SOLVING THE RAILROADS' HUMAN PROBLEM
In some of the real wisdom that wrote certain portions of the present
Transportation Act it was decided that the newly created Railroad Labor
Board should be kept entirely separate and distinct from the Interstate
Commerce Commission. The one had neither authority nor jurisdiction over
the other. They were even apart geographically; the one at Chicago, the
other at the national capital. There was a definite and convincing reason
advanced for this segregation. It was argued, with genuine good sense,
that the business of wage-making should be kept entirely separate and
apart from that of rate-making. In other words, wage-making was to be
based upon living-costs--the sort of thing that the Lane Commission tried
to do, even though hurriedly, and that the railroads themselves had failed
to do.
That the Railroad Labor Board, once appointed, took its new task
seriously, I do not for a moment doubt. I think that it tried and still is
trying to solve the entire question in a really scientific and human
fashion. It is a political board, to be sure. It could hardly escape being
a political board. But I believe that it is rather better than the
majority of its kind. It is a common experience here in America that these
newly created boards are likely to rank higher in their personnel at their
outset than after they have become old stories and pliable in the hands of
the professional politicians.
Yet I am not at all sure that the Railroad Labor Board was a necessity,
not at any rate as a permanent organization. We Americans are all too
prone to create boards and commissions for almost every sort of
conceivable situation. We dote upon chairmen and upon directors. We adore
secretaries and under-secretaries and under-secretaries to
under-secretaries and all the rest of it. It is a national weakness, and
an organization like our Railroad Labor Board is after all but a single
expression of that weakness.
Contrast that cumbersome method of ours with one which was adopted in
Great Britain but a year or two ago and which so far has apparently given
absolute satisfaction to both the rail workers and their employers over
there.
Under the wage agreements between the railway workers of the United
Kingdom and their executives the wage-scales have been fixed upon a basis
which permits them to rise or fall as the cost of living rises or falls.
These agreements were signed more than a year ago. The official charts
issued by the British Board of Trade, and held by all save a few of the
most radical of labor leaders to be both accurate and impartial, are taken
as the basis of the railway wage. The charts come as the result of
repeated and regular investigations by the Board of Trade agents into
house-rentals, clothing, foodstuffs, and all the other essential factors
that enter into living costs. Upon them an arbitrary reckoning of 125
points was fixed as the maximum that these should reach after the period
of after-the-war readjustment was fixed.
But despite this fixing of a purely arbitrary figure the cost of living
refused to stay put. It steadily rose until two years after the signing of
the Armistice the Board of Trade figures had reached 169 points. And
British railway wages had risen even more than ours. A station-porter, who
in the pleasant English days before the coming of Armageddon had been
content to receive fifteen shillings a week, found himself in January,
1921, receiving sixty-six, an increase of considerably more than 300 per
cent. To-day he is getting a little less pay. At the time that these
paragraphs were being written the Board of Trade's entirely arbitrary but
very scientific reckoning of living-costs had already dropped to 141
points and was going down further yet. The station-porter's weekly wage
had dropped three shillings, and Sir Eric Geddes, the British minister of
transport, was beginning to predict that a continuation of this lowering
of wage-costs would be reflected in the not distant future in lowered
passenger-fares and freight-rates.
For definitely it is fixed that for each five points that the Board of
Trade's cost of living report drops or rises the railway employees' wages
shall drop or rise a shilling a week. But they shall never drop to the
depths of the former pay-envelope; minima have been fixed ranging all the
way from 200 per cent. of the pre-war wages upward. In the case of our
station-porter the minimum of the future is to be forty shillings a week,
which is considerably better than fifteen. Yet fifteen was in truth an
outrageously low figure, even eight or ten years ago. British railway
wages were then decidedly too low. Now they are nearer a fair figure, and
so are likely to remain.
