Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters - Merger With BRAC

Merger With BRAC

Passenger rail travel dropped sharply after its peak in the 1940s, when the BSCP had 15,000 members, to the 1960s, when only 3000 porters had regular runs. After four decades of service as the First Vice President of the BSCP, Milton Webster was designated to be Randolph’s successor as Brotherhood President when Randolph retired. That transition never occurred. In February 1965, Webster suffered a fatal heart attack in the lobby of the Americana Hotel in Bal Harbour, Florida while he and Randolph were attending an AFL-CIO Convention. C. L. Dellums replaced Randolph as president of the BSCP in 1968. The BSCP merged with the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks BRAC a decade later. Dellums' successor and last president of the BSCP as an independent organization, Leroy J. Shackelford, became president of BRAC's Sleeping Car Porters Division. In 1984, the Sleeping Car Porters Division was combined, along with Amtrak clerical employees, into a new Amtrak Division of the union having approximately 5000 members, 3500 clerical and 1500 in on-board services, comprising the largest single unit of organized labor on the Amtrak system. Upon Mr. Shackelford's retirement in 1985, his position was not filled, its duties devolving upon the General Chairman of the BRAC Amtrak Division, Michael J. Young, and his successors. Thus ended the direct lineage of BSCP leadership, with Young becoming the first non-African American to lead the on-board group.

The three unions representing Amtrak on-board service workers, BRAC, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE), and the Transport Workers Union (TWU) joined to form the Amtrak Service Workers Council (ASWC). Craft lines and separate seniority lists for on-board workers were eliminated, with one labor agreement covering all. The chairmanship of the ASWC rotates annually among the chief executive officers of each constituent union's Amtrak bargaining unit.