Question of the Day - 05 October 2022

As can be expected, there certainly was labor strife in the early days of Las Vegas.

A handful of smaller local strikes occurred over the years, but the big one was part of major unrest by railroad workers nationwide, which led to the Great Railroad Strike of 1922, commonly known as the Railway Shopmen's Strike.

A year earlier, William Clark, former U.S. senator from Montana, namesake of Clark County, and builder of the original San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad that founded Las Vegas in 1905, sold out his share of the railroad to his partner, Union Pacific. Union Pacific quickly slashed the payroll by cutting 60 jobs in Las Vegas, in anticipation of moving the railroad repair shops out of Las Vegas. 

Sixty workers was a fairly substantial slice of the workforce, given that there were barely 2,000 Las Vegas residents in total at the time, while the railroad's repair-shop employees accounted for more than 15% of the population. In addition, a large majority of adult male Las Vegans were members of various labor unions. 

Following the layoffs, according to Eric Nystrom, writing for the Nevada Historical Society Quarterly magazine, "At 10 a.m. on on July 1, 1922, all 54 boilermakers, 27 blacksmiths, 63 carmen, 17 electricians, and 22 sheet-metal workers in Las Vegas laid down their tools and walked out. Evidently caught up in the excitement, track maintenance workers and storehouse laborers also walked out, even though no strike had been called for them. The 37 Japanese toiling for the Union Pacific in Las Vegas and an unknown number of Mexican workers walked out as well." 

Las Vegas historian Michael Green adds, "Since the UP provided the town’s electricity, the unions agreed to let a few people stay on the job … as long as strikebreakers didn’t get any of the power. But the UP hired strikebreakers at once. And the one person left to run the power plant fell asleep on the job, the equipment failed, and power and phone service failed with it."

Initially, momentum was with the strikers. Local and state politicians supported the strike; they didn't want to alienate such a large percentage of voters. They even refused to enforce a restraining order against the union after strikers beat up a half-dozen strikebreakers. 

However, when more violence broke out, the governor sent in reinforcements from the state police, who had little sympathy for the strikers. Also, the steam was dissipating from the national strike. Finally, Union Pacific raised the hourly wage slightly, reinstated a few (though not all) of the laid-off workers, and made a solemn vow not to move the repair shops out of Las Vegas. 

So the strike petered out in a few months. As soon as it did, Union Pacific relocated the repair shops to Caliente, Nevada, in Lincoln County.