of the Trades and Labour Congress, Hall was also instrumental in keeping the labour movement divided; he fought bitterly against unity with unions in the rival All-Canadian Congress of Labour. Hall later became a vice-president of the Canadian Labour Congress when the TLC and CCL merged. Hall's last major bargaining effort was the negotiations of 1961-62, where the unions made a case for a combination of layoff freezes and better severance for long-term employees. Union ranks were being decimated by the new "IBM machines:" early computers which handled an increasing number of clerical functions. The government-appointed Board of Conciliation and Investigation recommended the establishment of a Job Security Fund to be used for retraining programs and other measures designed to ease the effect of the layoffs. The establishment of the Job Security Fund was the cornerstone of the comprehensive system of income protection which is available to Canadian railway workers today. After his mandatory retirement in 1963, Hall was appointed Canadian Executive Assistant to the Grand President, in which position he continued as de-facto leader of the Canadian section of the union under the new International Vice President, Ed Downard. Major changes were in the wind for Canadian trade unionism. Canadian nationalism was growing and expressed itself in the labour movement as a demand for more Canadian control over Canadian union affairs. Against this backdrop, BRAC merged in 1967 with the Order of Railroad Telegraphers. A new Canadian leadership, led by W.C.Y. (Bill) McGregor, promised a new approach to the union's affairs in Canada. But another proposed merger, with the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway, Transport and General Workers, was turned down by delegates to the CBRT&GW's national convention, who did not want to give up their all-Canadian identity and merge with an international union. McGregor's efforts eventually led to a landmark development in Canadian-American union relations: the formation of the BRAC Canadian Division. The Canadian Division would have complete decision-making autonomy, with its own Constitution, its own national convention and national officers and its own dues structure. Observers both inside and outside the labour movement hailed the founding of the Division in 1976 as a model for relationships between trade unionists on both sides of the border. It was not long before the new structure was put to its first test. Clerical wages, like other wages throughout the Canadian economy, had been losing ground to rampant inflation and government wage controls. When the 1978 negotiations commenced free of wage controls, BRAC leaders agreed to bargain an increase paid in flat cents-per-hour, rather than as a percentage. For the lower-paid clerks, the settlement provided wage increases which totalled 10% in the first year. But the higher-paid employees who worked as train dispatchers and telegraph operators, who were stuck with the cents-per-hour increase, received much less on a percentage basis. While the agreement was ratified, resentment among the former telegraphers' group (as it was called) intensified and a decertification campaign was begun. For the next two years, the Canadian Division devoted a great deal of time and resources to combat the decertification movement, which had grown with the involvement of the Confederation of Canadian Unions (CCU), a non-CLC group whose entire membership consisted of former members of international unions. The combination of nationalism and resentment proved too powerful and the telegraphers decided to form their own union. Unfortunately for them, as for workers throughout the railways, the pace of technological advance was torrid. From about 3,000 members at the time of the split, the new union soon shrank to about a fifth of its original size and was finally absorbed into another international union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. As the 1970s turned into the 80s, technological change hastened the breakdown of established bargaining relationships. Traditionally, BRAC's members at CP Express and CP Transport had negotiated contracts which mirrored those on the railways. In 1979, CP served notice that it wanted to split the group and some 3,000 workers at CP Express began a bitter, six-week strike in 1979. The union eventually won wage increases and benefit improvements but the die was cast: the trucking workers were now isolated from their railway counterparts. The union was dealt a further setback with the gradual closure of the Newfoundland Railway, with its more than 1,000 BRAC members. As Canada's transportation infrastructure underwent wrenching change, BRAC lost thousands of members to new technology and new methods. Another casualty was the grainhandling industry in eastern Canada, as smaller elevators were closed and the workforce in Thunder Bay plummeted by hundreds of jobs throughout the 1980s. The 1980's also saw a period of consolidation in the airline industry. A number of representation votes were held as various mergers and buyouts took place. When Canadian Airlines bought Wardair as the 90's dawned, it was expected that the TCU would retain its members against the much smaller unit at Wardair represented by the Canadian Auto Workers. But such was not to be the case; the leadership of the union's Airline Division had made a secret deal with the CAW and led some 2,700 members out of the TCU. The trucking industry also underwent a wrenching period of adjustment as deregulation and free trade were introduced. BRAC was forced to fight a number of membership campaigns against the Teamsters as the CP trucking companies also consolidated. In this case, BRAC was able to win several campaigns and added more than 1,000 members. Railway workers, their ranks decimated by technology, faced and conquered serious challenges as deregulation and free trade caused huge layoffs. A strike against company demands to gut the Employment Security system in 1987 was successful in defending the gains of two decades. In 1994, the union faced yet another major challenge. At a meeting with TCU National President Jack Boyce, the president of CP Express and Transport delivered some important news for TCU members: parent CP Ltd. wanted to sell the company but after a two year search had not been able to find a buyer. CP was giving the company one last chance: it would sell it to its employees or close the door forever. For more than 2,000 TCU members, CP Express and Transport was bread and butter. For more than a hundred years, the company and its ancestors had served Canadians. But CP had let it run down. They had hived off and sold other parts of the company. Now the company was serving notice that it wanted out of the trucking industry for good. The union had a choice: either let 2,000 people be thrown onto the street or conduct an employee buyout of the company. The union decided to try to protect the jobs; the largest all-employee buyout in Canadian history was underway. Against all odds, the company survived for three years, putting $300 million in wages and benefits into the pockets of TCU members. But the company, which became Interlink Freight Systems, was poorly-equipped to deal with the brutal marketplace of the 1990's. The union managed to wring more than $50 million in support from CP Ltd., the former owners. But it was not enough. Even though the company was holding its own on a revenue basis and was making all of its payments on time, its financial institution got nervous and, as has been done so many other times in this decade, pulled the plug. It was a sad end to a unique experiment. Its membership ravaged by raids, shutdowns, technological change and layoffs, the union examined various restructuring options. In 1994, it had signed an Affiliation Agreement with the United Steelworkers, under which TCU members could use all of the larger union's services in exchange for a monthly per-capita fee. With a dwindling membership and facing a further restructuring, the union's leadership recommended a merger with the Steelworkers. The merger was unanimously approved by delegates to a Special Meeting in August, 1998 and was made complete by 2001. The Canadian Division of the TCU became the Transportation Communications National Local of the Steelworkers. The structure of the local recognizes the TCU's historical roots and unique system of organization. With the greater resources of the Steelworkers behind it, the National Local is once again looking forward to a period of new growth.