Why the American railroad wage could not have been fixed upon some basis
as this is difficult to understand. The fairest, the broadest-minded, the
most human of our railroad executives across the land say that 90 per
cent. of their difficulties with their men would be wiped out entirely if
only they could have direct dealings with them. Witness the example which
I showed in the preceding chapter; the big and representative road which
sought to install a piece-work scheme and, working through the leaders of
the shop-crafts unions, found that its actual shopmen had not been
consulted at all in the entire transaction.
The Pennsylvania railroad has fought desperately for the privilege of
direct dealings with its employees. Three years ago its operating
vice-president, General W. W. Atterbury, upon his return from France where
he had had charge of the movement of our American troops and munitions,
went on record as saying that the time had come for the rank and file of
our railroaders to have a distinct voice in the operation of the
properties. This does not mean in this instance that the Pennsylvania
would become enthusiastic over the admission of direct labor
representatives to its board of directors; such a genuinely progressive
step still is quite beyond its imagination. But it has sought--and, I
believe, honestly sought--to establish some sort of direct relationship
between the great body of its workers and its executive officers.
In accordance with such a plan the Pennsylvania started more than a year
ago toward the election of employee representatives from its various
shops. It turned its back upon the national officers of the shop-crafts
union and said frankly that it preferred to deal separately with its
various shops and their men as distinct and separate entities. One of the
sharpest quarrels that the railroad managements have had with the national
agreements has arisen from the fact that these contracts take no pay-roll
cognizance of whether a worker is living in a big city, such as
Philadelphia, or a very small one, such as Bradford--either Pennsylvania
or Ohio. Under the national agreements the Southern Pacific would have to
give the same pay to a station-agent at Orange, California (which is
almost heaven), as to the agent at Winnemucca, in the Nevada desert (which
is something less than heaven). In other days the Winnemucca man was given
what corresponded to a bonus salary, in order to compensate him in part
for the bleakness of his surroundings. Under the national agreements it
was a little difficult to get a good man to go to Winnemucca--to put the
matter mildly.
The Pennsylvania in accordance with its expressed home-rule principle held
that the employees elected as shop-craft representatives must be bona fide
workers upon the pay-rolls of the Pennsylvania railroad. The shop-crafts
union leaders claimed the right to have the names of the local
organization officers appear upon the ballots. The national headquarters
of the shop-crafts union also made loud protest. It appealed to the
Railroad Labor Board, which deliberated ponderously upon the crisis and
then ordered the Pennsylvania to proceed toward a new election, this time
along national and not along individual shop lines.
The Pennsylvania protested against the Labor Board's ruling. Its protest
was not heeded. The board after a rehearsing stood by its decision. Then
the Pennsylvania appealed to the courts, where the entire matter is at
present ensnarled. The railroad is loud in its protestations that it is
not attacking the Railroad Labor Board as an organization; that it merely
is seeking to keep it within the bounds laid down by the intent and
purpose of the remarkable Transportation Act, which, in the long run, may
come merely to a fine use of words.
The other railroads have not as a rule joined with the Pennsylvania in
this protest. On the contrary they have proceeded rather rapidly in
conforming to the Labor Board scheme, by joining in groups to set up local
courts of arbitration with their men in various large centers of the land.
Is this because they have loved the Labor Board idea? I hardly think so. I
think that the real reason is because they have realized that in the
difficult hour of transition from governmental to private operation--and,
consequently the almost inevitable lowering of wages--the Railroad Labor
Board, and the Railroad Labor Board almost alone, stood between the nation
and a general and calamitous strike of transportation workers. This of
course was before the coming of the industrial slump and the release of
several million workers into the labor market. It was a real factor in
helping to prevent the strike in October, 1921, which so many of the
railroad executives really wanted and which the railroad workers, knowing
from the outset that they would be beaten, did not want.
For these things alone the Railroad Labor Board probably has been worth
all this cost--and the cost has not been small. Yet that there could not
be a more direct pathway to them than the creation of a brand-new
expensive political commission I shall always deny. I have shown the
direct short cut that Great Britain took in railway wage adjustment. Is
it inconceivable that the United States might not occasionally take a
short cut of her own in these labor situations? Was the creation of
another political board an absolute necessity?
