THE MAN FACTOR OF THE PROBLEM
Progress in human relationship may be, I think, safely permitted at least
the consideration of priority in any understanding of our surpassing
railroad problem. For it may also be set down as fairly axiomatic that
unless we progress in this phase of transport we cannot expect to go ahead
in any other department of it. In its tense importance to the larger
question this very human problem can be regarded as foundation-like. Upon
it the railroad structure may yet build. Without it, it certainly must
fall.
For more than two decades past, imagination, virility, foresight have been
upon the wane in our railroads of the United States until to-day with
these qualities quite gone upon many of them, the debacle of our national
transport machine becomes a doubly depressing picture. The man with an
idea may be needed upon our carriers but, as we shall see gradually, he is
not often wanted there. They are ruled by conservatism; conservatism
carried to the last degree. Yet only yesterday the man with an idea was at
a premium in our railroading; our roads themselves were known for their
daring, their strength, their progress. To-day too many of the men who
operate them are the abject slaves of a system; the only ideas that they
safely may advance are those leading to immediate economies. Immediate
expenses, even with great and far-reaching economies as their ultimate
result, are quite taboo. The railroader no longer may think. Apparently he
may only execute.
What is the reason for this--for the human debacle of our carriers
following so closely upon the physical, and in many cases responsible for
it? Has the American railroader lost his ability to think and to act upon
original lines? Has he sunk, with the debris of much of his once proud
transport system, almost to the limits of degradation?
A hundred answers will be made to these questions. Some of them will come
from banking interests--shrewd men, in banking. These will bear upon the
degree of regulation to which our rail carriers are subjected to-day.
"These government sharks have killed railroad initiative," it will be said
time and time again. There is some truth in that answer, yet I think
myself there is greater truth in the statement that absentee ownership of
the carriers--if I may be permitted to speak frankly, long-distance banker
control--has done far more than regulation, either State or Federal, to
kill initiative and progress in our transport machine. Wall Street is
likely to think too exclusively in terms of dividends; Wall Street does
not think enough in terms of men.
People in Wall Street, and a good many others outside of that famous
thoroughfare as well, think of the difficulties of our railroad problem as
things merely of dollars and cents. They feel that the questions of rates
and wages, of income and outgo, are the sole factors to decide the future
weal or woe of the railroads. If the rates are put high enough and the
wages and other items of expenditure are kept low enough the roads will
prosper again. These people feel that the problem is solely an economic
one.
I believe that they are wrong. Granted that dollars and cents _do_ enter
largely into the problem and its solution, that unless our national system
of railroads becomes a real "going concern" it can hope for no continued
success, I still feel that the prime point of the entire question is
contained in three words, the human factor. This factor comes first, not
last. That Wall Street and other cocksure people have in the past placed
it behind the problem of finance, is one of the very large reasons why our
American railroads are having such extremely hard sledding at the present
moment.
The human problem of the railroad may be fairly said to be divided into
two classes, that of the patron and that of the employee. Before I am done
the necessities of the first of these classes will have had attention; for
the moment those of the second claim our full interest. There is always
that meaningful phrase, "the fine tradition of our American railroading,"
that we are using again and again because it stands for something very
definite, the thing which was largely responsible for the first upgrowth
and strength of our railroads and whose loss within recent years has been
chiefly responsible for their downfall. It was that tradition, that
old-fashioned affection for railroading and loyalty to it, that made men
work, not eight hours, but ten or twelve at a single stretch, and under
the stress of a great emergency, such as a flood or a blizzard, sometimes
sixteen or twenty-four or even forty-eight hours at a stretch. To-day they
will not do this.
Why?
It is not a story quickly told. To understand why the railroader of to-day
will not work long hours, even in reasonable emergencies, save under the
spur of fearfully high overtime pay, why he goes about with indifference
in his manner and a lurking grudge in his heart, one must dive beneath the
surface of the situation. There he may find the solution of the loss of
our railroad tradition.
The beginnings of that tradition are in the beginnings of the American
railroad itself. They root back to the days when the overland carriers
were in that same flash stage of development that in our day we have seen
come to the motor-car and the motor-truck--the days when romance rode the
steel highway, when it was thrusting its stout tendrils here and there and
everywhere, when earnings and enterprise and initiative were all alike
unlimited, when, in a word, the railroad called in an all but irresistible
way to the rich man's son and the poor man's too, when the banker's clerk
a president would be and the farmer's boy had as his supreme ambition the
driving of a fast passenger-locomotive.
