ORGANIZED LABOR--THE CONDUCTOR
Here is another of the well-organized and protected forms of the
railroad's labor--the conductor. He will tell you that a goodly measure of
responsibility rests upon his own broad shoulders. Yet your veteran
railroad executive does not regard his conductor so much as a
responsibility man as a diplomat. This last, after all, is his chief rôle.
You gather your brow. You do not understand.
"I thought," you begin slowly, for you have made some sort of a study of
this big game of railroading, "I thought that the traveling freight and
passenger agents, all that solicitous company which travels through the
highways and byways of the land, the big towns and the small, seeking out
traffic, for the railroad, were regarded as its diplomats."
You are partly right--partly wrong.
For the real diplomat of the railroad is multiplied in its service, far
more than the freight or the passenger agents. The humblest and the rarest
of passengers do not fail to see him. The man who rides on the railroad
train for the first time in his life comes into almost instant touch with
him. You yourself have seen him many times making his way down the aisle
of the car; stopping patiently beside each of his passengers--we use the
phrase "his passengers" advisedly--greeting old friends with cheery nods;
upholding the dignity of the railroad and his own authority--quietly, but
none the less surely--time and time again. Here, as we shall come in a
moment to understand, is a real diplomat of the railroad--an autocrat of
no small authority in those rare instances where he may fail to be a
gentleman. And all this stands to the infinite credit of more than 60,000
conductors in the railroad service across the land.
We have just called him an autocrat. Remember, however, that for the safe
movement of his train up and down the railroad's busy lines he shares, in
an important degree, the responsibility with the man with whom we have
just ridden in the engine cab; but the engineer cannot very well make or
lose business for his railroad unless he stops his train too sharply and
too many times. The conductor--well, we are going to see him in his rôle
of peacemaker plenipotentiary to the public. It, of itself, is a rôle
where he can be and is of infinite value to the railroad.
* * * * *
Do you chance to recall the conductor of yesteryear--conceding no more
than his blue cap to the growing use of uniforms in a republican country;
somewhat unkempt perhaps as to clothes--yet benevolent and fatherly in his
way? Did that sickly-looking woman at the end of the coach fumble and then
attempt a feeble and impotent smile when he asked her for her ticket? And
did he, with a sublime myopia, pass her by without demanding that bit of
pasteboard? Your old-time conductor knew the difference between
impostors--even in skirts--and empty-pocketed folks to whom a railroad
journey might be a tragic necessity. A few years up and down the line, the
constant study of the folk within his cars quickly taught him that. And it
would have been a pretty poor sort of old-fashioned railroad that would
not have allowed him discretion in such cases.
Your new-time railroad allows him little or no discretion in matters of
this sort. Your conductor of today, finally quite at ease in the trimness
of his well-set uniform, his arm-lantern gone into the scrap heap in these
days of electric-lighted cars, on most railroads has practically no
opportunity to use his judgment in matters that pertain to the fares. If
he lets anyone ride free on his train--and the boss learns of it--he hears
dire threats about the Interstate Commerce Commission, sees the yawning
doors of the penitentiary close at hand.
Railroad managements have a way of using that law for the punishment of
dishonest employees. So your conductor of today lacks the power of his
brethren of an earlier day. They worked in a generation when the railroad
still was a personal thing. Men and families owned railroads as they might
own farms or banks or grocery stores. They headed their own roads and they
assumed an attitude toward their men, autocratic or benevolent as the case
might be, but almost always distinctly personal. The railroad as a
separate unit had not then grown beyond a point where that was possible
and the big boss was a real factor in the lives of his men. They might
come to have a real affection for him--such as they had for Lucius Tuttle,
when he was president of the Boston and Maine--and call him by his first
name. No higher compliment can come up from the ranks to a railroad
executive.
Today discretion is discrimination in far too many cases. So reads the
Interstate Commerce Law about discrimination. It places discrimination in
the same class with burglary and the shippers who had dealings with many
of our railroads a quarter of a century ago are thanking all the political
gods of the United States of America that this law was placed upon the
statute-books; but it can be read too literally, just as the conductor of
a modern train can be too sharp-sighted. Here is a case, which from too
fine or technical a reading of the law might be read into discrimination;
in reality it was an instance of real discretion on the part of the
conductor.