These are political questions, not primarily those of transport, and
therefore I shall not answer them here further than to suggest that if the
Railroad Labor Board makes at least one thorough, scientific, and
impartial study of living-costs in this country--in big towns as well as
in small, in North, in South, in East, in West--it may perhaps justify its
existence and pave the way toward the adoption of some such simple method
as we saw adopted overseas more than a year ago.
It is however a transportation question to know what the railroads
themselves purpose to do about bettering the situation between the workers
and themselves. We have hinted at the expressed intentions of a high
officer of the Pennsylvania. So far so good; but not very far. If the
foolish national agreements are to be completely abrogated--and apparently
they are to be--what improvement in the relationship between the carrier
and its employees is to be substituted for them? We have seen the move
toward the establishment of local boards of arbitration by individual
groups of the carriers. So far so good again; but again, not so very far.
The per-hour wage has frequently been set down as the gold standard of
railroad pay. Yet to-day in the eyes of the operating heads, at least, it
is no standard whatsoever, save in shop-work where they reckon it as but a
very base alloy and where they would regard piece-work as platinum--set
with diamonds, at that. All of which of course is from the point of view
of the executives, and not at all from that of their workers.
But what are the railroads going to do about the recognition of real merit
and real industry in the individual worker? I do not mean the brilliant
fellow who forces his way to the top. Frequently it is the plodder, the
man unseen, unknown, who is the most valuable human cog of the transport
machine. Will the railroad, huge machine that it is, find him out and
give his loyalty, his industry, his energy--in many cases, his initiative
too--the recognition that they demand? Can it do this even if it will? I
have known many a railroad manager to complain to me that the reason he
could not gain a greater efficiency out of his workers was because of the
very scattered and attenuated location of his job. Real supervision, like
that of a factory or a large office, was out of the question. Men might
and did loaf on their jobs. Conversely it is of course equally difficult
to discover real merit along the line, particularly the modest and
conservative type of merit.
What too is the railroad going to do about adjusting hours of labor for
its workers so that, whenever it is possible, the worker shall sleep at
home? We have seen already in the pages of this book how often this is not
possible for the employees engaged in the operation of the trains. In a
little while we shall come to the vast possibilities of the use of the
gasolene-motor unit in local passenger transportation upon our standard
railroads, and I shall be urging as a corollary to its introduction a much
increased service as well. It ought, by a little skillful planning, to be
possible to use the eight hours of a railroader's time to extremely good
advantage, both to himself and to his employer, by an ingenious
dovetailing of runs. Up this line, across that, back on a third--the
possibilities are as infinite and as fascinating as those of a game of
chess, and all giving the maximum of eight hours' service to the railroad,
as well as the square deal to its worker. Could more be asked?
And then, for a final question, what is our American railroad going to do
about the assurance of continuous employment to its workers? We have
touched upon this question already. It is a particularly serious one, not
alone in shop-work but in every other department of the railroad. The fear
of losing one's job becomes at all times a decided factor both in the
statistics of labor turnover and in the individual morale of the worker.
In a single instance of a typical large trunk-line railroad a total force
of 80,895 workers in June, 1920, had been reduced by June, 1921, to but
56,091 and has been dropping ever since, which means quite naturally that
the men who remain are spurred to the best of endeavors. The road tested
this the other day. It asked all of its employees to go out in their spare
hours and see if they could solicit some freight for it. In ninety days
these men, entirely apart from the regular solicitation forces of the
line, had brought in more than 1400 car-loads of freight which otherwise
would have gone to its competitors. A good percentage showing was made by
the mechanics and other workers of one of its smaller shops. Yet in the
early part of 1920 the men at this shop had all gone out on strike because
a train accident had delayed the arrival of their pay-envelopes for two
brief hours!