What has become of that farmer's boy who used to stand in a field for a
single idle moment to watch the fast express go sweeping by and dream
wistfully of future possibilities, or who stood for a fascinated minute
beside the iron horse as it paused at the country depot, studying the
intricacies of thrust and gear and bearing? Alas, he no longer covets
railroading. It has ceased to enthrall or even interest him, despite the
fact that the swing of the pendulum is to-day all in favor of the rank and
file of men who work with their hands upon the railroad. Yesterday, in
those same golden days of which I have just spoken, the swing was at the
other end of the arc. The railroad employee was down; his employer was up.
Two years ago this giant pendulum had completed its course. The employer
was down, the employee up; and something approaching a social revolution
in our railroading had been accomplished.
The railroad employee--succinctly the two million and a half of the rank
and file of railroad workers--had become a political asset. Two million
and a half direct votes are a bait that few shrewd politicians can ignore.
That it was not ignored has in recent years been shown repeatedly, in the
passage, by this State legislature and that, of various protective
statutes for the railroaders, some of them good and some of them absurd;
in the thrusting through Congress of the Adamson Eight-Hour Law; and in
the extreme deference shown by the first Federal director-general of
railroads to the big brotherhoods and other unions of transport employees,
with the final result that those groups of railroad labor which had
remained unorganized up to the period of Federal control proceeded to
organize themselves. The stake was too good.
Incidentally it may be stated that in past years the average railroad
executive was himself the largest single force toward the propagation of
trade-unionism within his industry. While decrying its steady growth he
placed a premium upon its advantages. Let me explain. A few years ago, say
ten or fifteen, at the most, there were but four important unions of
railroad employees--the four great brotherhoods of train workers:
engineers, firemen, conductors, and trainmen. These were and still are
high-grade organizations, extremely independent, refusing for many years
even to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor. The men who
conducted them were high-grade men of great principle and considerable
vision. They fought for the rights of their fellows and fought well, with
the result that there were few times when train employees were not
adequately paid.
At that time the rest of railroad labor, with the very few exceptions, had
no national organization; its individual loyalty was given instead to the
properties for which it worked. With what result? Here is one glowing
instance.
Conductors, then and now, belonged almost without exception to their
strong trade organization, the Brotherhood of Railroad Conductors. It took
good care of its own. A conductor on a fairly good run might easily earn
from $175 to $200 a month, even in those prosaic days of butter at
twenty-five cents a pound. It was a good pay, yet one could hardly say
that the average conductor was overpaid. For he was far more than a mere
train employee, particularly if he had a passenger run. He was a great
point of personal contact between a railroad and its patrons. Upon his
tact and diplomacy and understanding, or lack of these qualities, his road
might rise or fall. True at all times, this was intensified in hotly
competitive territory. A good conductor might easily bring or hold patrons
for his road, a poor one drive them away to the other line.
Yet I think you will agree with me that at least an equal point of contact
between the railroad and its patron is the man with whom he comes in
contact before he boards the train--the station-agent. _His_ tact and
diplomacy and understanding have a good deal to do with attracting
patronage to the road. Yet it was not more than a decade ago that I found
in a certain small brisk Eastern city of some twenty-five thousand people
the chief representative of an important railroad working seven days a
week, twelve or fourteen hours a day, and paid $85 a month. He knew what
the conductors who ran the trains past his station were receiving and it
rankled.
This was not an unusual case, this high-grade man, working long hours in
his office at the passenger station and between trains scurrying out
through the town to sell tickets to possible travelers over his line--it
was in a genuinely competitive territory. It was all too typical. More
than one railroad in past years paid its dividends out of the exploitation
of its labor, and to-day is reaping the benefit of its short-sightedness.
One can imagine the ease with which the former United States Railroad
Administration was able to help bring about a strong union organization of
railroad station-agents and employees!
Mr. McAdoo was not asleep to the possibilities of this situation. We
already have seen how from the outset he extended to labor a place in his
cabinet and placed the entire vexed wage situation in the hands of a
special commission headed by the late Franklin K. Lane. Now in all
fairness and in simple justice to the Railroad Administration it should be
set down that no matter what its motive it did seek to place railroad
labor on a more scientific and more human basis with relation to its
employer than any private corporation had ever succeeded in giving it. It
tried to place the railroad wage on a basis more directly in accord with
living costs, and less with mere supply and demand. Similarly it
endeavored to better the working conditions of the rank and file of the
railroaders. That in some of these last cases, particularly those of
certain of the so-called national agreements, eventually it went entirely
too far, is not to be denied. That is now proved by the willingness of the
new Federal tribunal, the Railroad Labor Board out at Chicago, to abrogate
these agreements as soon as the individual carriers shall have succeeded
in making new ones with their workers.
