Emergency Board, Louisiana & Arkansas Railway & Co. - Employees. By the President of the United States of America A Proclamation...[caption title]

[Washington, D.C.]: U.S. Government Printing Office, March 10, 1932. Very good.. 2pp., printed on a single sheet. Light dust-soiling, minor creasing. A seemingly unrecorded broadsheet communicating a proclamation by President Herbert Hoover, calling for the formation of a three-person board to investigate and report to him on a dispute between a pair of railway companies and six labor unions, including the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Local Lodge No. 24 of the Colored Railway Trainmen. Hoover's proclamation reads, in part: "[A] dispute between the following carriers...and certain of their employees...now threatens substantially to interrupt interstate commerce within the States of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, to a degree such as to deprive that section of the country of essential transportation service. Now, therefore, I, Herbert Hoover...do hereby create a board to be composed of three persons not pecuniarily or otherwise interested in any organization of railway employees or any carrier, to investigate and report their findings to me within 30 days from this date." Signed in type at the end by President Hoover. This dispute between the railways and their employees provided a platform for the early application of the Railway Labor Act of 1926, which is mentioned by Hoover here a couple of times. The law allowed for strikes, but greatly limited the power of unions to prolong those strikes. The law still stands, and was applied as recently as December 2022, when Congress and President Biden used the law to justify a forced settlement of a national railway strike. Apparently not recorded by OCLC.