Here then is morale brought back in a perfectly human fashion, yet I doubt
if in a good one. In the long run fear cannot make loyalty or initiative
or ambition. The day will come when abounding prosperity will return to
the carriers, when the labor markets across the land will be empty of
possible material. Then labor may remember. Memory is quite as human a
trait as fear. And the pendulum will be set high again at the workers' end
of its arc.
I feel that we shall be compelled to find far better ways of bringing
loyalty and initiative and ambition into the hearts of our workers of
to-morrow--the other qualities that go into the making of that highly
modern term "morale"--and so bring back a genuine revival of our American
railroad tradition. We shall start of course with a good wage. We already
have that. The average annual wage of the American railroader is now $1700
for eight hours of daily work. In 1913 he worked ten hours a day and
received but $761 on an average. His hourly wage is now about 150 per
cent. more than it was eight years ago.
Remember all the while, if you will, that I am not urging that the
railroader is overpaid to-day. I do not believe that upon the average he
is any more than well paid--in all cases not even that. And I do believe
that these entire pay arrangements are still far from being upon an
entirely just and equitable basis; the conditions of his working
arrangements, so very vital to the return of our American railroad morale
and tradition, are still in the infancy of a really scientific and human
adjustment. Here again the situation is open to further explanation.
There are, roughly speaking, three classes of railroad employees. The
railroad president and the small group of high-priced executives closely
about him constitute the first of these classes. This is small in number.
It contrasts with the two millions and a half of the rank and file of
railroad employees in the United States.
Here then are the right and the left wings of our railroading. Between
them is a third class, not often in the public eye, but in many ways the
keystone of the arch of operation. This third class, not large in numbers,
consists of the minor officers of the various active departments of the
railroad. It is an immensely valuable factor in successful operation; in
fact the great driving force behind it. Yet its position is not a happy
one. At all times it is a buffer; it is caught between the upper and the
lower stones of a mill which attempts to grind finely. From below comes
the natural and unending pressure to increase expenses; from the high
executive offices above comes another, to hold down expenditure. From
somewhere between these grindings the division superintendent or engineer
or mechanical superintendent must produce results. Of necessity, his is a
driving job.
Ofttimes it has been a thankless job as well. For there has been little
outside protection for this valuable central class of railroad labor.
Numerically it is not large enough nor important enough to command the
favor of influential politicians. As we have just seen, the rank and file
does. This is at least well paid. And as the railroad man at the bottom
has received attention, so has the railroader at the top. The executives
have always succeeded in taking good care of themselves. They know that
the large financiers and banks and other institutions which to-day are the
heavy stockholders of our railroads are utterly dependent upon them.
Without them their securities would fall even flatter than already they
have fallen, which means that the railroad president and his important
vice-presidents can command salaries that are at least commensurate with
those paid in other industries. Their worries are those that come from
their responsibilities, not from their pocketbooks.
But the middle class of the railroad personnel--like the middle class of
the world outside--is caught to-day, not only with responsibility for its
job, but with a deal of worry too for its wallet. Salaries between the
upper and lowest classes of railroad workers take a fearful fall. In
theory they should form a gentle curve, a sloping sort of descent. In
practice, too, they should curve. In truth they do not. They drop. I have
known of repeated cases where the superintendents of railroad divisions--a
railroad superintendent is supposedly the prince of a transportation
principality--have actually received less than some of the
locomotive-engineers who are working for them. In any such scheme of
affairs the incentive or desire for promotion cannot be very great.
As a matter of fact very much of that desire or opportunity for promotion
passed away long ago, which is one of the significant reasons for the sad
decline of our American railroad tradition, and which is also one of the
most alarming symptoms of the serious illness of our sick man of American
business. He is making no provision for the future--in this serious
necessity of providing good new railroading blood for oncoming years.
There should be fresh generations of material for future railroad
executives tramping forward, and there are none.