This last, however, seems to be much easier planned than actually
accomplished. Months are slipping by and some of the outrageous and
expensive agreements still stand, along with some others which are
neither outrageous nor expensive. The very worst of the lot, the
meticulous arrangements under which a small job on a locomotive headlight
(to make a single possible but rather typical instance) required six or
eight men because each was a specialist and no man could infringe upon
another's specialty, are going now and going rather rapidly. There is an
apocryphal story around one Eastern railroad town to the effect that the
changing of an air-hose connection on a Pullman sleeping-car one day more
than a year ago cost the railroad forty dollars--a small job which two
ordinary capable mechanics would have been glad to perform for but two or
three at the most. Instances such as these have been multiplied. A
farmer's boy who lived close to a railroad in the Middle West and who
received five dollars a month and an occasional trip-pass to Chicago and
back for oiling and watching an automatic electric pump at an obscure
siding saw himself rated as an electrician and in receipt of $185 a month
(standardized wage) without having lifted one finger toward the bonanza.
It was heyday for the rank and file. The Lane Commission, which really did
much scientific work on this wage question despite the exceedingly great
time pressure and the war crisis under which it worked, started the ball
rolling, yet in what seemingly was a very fair and reasonable fashion. It
was after that, even after Mr. McAdoo's actual term of office as
director-general, that the real damage was done. The pendulum swung then,
and swung far. From a point where the wage-scale was unfair to the
railroad employee it came toward a point where it was unfair to the
railroad investor.
This was particularly true in the case of the shop-craft men. They seem to
have been the real offenders in the situation. With the position of the
men in the train service, the members of the brotherhoods, I can have
little else than great sympathy. Their plight at this moment is
deplorable. At the best, they catch the hard end of railroading, the long,
unconscionable hours, the stress of bad weather, the nights away from
home, all the other difficult conditions of life upon the road. I do not
believe that there have been many times when these men have been seriously
overpaid. The score is far more apt to lie upon the other side of the
table.
True it is that even in these branches of railroad service the unreasoning
form of national agreement has crept in. I can remember not so many years
ago up in northern New York when if a switch-crew was sent down to one of
the paper-mills to get a box-car it was paid two hours' pay for two hours'
work. That was fair pay--and it was not. A switch-crew even in dull times
could hardly exist on the prospect of getting no more than two hours' pay
out of twenty-four. Gradually the pay for such a job--any job at all--was
set at a minimum of half a day. That seemed fair. A little later this
minimum, no matter how small the job, was set at a full day's pay. Even
that might have been fair were it never abused. Let me illustrate.
Here is a yard-crew kicking around in Watertown yard. The first thing that
happens in a brisk day is that an engine derails somewhere south of the
junction. It is not a serious mishap, and the yard-crew, acting as a
wrecker, cleans it up in ninety minutes or thereabouts and gets a full
day's pay. An hour later that same crew has to take a box-car two miles
down the Cape Branch to a paper-mill, another ninety minutes perhaps, and
another full day's pay for every man Jack of the crew. They sit around for
three hours in the yardmaster's cabin and settle all the affairs of the
New York Central railroad. In two or three more hours a careless switcher
sends two flat-cars off the end of the siding up at Sewall's Island. Our
little crew is again a wrecker. It goes up to the Island, puts the
derailed cars on the track again,--another ninety minutes of actual
work,--and draws a third full day's pay. Three days' pay in eight or nine
hours is not bad. I should like to be able myself to turn the trick.
This is an exceptional case, of course--and it is not. Some strange things
are possible in the national agreements which were foisted upon the
Railroad Administration during the control of Walker D. Hines. I do not
believe that Hines himself ever realized how strange they might
become--his own large railroad experience would have guarded him against
them.
* * * * *
When the versatile Henry Ford embarked not so many months ago on the
difficult and time-honored business of running a railroad he was not
greeted with any warm-hearted reception dinner by the American Railway
Association. He probably was not even asked to join the association. Its
members had heard of Mr. Ford as a shatterer of traditions. And
traditions, as you already know, to the heart of the old-time railroader
are like unto the ten commandments themselves. I have no brief for Mr.
Ford, any more than for Mr. McAdoo. He is not an economist, although he
would like to think himself one. He is a mechanic, a super-mechanic if you
please. And he has a glorious knowledge of men, their strength and their
weaknesses. Yet this is not criticism. These last qualities are much
needed in our American railroad situation to-day. By this time there is
almost a superfluity of economists in it.
Mr. Ford at the outset sought to solve the railroad labor question by
straddling it--by tearing up all the cumbersome and complicated
standardized national agreements between the men of the small railroad
that he now owns and substituting for them a generous minimum wage and the
right of the road to utilize a man at whatever work it pleases, within his
established eight hours of labor. On Mr. Ford's railroad an employee may
possibly drive a locomotive for ninety minutes and then spend five hours
and a half washing car windows, or trucking cases upon a freight-house
platform. And the astonishing thing is that in this one instance at least
the plan apparently is working.
