http://hobo.com/whatisahobo/touristunion63.html
I dont know? I think this sounds like a nostalgic undertaking? We do not get arrested for vagrancy so there is no need to be in a trade union. Im all for the organized labor & very much so pro union & no plenty about the wobblies.
But today there is so much social welfare, nonprofit & support services for travelers, homeless & low income people. You must remember that soup lines were a reaction to people literally starving to death. Now in any city in America we can find many soup kitchens, mobile feeding trucks & food pantries for hungry people: during the great depression those things were just starting out. Many of the social services we have were created & expanded from that era.
The safety net most def already exists already. We have many thousands of travelers, homebums & or addicts/alcoholics who are out there spanging everywhere in the US. Our society lives in excess so it i not hard to spange up a few buck sfor some food, some gear, a bus ticket or something else. There are plenty of people who loose there gear , get arrested, beat up, robbed & or removed from trains. Keep in mind that the amount of hobos is significantly fewer in number & almost never kicked off moving trains. It is much more civilized where the bull catches you & normally takes down your info & tells you not to ride his section off RR any time soon. They give you a pas & some of hitch out to another yard or roll the dice & try to elude the same bulls again. You can find plenty of free clothing & boots at free Church/nonprofit thrift stores, some soup kitchens have rooms of stuff you can go thru too. I have had guys bring me coolers full of food, good Carhart bibs, socks & canned food while flying a sign in West Memphis. West Memphis isnt exactly a wealthy are yet someone was able to help me out. I had coveralls & ended up carrying the bibs & sweatshirts for a few hundred miles before I kicked them down to a tramp who was heading North that I met while hes was flying & I ws hitching. There are nonprofits like this one in NYC that supply gear to homeless types. They are decent & heavy duty/waterproof packs made to distribute to those living out of a pack.
http://dontwalkby.org/about/ There i also Travelers aif a nonprofit that has been around for like 100 years that helps out with bus tickets etc. Then you have stuff like couchsurfing where travelers can crash & cleanup with regular honest working people.
Lastly we have STP. We kinda guide some people in the right direction & have a communal nature about us with the rideshares, crustsurfing & black market.
I wish there were people in better economic positions that could do more with setting up caches of gear for those who come through. I bet many who are housed & or parttime travellers or former travelers who are on STP are like me, I always have extra gear (sleeping bags, sometimes a pack, boots, clothes,gloves, etc). I dont have an endless supply but if I come across something free on craigslist or somewhere else I save it. I dont know how many good & quality gear items that I have put into use with fellow travelers. I think that this could be done more here on STP especially with those who host surfers. I myself only meet up with travelers once in awhile.
I know that a few of us travel to seek greener pastures for work once in awhile, some who travel to seasonal gigs but the majority who are in this culture for the freedom of it. The freedom of being a wage slave. Most can obtain some sort of shitty work where they are these days while not travling. Traveling i usually the result of people getting fed up of a shitty job. Back then even the shitty jobs were few & far between.
A few years ago I came across a dude who honest to God was planning on traveling in a suit & leather shoes. This guy had some serious nostalgic nonsense going on in his thick head. He had watched too many depression era movies & read to many adventure books. He refused to spange for money & had like $750 that he would dip into for himself. He never really got the idea of living free, he was like a tourist slumming. He had bought into capitalism so much that he was gonna work on his vacation to be more like a "real hobo", lmfao. Instead of sharing anything of what he had with others who had nothing, he would bogart his money & bitch about not having enough & pissed that he could not find any work (keep in mind he was in the US on a tourist visa) So his 2 month holiday to the states he was using as a bucketlist experience to do stuff then return to his shitty life & job. I How fucking impractical is it to wear a suit & tie with shoes when riding trains? Id say that attire would last 15 minutes in a yard hopping knuckle of climbing on ladders.
All though you seem genuine It sure sounds like some of the same nostalgic hobo stuff. The old timers still meet in Britt, Iowa every year but most havent road trains in 40+ years.
We are the natural evolution of this pasttime no less purist than the old boes or more fake than the last. There were others before us & will be others with different styles after us riding trains. Good luck with the project all though I cant directly grasp on its relevance today.