A man--a nervous, tired man--was bound east through the state of New York
upon the Lake Shore Limited. His destination was Kingston, which is
situate upon the west bank of the Hudson River, almost half way between
New York and Albany. The route of the Lake Shore Limited is down the east
shore of the river, without a stop between Albany and New York. Anyone who
knows the Hudson Valley well knows how atrocious are the facilities for
crossing the river at almost any point between those two cities. This
tired, nervous man planned to catch the last train of the afternoon down
the West Shore Railroad from Albany to Kingston. Under normal conditions
he had about thirty minutes' leeway in which to make the change; but on
this occasion the Lake Shore Limited was a little more than thirty minutes
late and he did not alight at Albany--he had no wish to hang around there
until some time in the early morning. He decided that he would go through
to New York, cross the city from the Grand Central Station to Weehawken
and then go through to Kingston on a night train. This meant 180 extra
miles of travel; but the man was in a very great hurry and with him time
counted more than miles.
As his train swept across the bridge and out of Albany the conductor came
through. He was a round, genial-faced fellow, typical of that other
generation of train captains that one often finds upon the older railroads
of the land; and the man from Kingston halted him--told his story very
much as we have told it here.
"I didn't know but that, if you were going to stop for water at
Poughkeepsie, I might slip off some way," he finally ventured. "That would
leave me less than twenty miles from home."
The conductor did not hesitate.
"We don't stop at Poughkeepsie--for water or anything else," he said. "But
I'll stop at Rhinecliff for you."
Rhinecliff is on the east bank of the Hudson, directly opposite Kingston.
That seemed too good to be true--and the man stammered out his thanks.
"I didn't think you'd stop this crack train for anybody," he said quite
frankly. "The time card doesn't--"
"This train stops for the proper accommodation of the patrons of this
road," interrupted the conductor, "and I'm its high judge. You lost out on
your connection at Albany through no fault of yours. It was our fault and
we are doing our best to make it up to you."
Consider the value of such a man to the organization which employs him.
That little act was worth more to the big railroad whose uniform he bore
than a ton of advertising tracts or a month's service of its corps of
soliciting agents. The Kingston man crossed the river from Rhinecliff in a
motor boat and thanked the road and its conductor for the service it had
rendered him. He was a large shipper and his factory in the western part
of the state is in a hotly competitive territory; but the road that
through the good sense of its employee had saved him much valuable time
today hardly knows a competitor in his shipping room.
Discrimination? Your attorney, skilled in the fine workings of the
Interstate Commerce Law, may tell you "Yes," but we are inclined to think
he is wrong, for the man was not permitted to alight at Rhinecliff because
he was anything more than a patron of the road. He had no political or
newspaper affiliations to parade before the conductor; he did not hint at
his strength as a shipper, he did not even give his name. If there is
discrimination in that, I fail to see it.
A certain man took a trip from New York to Chicago three or four years
ago. He went on a famous road, well conducted, and he returned on its
equally famous competitor. Each road had just conquered a mighty river by
boring an electrically operated tunnel underneath it. The tunnel had been
well advertised and the man, whose mind had a mechanical turn, was anxious
to see both of them. In each case the train bore a wide-vestibuled day
coach as its last car.
In the first tunnel through which he passed he went to the rear of the day
coach with the intention of taking a look at the under-river bore. He
wanted to stand at the rear of the aisle and look through the door at the
electrically lighted tube. But the conductor anticipated him. He drew down
the sash curtain of the car door.
"Sorry," he said, "but the company's rules prohibit passengers from
standing in the aisles."
One might write a whole chapter on the thoroughly asinine rules that some
roads have made for the guidance not only of their employees but of their
patrons as well. But this man did not argue. He bowed dutifully to the
strong arm of the rule book and went back to his seat--thoroughly cowed.
But how different was the case on the other railroad, by which he returned
from Chicago! This second time he went to the rear of the train, recalling
his first experience and the rebuff he had received. But this road and its
conductor were of a different sort. This second conductor was fastening
the outside doors of the vestibule at the rear of the last car and saying
to the little group assembled there:
"If you will wait a minute I will give you a chance to get out on this
rear platform and see the big job we've been working on so long. We all of
us are mighty proud of it."