"Over-regulation," says one transportation executive at once, and leaves
us in the belief that here is the sole cause of this sad deficiency.
He is right--partly right. For more than twenty years the railroad
business in the United States has been under constant attack--rightly or
wrongly, and generally both. A business under constant attack is not one
that makes a large appeal to a young man just seeking about for a future
career. One of the very ablest of our railroaders, Daniel Willard,
president of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, recently went on record as
saying that at the present time he could not recommend the business in
which he has spent a lifetime as a proper opening for his son.
Add to these things the fact that the business itself has taken very
little thought as to the morrow in this vital question of renewing
personnel--has not only failed to establish courses in various phases of
railroading in the technical schools across the land, or made any
concerted effort to bring the best of their graduates to their ranks, but
for years has ridiculed and humiliated these highly trained young men when
they have sought to enter its doors--and one may easily perceive why the
best of our young men in recent years have not gone into railroading. The
automobile industry, mining, electrical work, manufacturing of nearly
every sort, the professions, even retailing, have called to them, and not
in vain. Each has received its fair proportion of them. But railroading
has been left aside.
Here is a most serious phase of our railroad debacle. It is not one that
can be quickly mended. Take the nearest "Who's Who" and note the birth
dates of the railroad men that you find there. With a few exceptions they
are not young men. They are getting on in years, while those who know them
personally know that their tremendously increased anxieties and
responsibilities have grayed them even beyond their years.
A young man whose heart and soul alike thirsted for a better knowledge of
the rail transport business recently asked a veteran railroader of my
acquaintance how he could get into it. He had been offered a job in the
local interchange yard, firing a switch-engine. That job had a good deal
of appeal to him. He was perfectly willing to don overalls and get down
to hard manual work with a shovel. But the old railroader shook his head.
"No, no, Harry, that is not the way that it is being done nowadays," said
he. "Let me advise you."
Then he explained. Harry might and probably would develop into a good
fireman, like President W----. Eventually he would probably have a fine
passenger run and get as much money perhaps as his division
superintendent, probably more than his trainmaster or his road foreman of
engines. But that would end it. He would be a working man, albeit a
well-paid working man, but nothing else--never an officer. The new caste
in our railroading would hold him tightly down. Far better that he should
pocket his pride as a graduate of a pretty good Eastern university and
become an office-boy in some railroad office and study all the phases of
the business at every opportunity that presented itself. There was chance
there of his getting ahead in railroading, perhaps to the very head of it.
The taint or stigma of unionism would not be upon his shoulder to draw him
down in the estimation of the big men who won and control our carriers.
That was frank talk, but accurate. At last we _have_ achieved an
industrial caste. The barrier is there. The railroads suffer from it
greatly, but the men who to-day control them are not going to remove it.
Here and there across the face of the land you will find a few minute
exceptions, a trainmaster here, a master mechanic there, perhaps all the
way across the land as many as ten or a dozen superintendents who have
risen from the brotherhoods. But in our big national organization these
few are as nothing. The barrier is being well maintained. And as long as
our railroads are owned and operated as at present, it is likely to stay
put.
Granted then that this great wall is to be kept, and assuming that the
railroads can tide over their present personal deficiencies, how can this
distressing situation be avoided in the future? Easily enough. It comes
down in final analysis to a wage question. Our railroads can and should
establish courses in the various phases of their business in many of the
large colleges and training-schools across the land; they should have
methods of systematically scanning the output of these schools and of
securing for themselves at least their fair share of it for proper
training toward executive possibilities. Other industries in America long
since have shown the possibilities of such methods. Yet even such a
program will fail if the salary inducement is not made both fair and
attractive. I spoke but a moment ago of the lack of curvature, the
tendency toward right-angledness of the salary line between the top class
of railroad personnel and the bottom. It too has arisen in other
businesses, and they have had to solve it. Here is one case in particular.