It may be that Mr. Ford has reached the solution of the problem. I am not
at all sure that he has not. But I feel that if he has, a large number of
railroad executives and sub-executives will forget their annoyances at
the Detroit gentleman's publicity methods in connection with his personal
railroad and begin to call him blessed. They have had little good fortune
as yet in handling the standardized national agreements with their men,
which were their unwilling inheritance from Uncle Sam, railroader sublime.
The agreements still stand despite the professed entire willingness of the
Railroad Labor Board to abrogate them, for the simple reason that no
acceptable substitute for them has yet been brought forward. The Labor
Board has made some rather sweeping rulings in cutting down overtime
payments and the like, however--all to the cost of the rank and file of
the railroaders. Their position steadily becomes less and less enviable.
In October last they took the 12 per cent. cut in their wages--roughly
speaking, half a billion dollars. They did not want to take that; the
hot-heads in the organization talked "strike" and a national tie-up of our
rail transport machine. If it could have been achieved it would have been
a real national calamity. As it was, the country had a very bad state of
nerves over the mere possibility of the thing. The strike was an
impossibility. Many of the railroad executives in their hearts wanted it.
With labor conditions as they were across the country, with the
unwillingness (to put it mildly) of the average man to have his comfort
and necessities interfered with no matter how much right or justice might
be involved in the situation, the executives held all the cards. The
leaders of the men knew that. Therefore there was no strike. Strikes are
rarely popular when times are dull.
Perhaps it is knowing this that a certain group of railroad
executives--there is no great unanimity in the matter--is steadily
pressing toward a further wage reduction of another 10 per cent. I shall
refrain from comment upon the wisdom or unwisdom of such a further step at
this time. That the very executives who are urging it are, I think, none
too sure of their position is indicated by the fact that they are coupling
the proposed reduction with vague suggestions that if it is granted they
will reduce their freight-rates, at least, correspondingly. The idea of
reducing rates to build up traffic apparently does not even come into the
reckoning.
* * * * *
Would you understand this situation better? Then come back with me for a
moment to those humming summer days of 1920 when the railroads of the
United States were still in record-breaking traffic. It is June, 1920; a
sluggish hot evening in the city of Chicago. Eight railroad engineers,
members in good standing of their brotherhood, are set upon by a gang of
organized thugs--in the picturesque phraseology of the railroaders, a
"wrecking crew"--in the shadows of the great Northwestern Terminal, and so
badly beaten up that they have to be sent to the nearest hospitals for
treatment. Yet the Chicago newspapers of the very next morning announced
with a sort of smug optimism that "satisfactory progress" was being made
with the switchmen's strike. They predicted an early break-up of the
entire "outlaw" walk-out (which had been in progress since the preceding
April), and apparently without a definite knowledge that each ensuing
twenty-four hours were seeing the whole outrageous business gain in its
vicious strength.
Up to that time we had had almost every thing difficult and disagreeable
in our railroad debacle except physical violence. It then seemed to have
embarked upon this final phase of badly disordered industrialism. The
Chicago imbroglio was not particularly exceptional. Brotherhood men all
over the country, members of the most powerful unions that this land has
ever known, literally went to their work nightly in fear and in trembling.
In few of our big cities is police protection to-day at its highest point
of efficiency--for a variety of reasons, which need no particular
explanation here and now. This means, in turn, that rowdyism and thugism
are at high-water marks. When these are organized by brains and financed
with plenty of real money they seem to go all unchecked. And loyal
railroaders of every sort suffer the penalty, in the first instance at
least, with the dear old public as usual in the role of the greatest
sufferer and the final judge.
Outrageous as it really was, the outlaw strike was one of the most human
that this country has ever seen. It came as the logical result of official
stupidity and procrastination. In January, 1919, the various groups of
railroad employees, appalled, as was every other form of worker, by not
only the steady but the extremely rapid increase in living costs, made
applications for wage raises beyond those that the labor commission
originally had granted--the so-called billion-dollar increase. So did
other forms of labor ask for wage raises--and got them. The applications
of the railroad workers remained under consideration after eighteen
months. The Railroad Administration, even though it continued in full
control of our carriers for fourteen months after the wage applications
had been filed, passed the buck--and permitted the national agreements.
That was politics. The recently created Railroad Labor Board sitting out
at Chicago was going over all the testimony again, making solemn and
voluminous proceedings of a business that might be decided, tentatively at
least, in a week of real work. That was politics again.
