On this day in 1886, the Great Southwest Railroad Strike began, involving more than 200,000 workers throughout the Southwestern United States.
The strike began when an agreement between the Knights of Labor and Union Pacific to give notice and investigate all firings was violated where a Knight named Charles A. Hall in Marshall, Texas was fired for attending a union meeting on company time. In response, te District Assembly #101 of the Knights called a strike.
Within a week, more than 200,000 workers were on strike throughout Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri and Texas, paralyzing railway lines with both inaction and sabotage.
At least nine people were killed in conflicts between police and crowds of striking workers. On April 9th in East St. Louis, eight deputies guarding a freight train shot into a crowd of strikers, killing six bystanders. The crowd responsed by setting the rail yards on fire.
After two months of protest, the strike was called off on May 4th without the workers winning their demands. The failure of the strike led directly to the collapse of the Knights of Labor and the rise of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
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You should read Carbon Democracy, which posits that the switch from coal to oil was in large part motivated by just this. The coal miners and railroad operators held way too much power over coal distribution, and could easily shut a whole country down to demand better wages. The switch to oil relied on machines to pump the oil and pipelines to transport it, both curiously without people to man them and therefore totally destroyed any power the miners and railroad workers had. Don't think it's too much of a stretch to include your thesis inside of that as well.