It is a nation-wide utility company, not transportation, but in a large
sense akin to it. It divides itself between the Atlantic and Pacific into
various subsidiary companies, each fairly autonomous. These companies,
working in cooperation, have evolved a salary plan that is attractive to
their personnel. The company heads each receive as an average from $35,000
to $40,000 a year. Immediately beneath them are their vice-presidents,
three or four at from $20,000 to $25,000; beneath these in turn a group of
ten to a dozen sub-executives at $15,000 to $18,000, and then a large
group (thirty-five or forty men) at from $10,000 to $12,500 annually. The
curve irons out to a comfortable rotundity. The salary appeal stands
strongly; the opportunity of getting into that third sizable executive
group of good wage standard is large enough to bring young men out of
college to these companies in a larger number than they can accept, which
gives them a most excellent opportunity to pick and choose.
A plan such as this would be easily applicable to almost any one of our
American railroads of to-day, which almost invariably are under-staffed
rather than over-staffed. And the first objection to it, the cost, is
discounted by the fact that even to a comparatively small line it would
not add more than 5 or 6 per cent, to the pay-roll--perhaps not more than
a fraction of 1 per cent, to the total operating cost. The utility company
which I have just quoted boasts that it could cut its entire pay-roll down
to a maximum of $5000 a year for all of its officers and still reduce its
total pay-roll cost less than a mere 1 per cent., which speaks volumes for
the even distribution of its official salaries.
Given a broad-minded fairly planned salary scheme such as this--and having
provided always that the scheme was well advertised--and the average
railroad ought to begin to pull itself through on this difficult question
of supplying a fresh quantity of proper officer personnel for itself. To
this might well be added, as has already been suggested, a systematic plan
for teaching the various phases of transport in many of our schools and
colleges and then closely scanning the output of these classes for future
executive material. That such a plan would work and would be worth far
more than its comparatively modest cost, is the opinion of far-seeing men
within the railroad industry as well as outside of it. That more attention
is needed to this vital phase of our transport problem is clearly
indicated by the action of the Pennsylvania railroad immediately after
coming out from government control, in appointing a high personnel officer
with a title and prestige none the less than vice-president.
The problem of personnel and its continuous and permanent supply, long
since recognized by other of our industries than that of railroading by
the appointment of well-paid specialists with staffs trained to handle it
at best efficiency, is not in itself a particularly perplexing one. A fair
degree of study and thought will solve it almost invariably. One reason
perhaps that so many of our railroads have not met it properly up to the
present moment is because only yesterday it became apparent as a really
vital matter, not merely to their success, but to their very continuance.
It was but yesterday that trades-unionism became a dominating and fairly
autocratic force in their operation, that the traditional stairways of
progress from the engine-cab or the caboose or the little yellow depot
became so firmly closed and abandoned, and that the railroads were really
forced to look out into the broad world beyond for future personnel.
* * * * *
Our railroaders as a rule have not lacked technical ability. They have not
lacked honesty. They are not lacking in these qualities to-day. Taken man
for man I doubt if their high average for both of them could be exceeded
by any other American industry or profession, or even equaled throughout
the rest of the civilized world. That many of them have lacked both vision
and imagination, I am going to contend at other times. For the present it
is enough to say that theirs is indeed a difficult job, that, leaving
aside the question of securing future executives, the task of the existing
ones is very far from a sinecure. The relationship of the human factors in
the operating phases alone of our railroads, from the top executives down
through the mid-executives to the rank and file, is this very day and
minute one of the vastly serious phases of our whole railroad muddle. For
just as the problem of new personnel is to an extent a future one, so is
the deplorable loss of the old tradition to an extent a past one. There is
not much use in crying over spilled milk. The thing to do is to find just
what can be saved from the spilling.