In the meantime, in those slowly moving eighteen months, what came to
pass? In San Francisco, in Portland, in Seattle, in half a dozen other
west coast cities where the wages of unskilled labor had reached an
abnormally high figure, the railroad switching-crews had the exquisite
pleasure of shunting cars at $4.50 for an eight-hour day into shipyards
and other industries where the commonest and most unskilled forms of labor
were receiving six and seven and eight dollars a day for the same amount
of labor. I do not maintain that shifting box-cars is a particularly
expert form of labor. Yet at the least it is a fairly hazardous one. The
actuaries of the insurance companies will assure you as to that. And it is
a fairly responsible one too. The claim agents of the railroads themselves
will bear full witness as to that. They know to their own great sorrow
that a box-car filled with breakables cannot be batted back and forth
like a gondola of coal or a flat filled with steel angle-iron.
"Responsible, did you say?" snorted the brotherhood engineer of a switcher
to me one day, a year or two ago out in the Mid-West. He shouted across
his cab as he poked into a siding and pulled out one of John Ringling's
long circus trains. "You'd think it was responsible if you'd see the
amount of signing off I have to do for this trick before I can cart her
out of the roundhouse. They're right too. She may be eleven years old--you
can see by the maker's plate there over the steam-chest--but she's still
worth a good fifteen thousand dollars in the open market to-day. And I'm
responsible for her. For five dollars. While the fat-heads that are up on
the main streets of this town manicuring the cobblestones for the city
fathers are getting six dollars--and no responsibility whatsoever."
Here are two of the reasons why I have just called the walk-out of the
railroad switchmen one of the simplest and the most logical of all the
strikes in the country. The eighteen months of inexcusable procrastination
in coming to a decision in this railroad wage matter was a third and a far
greater one.
Yet remember that the switchmen were not the only aggrieved parties to
this situation--this seemingly impossible situation that has quickly
become an actuality. Other forms of railroad labor suffered quite as much
if not more from official procrastination and official indifference. A
passenger trainman rode with me a year or two ago across northern Idaho.
"Don't you go putting any pieces in your paper," said he, "saying that all
of the train-crews are making the big money. A few are. But they are
mighty few."
He swung quickly to his own case. He was on his run, across three States
from Spokane, Washington, to Paradise, Montana, seven days a week, 365
days out of the year. For this he was pulling down $150 a month--$120 for
his straight time and the other $30 as overtime. Around him in Spokane
carpenters were getting $1.25 an hour and plumbers $1.50--and working five
and one half days a week or, at the most six. They all owned cars, and
Saturday afternoons and Sundays they went fishing. The brakeman had not
been fishing in more than two years. He told me so and I believed him. If
you interview enough men in the course of a twelvemonth you will come
quite quickly to know the kind that you can believe. It is written in
their faces.
"Seven days a week and with two gardens, one at each end of the run; and I
make out--nothing more," he continued. "Last night my wife and I went down
to the market and we bought pork-chops. There were six of them--none too
many for the three mouths to be fed at home--and the measly things cost me
sixty cents, at the rate of forty-five cents a pound. We allow ourselves
meat three times a week, not oftener."
Somehow even though it might have the fervent approval of some of our
really high-brow hygienists, I do not like that idea of an American
workingman being able to have meat but three times a week. It doesn't seem
quite American. It doesn't seem quite fair. I do not believe that the
average executive, or even the average stockholder of the American
railroad, wants such a condition. He assuredly would not want it for any
member of his household, or for himself. If he did want such a condition,
I should like then to contrast his attitude with a British one that came
to me not long ago.
"We of Great Britain feel that every British workman is entitled first to
a minimum wage that will insure him decent conditions of living--housing,
food, clothing, education for his children, insurance against death and
old age--and to a maximum wage that will include these things plus a
little share in the profits of the railway business. Otherwise we can
never be sure of the coming generation. And a decent coming generation is
our one national assurance of continued national strength and security."
So spake the general manager of a British railway to me one day last year.
He sounded a real truth. In their prosperous days our American railroads
were decidedly loath to share their profits; some of their more captious
critics were not slow to say that they had capitalized their underpaid
helpers and were paying dividends on the remainder. A few roads, notably
the prosperous Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific, in the golden days
before the war had made a beginning toward bonus and profit-sharing
systems but these were in the vast minority. I should like to see those
extremely prosperous railroads, the Burlington and the Lackawanna,
resurrect the experiment. It should not be left to Henry Ford to
accomplish all the railroad experimentation in this country.
Offhand the job of a passenger trainman, such as my friend up on the
Northern Pacific, may not seem to be a particularly strenuous one even
though it is long-houred. Here is a harder one. On a test running across
Wyoming not long ago the husky boy with the shovel in the engine-cab
tossed six thousand pounds of coal an hour from the tender into the
fire-box. The run was six hours long. If you do not even yet get the
measure of his job, go down into your cellar, find that there are eighteen
tons of coal there and then shovel it from one side of the cellar to the
other--in six hours. Repeat the entire process three or four times in the
course of a week and then write and tell me which you had rather fire
on--a coal-burner without a mechanical stoker, an oil-burner, or one of
those big electric locomotives up on the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul,
where the fireman's chief job is to keep awake against the lazy droning of
the motors to be prepared in the always-possible emergency that he may
have to take control of the craft.