How much of an asset do you suppose this conductor was to his company?
By this time the new-fangled railroad executive who reads this will be
filled with disgust.
"Doesn't he know," I can hear him say, "that railroading has taken some
pretty big strides within the past fifteen or twenty years? We're
perfecting; we're systematizing. We've studied the motions of the
bricklayer and we're dabbling in efficiency. We've modeled our railroads
after the best of the standing armies of Europe and we've begun to move
men like units. That means that we've no room in railroad ranks for
individualists. An individualist never makes an ideal unit and the new
efficiency demands units--not thinkers!"
Does it? In the minds of a good many railroaders of the newer schools it
seems to. Yet some of these very same railroaders were overjoyed a little
time ago--when the half-baked Adamson eight-hour law was being jammed
through Congress--to see out from the Middle West, from the rails of the
Santa Fé, the Union Pacific, the Milwaukee roads, veteran conductors
coming forward, who not only did not hesitate to speak their minds against
the measure, but actually sought out injunctions against it. What it might
cost these men in prestige and in the affection of their fellows, in
possible punishments by the lodges of their brotherhoods, the outside
public may never know. It can be fairly assured that the price was no
small one.
Would the railroad executives of the Middle West have preferred that these
men be units, rather than individualists? I think not. The truth of the
matter is, that in its very desire to stand straight, the new school of
railroading sometimes leans backward. We will grant that in the coming of
the great combinations of new-time railroads it was a mighty good step to
eliminate the haphazard, wasteful, inefficient old school of personal
railroading. Consolidation has effected some wonderful working advantages
in the operation of our giant systems, and it is a grave question whether
today, with the margin between income and operating cost constantly
narrowing, if the eggs were unscrambled and the famous little old roads
returned, they could be operated long and dodge the scrawny fingers of
receivership. Yet it is a fact that if they have gained in many ways by
consolidation and centralization, they have lost something definite in the
personal feeling which used to exist between their men and themselves. It
was an asset that could hardly be expressed in dollars and cents.
After the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad had absorbed the
famous Old Colony--down there in the southeastern corner of
Massachusetts--it was five years before its conductors ceased to know it
and to love it as the Old Colony. To older conductors the Panhandle and
the Lake Shore are still as real and as vital as if those beloved names
still appeared upon the rolling stock. Measure such an asset in dollars
and cents if you can! You cannot, thank God, place a valuation upon such
assets as affection and loyalty.
So to your first qualities of dignity and authority and discretion--in
these days we dare not call it discrimination--supplement those of
affection and of loyalty. And to these add that of ability; for a
conductor's entire work is not merely collecting his tickets and keeping
the passengers of his train in good humor--though sometimes this last is a
man's job by itself. He must bear in mind that Bible of the railroad--the
time card--the place his train takes upon it; its relation to every other
train, regular and special, on the line. His mind must be--every minute
that he is on the road--a replica of the dispatcher's, working in perfect
synchronism with that of the controlling head who bends over the train
sheet back at headquarters. This work, comparatively simple on a
double-track line, becomes, in many instances, tremendously complicated
upon the many miles of single-track railroads that still bear a heavy
traffic up and down and across America.
The "opposing trains" to be met and passed; the slower trains moving in
the same direction to be overtaken and also passed; the complications of
special movements--all these must be borne in accurate correlation as the
conductor passes up or down the line. He may have extra cars to his train
and an extraordinarily difficult crowd of passengers to handle, but he
cannot for a moment ignore the most minute detail of the flimsy messages
that are handed to him during the entire length of his trip. And back of
his specific orders for the day he must ever carry the entire scheme of
the division's operation.
[Illustration: THE KNIGHT OF THE TICKET PUNCH
Courtesy, diplomacy, helpfulness are quite as much parts of his job as
anything else. He is a distinctive American figure; no railroads elsewhere
have his counterpart.]
