The four brotherhoods made a joint demand for an eight-hour day early in 1916.[84] The railway officials claimed that the demand for the reduction of the work-day from ten to eight hours with ten hours’ pay and a time and a half rate for overtime was not made in good faith.  Since, they said, the employes ought to have known that the railways could not be run on an eight-hour day, the demand was but a covert attempt to gain a substantial increase in their wages, which were already in advance of any of the other skilled workers.  On the other hand, the brotherhoods stoutly maintained during their direct negotiations with the railway companies and in the public press that their demand was a bona fide demand and that they believed that the railway business did admit of a reorganization substantially on an eight-hour basis.  The railway officials offered to submit to arbitration the demand of the men together with counter demands of their own.  The brotherhoods, however, fearing prejudice and recalling to mind past disappointments, declined the proposal and threatened to tie up the whole transportation system of the country by a strike on Labor Day.

When the efforts at mediation by the United States Board of Mediation and Conciliation came to naught, President Wilson invited to Washington the executives of the several railway systems and a convention of the several hundred division chairmen of the brotherhoods and attempted personal mediation.  He urged the railway executives to accept the eight-hour day and proposed that a commission appointed by himself should investigate the demand for time and a half overtime.  This the employes accepted, but the executives objected to giving the eight-hour day before an investigation was made.  Meantime the brotherhoods had issued their strike order effective on Labor Day and the crisis became imminent.  To obviate the calamity of a general strike, at a time when the country was threatened with troubles on the Mexican frontier and with the unsettled submarine controversy with Germany ready to flare up any moment, the President went before Congress and asked for a speedy enactment of an eight-hour law for train operatives without a reduction in wages but with no punitive overtime.  He coupled it with a request for an authorisation of a special commission to report on the operation of such a law for a period of six months, after which the subject might be reopened.  Lastly, he urged an amendment to the Newlands Act making it illegal to call a strike or a lockout pending an investigation of a controversy by a government commission.  Spurred on by the danger of the impending strike, Congress quickly acceded to the first two requests by the President and passed the so-called Adamson law.[85] The strike was averted, but in the immediately following Presidential campaign labor’s “hold-up” of the national government became one of the trump issues of the Republican candidate.