Here is a final instance or two of what I mean.
From one point in California to another 170 miles distant is a typical
operating division of one of the biggest roads in our Southwest--a little
longer than typical Eastern operating divisions in fact. It is provided
that freights moving from the one to the other shall do so at the average
rate of twelve and one-half miles an hour; which means thirteen hours and
thirty-six minutes for the division. That therefore becomes its official
running-time. Anything beyond that fairly good lapse of continuous labor
was paid for as overtime "pro-rata." In other words, the train-crew was
paid the same figure for its sixteenth hour of continuous service as for
its first one, and the incentive for the railroad to cut down its overtime
is gone. That is why the rank and file of railroaders were fighting so
strenuously three years ago to gain time-and-one-half pay for their
overtime, beyond a basic eight-hour day. It is the only way that they
could see for bettering their actual conditions of labor--for getting in
that occasional fishing-trip or the journey with the wife over the hills
in the long-distance jitney.
Let us translate this more definitely and more intimately, and come to the
exact testimony of a Great Northern fireman operating out of Havre up in
northern Montana. He speaks, under the promise of no revelation whatever
as to his identity, with great frankness. It is not easy for a railroader
to speak frankly, particularly to a stranger. It is not encouraged in
railroad circles, to put it frankly. But this man--he is a keen,
upstanding American of the best type--speaks to you through me with
absolute frankness. He begins with one or two observations as to the rank
and file of railroaders in general to-day.
"When I started in this game," he says, "the men I worked with were mostly
single and had neither dependents nor home ties. Their conversation
consisted mainly in stories of the road, whose location wanders from
Portland, Maine, to Seattle or to Winnipeg--'the Peg'--to Pocatello, to
New Orleans, or to San Francisco. Conductors in charge of a train were
very rarely men who had been 'made' upon that road; seniority did not mean
much; men went from job to job as their fancy dictated. They tell a story
up this country about a conductor and an engineer that will illustrate my
point.
"You will begin by understanding that the rules of this road, as well as
of all the others, provide for a standard watch--a watch that has been
passed upon by a qualified and registered watch-inspector. There is also a
rule that the conductor compare time with the engineer before starting
out upon any trip. In each division-office there is a 'watch register,'
and every watch must be compared with the 'standard clock' and any
difference between them noted upon the register. The rule states
specifically that no watch can be called correct that is even thirty
seconds away from the 'standard clock.' Now then.
"This freight conductor over in the eastern end of the State came to the
engineer with his orders and handed them up into the cab. After the
engineman had finished reading them, the conductor asked: 'What time have
you got?' The engineer grinned and replied: 'What time have _you_ got?'
This time the conductor grinned. He reached down into his overcoat pocket
and pulled out one of the small tin watches that are advertised across the
land as having made the dollar famous. 'Seven forty-five,' said he, with
great gravity. His friend, the engineer, also assumed solemnity, then
pulled a nickel-plated alarm-clock out from under his seat. 'You're right,
Tim,' said he, 'right to the minute.'
"Those days are passed. It takes longer to-day to get a regular run on
most roads than it takes for a lawyer or a doctor to complete his college
course. Seven years is about the quickest time to a run that amounts to
anything. The railroader of to-day takes his work seriously, settles down
and tries to be a good citizen instead of the old-time 'boomer' [the slang
phrase for the former itinerants] that once filled up the business, and
not in any way to its credit. But it's pretty hard being a good citizen
under the sixteen-hour law and the Adamson Law which was supposed to
provide a real eight-hour day and really never did anything of the sort.
If we get in at four o'clock in the afternoon we don't know whether we are
going out again at eight o'clock the next morning or eight o'clock the
same evening. The one thing is just as likely to happen as the other. And
how can friend-wife count upon her evenings with us at the movies?
"Let me be still more specific.
"Let's stretch that sixteen-hour day of which I was just speaking into a
good practical work-day. Let us say that we will call you on the first day
of the month for First No. 401 bound west out of Havre here. We will slip
you 2450 tons and Mallet articulated compound No. 1801, and make the start
at sharp four in the afternoon. Our lad at the fire-box gets sick over at
Gilford and we tie you up there, 'on credit.' In other words you were four
hours and thirty minutes getting to Gilford and yet your time didn't count
after getting your 'tie-up' message; not until you are called once again.