So here you have the passenger conductor--a real knight of the road, if
you please--careful, discerning, courageous; a rare diplomat; perhaps in
this commercial day of big things the spirit of the skipper of the
famous old-time clipper ship incarnate! He is worthy of the great railroad
empire of the world. In Europe, the state railroads of Germany and of
France, the short, congested lines of Great Britain have not his
counterpart. He is a product both of our nationalism and of the hard
necessity that has hedged him in. And, in passing, it is worthy of note
that some of the men who sit today in the highest executive positions of
the greatest of our railroads have stood their long, hard turns with the
ticket-punch. A recent and a peculiarly gifted chairman of the Interstate
Commerce Commission--Edgar E. Clark--was for many years a passenger
conductor; his pride in his calling of those earlier years is unbounded.
Here I have shown you in a word the two strongest of the four types of
railroad organized labor. For while there are organizations among some
other forms of the railroads' employees, switchmen, telegraphers, and the
like, it is the engineers, the firemen, the conductors, and the trainmen
who hold the whiphand of authority over the railroad executive and the
politician alike. They have a power that is to be feared--they have said
it themselves. And the politicians, the public, a good many of the biggest
railroad executives have believed it. Once in a while you will find a
railroad executive--like that stern old lion, Edward Payson Ripley, who
brought the Santa Fé Railroad out of bankruptcy into affluence and became
its president--who states his disbelief and states it so plainly that
there can be no doubt as to its meaning. For a long time Ripley has seen
the handwriting on the wall. And so seeing, he has had small patience
with the weak-kneed compromise that invariably has followed the so-called
recurrent crises between the four big brotherhoods of the railroads and
their employers. There is nothing weak-kneed about Ripley and the rapidly
growing group of executives rallying about him. It must come to an issue,
open warfare if you please. In such a war either the railroads or their
labor will win. But upon the victory, no matter how it may go, definite
economic policy may be builded. You cannot build either definite or
enduring policy upon compromise. Our own Civil War and the weak-kneed
years of compromise that preceded it ought to show that to each of us,
beyond a shadow of a doubt.
* * * * *
We are just passing through one of the periodic "crises" between the
railroads and their four big brotherhoods. These "crises," which, up to
the present time at least, have always ended in wage adjustments of a
decidedly upward trend, are apt to be staged on the eve of an important
election. They invariably are accompanied by threats of a strike--the
German _der Tag_ reduced to an American rule of terror. These threats are
so definite as to leave nothing but alarm in the public breast.
Then arbitration may be brought to play upon the situation. There is a
vast amount of understanding--accompanied by a still greater amount of
misunderstanding. The big leaders of the big brotherhoods are no fools.
They are skilled in the new-fangled science of publicity. And so are the
railroads. Yet finally the men get their increased wages--or a good part
of what they have asked. And finally the cost is slipped along to the
public, in the form of increased passenger fares or freight tariffs. Then,
sooner or later, the brotherhood railroad employee feels the increased
cost of transportation distinctly reflected in his own rising cost of
living. He feels it distinctly, because an instinctive idea of the
manufacturer or the distributor is to add on the transportation cost to
his manufacturing and selling cost, with something more than a fair
margin. Thus a general increase of five per cent in freight rates may only
mean that it costs a fraction less than two cents more to ship a pair of
shoes from Boston to Cleveland. But the manufacturer in Boston is tempted
to add five cents to his selling cost--to cover not only the increase in
transportation, but other manufacturing-cost increases, less definite in
detail but appreciable in volume. The wholesaler, under the same pressure
from a steadily advancing cost of maintaining his business, makes his
increase ten cents, and the retailer, not immune from the same general
conditions which govern the manufacturer or the wholesaler, protects
himself by placing an extra charge of twenty-five cents to his retail
patron. If the final patron--the man or the woman who is to wear the
shoes--protests, the retailer informs him that the recent increase in
freight rates--well advertised in the public prints--is responsible for
the new selling price. So has the increase in freight rates been
magnified--both in reality and in the public mind.