Jinks who reads this, and in his more serious moments conducts a
cotton-factory, and Blinks, who has the biggest retailing business in his
town, may both laugh at the thought that their railroading may be a
supremely difficult business. Each of them _knows_ that _his_ is the most
difficult business in all the world and has a thousand convincing ways of
proving it. But Jinks may summon all his operatives into a hall at five
minutes' notice--he has them all at work inside of a brick wall--and put
the fear of the Lord (and of their boss) into their hearts in another
five. While Blinks, as a matter of principle, reads the riot act to his
clerks every morning as soon as he has unlocked the doors of the store.
A railroad's employees may be outstretched a thousand miles or more.
Remember again that the railroad itself is in truth a narrow ribbon,
ofttimes no wider than the right-of-way of a single track, far-reaching
and tremendously attenuated. A thousand employees here, and then twenty,
thirty, forty miles to the next group of more than a dozen! What a small
opportunity for any sort of close superintendency or inspection! How hard
the problem of attaining a real morale! With the irregular demands of
energy that a railroad makes upon a man's time--two trains perhaps within
the hour, and then perhaps not another for three or four--it can rarely
utilize a man's eight hours at best advantage. While if an employee is at
all inclined to idle upon the job how rare the opportunities for
loafing--or if not for actual loafing, the failure to work in his allotted
hour to the top notch of his ability! These opportunities exist, and
unless Mr. Ford's plan should become a howling success, must continue to
exist, in a tremendous variety.
Our station-agent no longer has to work twelve hours a day. Under
government control his hours began to approach those of an easy-going
banker. He ceased to worry about the prospective passenger who may be
thinking of going to California and who by proper persuasion may be
induced to go by the S. A.'s line. All of which is another of the many
evidences of the decline of our fine old-time railroad tradition.
Not that any fair-minded man would wish a return to the outrageously long
hours, low pay, and difficult working conditions of say twenty years ago
that it tolerated and condoned. But there ought to have been a happy
medium between those conditions and the ones of to-day. It should not have
been so very difficult after all to figure out a fair compensation and
fair hours and keep a reasonable amount of affection and loyalty in the
heart and mind of the employee for the property that he serves. Without
these perfectly human qualities working for it within its personnel no
railroad, limited as we have just seen by overwhelmingly difficult
conditions of superintendency and inspection, can operate at anything
like efficiency. It suffers and suffers greatly. And its patrons suffer in
consequence.
For here again, Blinks and Jinks, does the railroad business differ from
yours. If you cannot inspire your workers to affection and loyalty, and
through these to efficiency, you fail. Your factory or your store closes.
But the community that you served may not suffer greatly--not for any
length of time. It readjusts itself; it buys its cotton at another mill,
its dress-shirts at the store across the street.
But if your railroad should shut down, unless it should happen to be a
sort of fifth wheel in an unusually competitive territory, the whole
community would suffer tremendously, immediately and permanently, while
any perceptible lowering of the quality of its railroad service brings
instant trouble and discomfort to it. When, as a war measure, the old-time
station-agent, reared in loyalty and tradition to render a real service to
his public, became even for a time the government bureaucrat, the
traveling public quickly realized the difference. And no other one thing
perhaps has done more to render the phrase "government railroad" more
obnoxious to the average American to-day than the conduct toward them of
many railroad employees during the twenty-six months of Federal control.
That the men in control of the Railroad Administration took steps,
well-planned but fairly impotent, to bring about better politeness and
courtesy among the railroad servants is not to be denied. But the problem
was quite beyond them, the distances between the administration offices at
Washington and the men themselves much too far to be efficiently
traversed. Letters and bulletins urging courtesy were puerile. The
railroad rank and file laughed at them. Why courtesy? They were autocrats.
Did not the first director-general himself proclaim that in the earliest
days of his regency at Pueblo and again at El Paso? After such
proclamation these courtesy bulletins were to be regarded as just so much
waste paper.