If by that time you are hungry or sleepy it is not the Great Northern's
fault. It is following the rules of the game, just as every other road
across the land is following them.
"Five hours later a train comes along and a relief fireman gets off. You
make a fresh start at your trip. You still have eleven hours and thirty
minutes to go, out of your sixteen hours of actual on-duty trick. Now see
how you go it. While doing some switching at Chester you get a car off the
track. After that your engine bursts a flue and dies. They release you
once more, again on credit, and until four o'clock in the morning. At nine
along comes another engine and you are called once again. You still have
eight hours to work. Everything goes all right until you get to Shelby.
You get a message there at two in the afternoon to do some switching. The
conductor tells the despatcher that if he stops to do this work the
sixteen-hour law will get him before he gets in. The division
superintendent butts in and says: 'We will give you credit for being off
the track two hours at Chester, and that will give you plenty of time.'
"You cannot beat out the old D. S. He was born to the game. You arrive at
Cut Bank at seven o'clock on the evening of the second, having complied
with the law, technically at least, and are ordered to deadhead back to
Havre on No. 2 leaving in fifteen minutes. You probably have a chance to
get just a bite to eat before slipping on No. 2. It is snowing hard, in
the dead of the Northern winter in fact, and Two has a time of getting to
Havre. It is six hours at least before you swing down in front of the
depot there. Before you ever have a chance to get into the depot the
call-boy meets you and as you have had your Federal rest--eight hours
curled up on a seat in a day-coach--he wants you for First No. 403 to go
right back to Cut Bank again. If you don't want to go you are a
bolshevist. Exaggeration? Not one bit of it. I have been myself four days
making the trip that I have just described to you, so you see that I could
have made my illustration both longer and broader and thicker. If you
think that I have exaggerated, stay in your office some day sixteen hours
at a stretch, then get on the day-coach of a local train, ride eight
hours, and cut in for another sixteen hours of office work
again--preferably at writing a railroad book."
I have let this man close the case for the train service men. He puts it
in its full strength and I think that he puts it well. No fair-minded
American wants American labor poorly paid, and American railroad
labor--upon which so much of our life and property is absolutely
dependent--least of all. It has been a sort of tradition in this country
that railroad labor should be paid less than similar labor in other
industry--just why I never could quite understand, unless it be for the
fact that railroad labor until a comparatively recent time has been a
little more loyal to its calling than the labor of some other industries
that might easily be mentioned specifically. The variety of the business,
the opportunities for travel and experience that it gave, have been real
factors in holding its wages very slightly yet very perceptibly under
normal levels. And in the same way they have been factors in holding it
back against normal industrial progress.
When one comes to the question of the shop-craft unions (I shall speak of
still other branches of railroad endeavor before I am done) the problem
becomes infinitely more perplexing. It is indeed with these newer union
affiliations that the railroads are to-day having their greatest
difficulties. For the old-time brotherhoods, in which there is a fine
flavor of reasonable conservatism, the average working railroad executive
has a deal of real respect. Perhaps he realizes how much worse off he and
his fellows would be if he had to substitute for them in train operation
unions of the sort that are driving him mad in his shop-work. But the
shops represent a real perplexity. Some of the roads, beginning with the
Erie, have gone so far as to rent their repair-shops at division points
for operation by privately organized corporations. In fact the Erie has
gone so far as to follow this practice for its track maintenance in
certain instances. A private corporation is bound neither by the national
agreements of the Railroad Administration or by the rulings of the
Railroad Labor Board out at Chicago. It can buy its labor in the open
market and at the prevailing market prices--and at the present moment at
obvious savings. But the effect upon the morale of a railroad of this
remarkable practice of "farming out" inherent parts of its operation I
shall leave to your imagination.
That the outside shop can and does work cheaply is shown by the experience
of a plant in Buffalo which upon an actual invested capital of $80,000
cleaned up more than $100,000 actual profits in 1920 and expected to
double this figure in 1921. Yet it was able to repair freight-cars for the
railroads entering that important railroad point for about $600 each,
which was about $200 less than the roads could do it for themselves.
* * * * *
There is a railroad executives' side to this situation, and it is a big
side indeed. A certain large road in the central portion of the country
decided to put the matter squarely up to its shop forces before proceeding
toward the leasing of its repair facilities to outside companies, as we
have just seen. It called in the heads of its shop-crafts unions and put
the cards squarely on the table before them. It wanted to go back to
piece-work, the method by which each and every man was paid for what he
actually accomplished, a good old-fashioned American way of running a
shop or any other sort of business. The McAdoo administration abolished
piece-work in the railroad shops across the land, and the output fell off
greatly both in quality and in quantity. The railroads to-day are having a
fearful time getting it installed again.