It is when the brotherhood man or his wife or daughter buys the shoes
that they begin to pinch--economically, at least. It is not only shoes, it
is clothing, it is foodstuffs, it is coal--the pressure gains and from
every quarter. Then the brotherhood man--engineer or conductor or fireman
or trainman--rises in lodge-meeting and demands a better wage. His margin
between income and outgo is beginning to narrow. He has a family to rear,
a home to maintain--a pride in both. In the course of a short time the men
at the top of the brotherhoods feel this mass pressure from below. They
must yield to it. If they do not, their positions and their prestige will
be taken away from them. So they get together, decide on the amount of the
relief they must have, and begin their demands upon the railroads. And
when the railroads, with their well-known cost sheets ever in front of
them, show resistance, the threats of strike once again fill the air.
Gentle, peace-loving folk of every sort become alarmed. There is turmoil
among the politicians, of every sort and variety. After that, arbitration.
President Wilson in his recent address to Congress, in his accurate,
authoritative way, laid great stress upon this very point of arbitration.
He had laid stress upon it in the crisis of September, 1916--when it
looked as if railroad union labor and the executives of the railroads had
come to an actual parting of the ways--and the country was to be turned
from threats into the terrorizing actuality of a strike. Only Congress,
which seems rarely able to realize that it can ever be anything else than
Congress and so bound to its traditions of inefficiency, chose to overlook
this portion of the President's solution of the situation. It granted the
eight-hour day--so called--but it was deaf to arbitration.
Said President Wilson in his address:
To pass a law which forbade or prevented the individual workman to
leave his work before receiving the approval of society in doing so
would be to adopt a new principle into our jurisprudence, which I take
it for granted we are not prepared to introduce. But the proposal that
the operation of the railways of the country shall not be stopped or
interrupted by the concerted action of organized bodies of men until a
public investigation shall have been instituted which shall make the
whole question at issue plain for the judgment of the opinion of the
nation is not to propose any such principle.
The President is nearly always right--particularly so in domestic affairs.
But never, in my knowledge, has he expressed himself with greater vigor
and strength than in this particular instance. Not that the principle is
apt to be popular--quite the reverse is probable. There are employers of a
certain type, also employees of a certain type, whose bitterness against
any fair measure of arbitration is unyielding. The great railroad
brotherhoods have never shown any enthusiasm over the idea, despite the
fact that the two countries in which arbitration is strongest and most
successful--Australia and New Zealand--are controlled by organized labor.
There are railroad executives also who have been opposed to arbitration
save where they might manipulate it to serve their own selfish ends. But
these are the types of railroad chiefs who are beginning to disappear
under the new order of things in America. Theirs was another and somewhat
less enlightened generation--particularly in regard to social economics.
And even in the railroad the old order is rapidly giving way to the new.
There is a class in America which enthusiastically receives
arbitration--compulsory arbitration--and demands that it be extended in
full to the railroad, as well as to every other form of industrial
enterprise. I am referring to the average citizen--the man who stands to
lose, and to lose heavily, while a strike of any magnitude is in progress.
He is an innocent party to the entire matter. And he must be
protected--absolutely and finally.
That is why we must have arbitration--compulsory arbitration, for any
arbitration which is not compulsory and practically final, is useless. We
have had the other sort already and it has brought us nowhere. We had
arbitration of the uncompulsory sort before the critical days at the end
of last August. In the final course of events both the railroads and their
brotherhood employees ignored it. And the average man, the man in the
street, was ignorant of the fact that it had even been tried.
After that sort of arbitration comes compromise, and compromise of that
sort is a thin veil for failure. And failure means that the whole thing
must be gone over once again. The circle has been completed--in a
remarkably short space of time.
It all is a merry-go-round, without merriment; a juggernaut which revolves
upon a seemingly unending path. Yet he is a real juggernaut. For while
the brotherhood man may seek and obtain relief upon the lines which I
have just indicated--how about the salaried man outside the railroad? And
how about the man inside the railroad whom no strong brotherhood
organization, no gifted, diplomatic leader of men protects? It is this
last class--the unorganized labor of the railroad, that I want you to
consider for a little time. It is obviously unfair, from any broad
economic standpoint, that these men, far outnumbering the organized labor
of the railroad, should be ignored when it comes to any general
readjustment of its wages. Yet, as a matter of fact, this is the very
thing that has been coming to pass. And today it is one of the most
pronounced symptoms of weakness in the great sick man of American
business.