Blinks and Jinks both know that in their business courtesy comes through
contact. Blinks in his big retail store knows that courtesy is one of the
invaluable and irreplaceable assets of his business. So he not only
preaches it but inspires it through contact, through knowing his
sales-people as well as the rest of his working force personally, and
through trying to help them work out the many little problems that perplex
their lives. Comparatively few--a mere nothing--of Jinks's employees ever
come in personal contact with his customers. Yet he too has found long
since that courtesy pays dividends, plain dollars-and-cents dividends. And
so he too is preaching it, has well-salaried experts, under the title of
social workers, who give their days toward bettering the lot of his
factory family, with the courtesy idea well in the forefront of their
endeavors. Through personal contact the thing is accomplished, and with it
enthusiasm and efficiency--all together the sort of thing that we have
learned to call morale.
That this morale, the old-fashioned tradition of American railroading, can
be returned to us I do not doubt. It cannot be easily accomplished. It
will require a deal of study, and the exercise of great tact and
diplomacy. It will have to be preceded by an end of union-baiting and of
the more subtle but nevertheless bitter attacks upon government regulatory
bodies. That there will have to be less governmental regulation or else
the private operation of our railroads will collapse, is the handwriting
that already is written upon the wall. That a lessening of such regulation
will of itself bring the best blood of the land once again to American
railroading or a better spirit of loyalty and energy and initiative to the
present personnel, I do not for one minute believe. If that were so, the
solution of our vexing problem would be easy. We simply would have to put
the hands of the clock backward again, return to 1887 or thereabouts, and,
presto! our troubles would be over.
Unfortunately no such quick cure awaits the sick man of American business.
The restoration of his health, putting him soundly upon his feet once
again, requires a great deal of study and of thought. Already I have
hinted at two possible embrocations in this very sore spot of his labor
relationships--the readjustment of wages (it is hardly going to be
possible to lower them far again unless possibly under some adaptation of
the very sane British method which we have just seen) and the beginning of
an organized movement to recruit and direct the best of our young men into
a business which normally should have great fascination for them. There is
another ointment which I have saved for the last.
Cooeperation beats regulation. It always has and it always will. Already we
have quoted Vice-President Atterbury of the Pennsylvania as saying that in
the future the employees should have direct representation in the
management of the carriers. That is one of the few 100-per-cent.-right
statements. Carried to the final degree of actuality it would mean
employee representation upon a railroad's directorate. That such a
representation would be a benefit to labor I shall not deny. But I am
thinking of quite another thing, of the vast benefit that it would be to
the railroad itself. There is the real kernel of the nut.
Some day we shall progress to the point where the directorates of our
railroads will be very real directorates indeed, not groups of busy and
harried bankers dropping in once a week for an hour or two for their
twenty-dollar gold-pieces. The farce that such a representation is
necessary to a proper protection of the underwritings will then be
completely exploded. Possibly the most successful single private business
in America, Standard Oil, is to-day operated upon the continuous
directorate principle. Its directors give their entire time to the company
upon whose board they sit. They are paid generous salaries for their
entire time. They are experts in the refining and the selling of oil. And
the board which sits each business day at eleven fritters away no time
whatsoever in listening to the fads and whimsicalities of inexpert
representation.
Some day some one of our railroads may have the vision and the enterprise
to adapt that plan to itself. If so it does it will at one time have
solved many of the most vexatious present-time problems of its operation.
The curse of absentee landlordism will then disappear almost
automatically. And if that railroad has the future vision and enterprise,
and the courage, to place at least one or two genuine labor
representatives upon its board, 99 per cent. of its labor troubles will
also disappear, also automatically. Already it has been suggested that
future railroad legislation insist that such representation be made. I
should hate to see such a step taken, by law. It would be worthless. It
would be merely multiplying the evil of over-regulation from which our
roads already are suffering. But I should dearly love to see the step
taken in the only way it should be taken--from the heart of an American
railroad itself, as a matter of good sentiment, good tradition, good
business sense. Then and then only would it bring its great reward--a
revival of loyalty, energy, ambition--the reincarnation of the spirit of
our fine American railroader of yesterday.