The general manager of this road of which I am speaking--he is himself a
real red-blooded little man who came up through every phase of railroading
through his ability and his sheer energy--told the shop-crafts unions just
what he would do and what he would not do and when he would do it. If they
would accept piece-work on a schedule 25 per cent. higher than that of
1917 and turn out the same good volume of work that they turned out in
1917, they would be making considerably more than the per-hour basis gave
them in 1921. If they would not accept piece-work by a certain specified
day he would then proceed to lease these facilities to outside
corporations, much as it would hurt the road's pride to do so.
The men did not accept the piece-work system. And the general manager of
the big road went from one end to the other of it leasing its shops just
as he said he would do. When he came to the last of them he hesitated. It
was the road's oldest shop. In it there had been made no little railroad
history. Sentiment halted him. He thought of tradition. Remember, if you
will, that there are as many times in railroading where tradition is a
good thing as where it is an exceedingly bad thing.
While he halted a request came to his ear from a personal friend, one of
the oldest mechanics in that ancient shop. His old friend wanted to see
the big boss--he still called him "Billy." He came and brought a friend or
two with him. He wanted to know why the big shop, with its six thousand
workers, had been shut down for so long. The G. M. answered promptly. He
told of his proffered plan for piece-work. The old mechanic made him
repeat his statement.
"We never heard one word of it, Billy," he said.
"Billy" stayed two more days in that town. On the second afternoon he
called a mass-meeting of the shop-workers in the biggest hall in the city.
They came, enough of them at least to fill the place to its very rafters.
He put the piece-work proposition to those men. They ratified it
overwhelmingly. The next day the shop reopened and from that day to this
has been a humming center of revivified railroad industry.
* * * * *
There also is still another side to this vexed shop situation, and it too
is a big side. I should not be fair if I did not give it at least passing
attention.
With their insistence that their shops return to the piece-work
system--and it seems to be a perfectly fair demand--the railroads are
using every endeavor to bring back their shopmen to the high quality of
workmanship that they attained before the days of the World War, and which
has not come back since then--not until very recently at least and under
the spur of widespread unemployment across the land. Yet, our railroads as
a rule--there are a very few exceptions--have been most lax in employing
modern or scientific methods of spurring up the production of their
shopmen, in quality as well as in quantity. A year and a half ago I made
an extensive tour of some of the most forward-looking manufacturing plants
in America and found there for myself many ingenious plans for stimulating
the interest, the enthusiasm, and the productive ability of the men. Shop
committees, education, bonus systems--all these and many other well-tried
devices at work, and successfully at work. I was appalled when mentally I
compared these factory plans with those of the average railroad shop,
which rarely has any at all.
One other thing of even greater importance. In these days no more than
those, there still is no assurance to the shop-worker of continued
employment. The great haunting fear of being "laid off" forever is just
ahead of him.
I recognize clearly the difficulties that would await any systematic
attempt to insure continuous employment to the worker in the railroad or
any other sort of shop. Yet the fact remains that the railroad shops have
not always been as fair as those in outside industries in keeping a
well-filled pay-roll, even in seasons of great depression and stress. That
such a neglect of human obligation reacted against them in the war-time
days is not to be doubted. No really permanent solution of the railroad
shop problem--it would be pathetic to regard the process of leasing out
the shops to outside corporations as any long-time solution--can afford to
ignore this factor.
I have known a railroad under orders from the men away up at the top--the
president or the board of directors--to make sweeping and senseless
reductions in shop and maintenance forces in order to make a quick showing
of apparent savings in operating costs, for financial purposes known best
to those same men, higher up. The futility of such moves needs no
discussion; what is saved to-day on necessary maintenance of rolling-stock
or other physical plant of the railroad must be expended to-morrow, and
generally in larger measure. They would be laughable were it not for one
thing, the human misery that almost invariably follows in their trail. How
very much greater the wisdom that now and then and again tempts a railroad
to use a dull season for the repair or even the reconstruction of its
equipment, for the rebuilding of lines or even the construction of new
trackage!
Therefore I am repeating--and adding--that no permanent solution of our
railroad problem can be reached that ignores the right of the faithful and
loyal employee to continuous service. It may be necessary to cut his wage.
That is a situation that may confront any man in any business or
profession. But save for fair cause he has an inherent right to continuous
employment. This should be put down as a real fundamental of the railroad
industry.
Railroad industry! Railroad tradition! Railroad morale!
Give them a chance. Let us have a scientific way of developing them once
again; let us have a scientific yet a simple and humane way of studying
out these surpassingly great problems of the human factor in our railroad
operation; in the hours and conditions of his working, the cost of his
living, the reckoning of his compensation. To such a problem--a problem
within a problem--we now have arrived. And we shall begin its
consideration.