THE LABOR PLIGHT OF THE RAILROAD
Some eighteen per cent of the 2,000,000 railroad employees of the land,
receiving a little over twenty-eight per cent of their total pay-roll, are
affiliated with the four great brotherhoods--of the engineers, the
firemen, the conductors, and the trainmen. In fairness it should be added
that the reason why this eighteen per cent in numerical proportion,
receives twenty-eight per cent in financial proportion, is that the
eighteen per cent includes the larger proportion of the skilled labor of
the steel highway. Offhand, one would hardly expect a track laborer to
receive the same wages as Freeman, whose skill and sense of responsibility
entitles him to run the limited.
Yet how about this section-boss, this man whom we have just interviewed as
he stands beside his job, the man who enables Freeman's train to make her
fast run from terminal to terminal in safety? Remember that in summer and
in winter, in fair weather and in foul, this man must also measure to his
job. He must _know_ that his section--six or seven or eight or even ten
miles--is, every inch of it, fit for the pounding of the locomotive at
high speed. You do not have to preach eternal vigilance to him. It long
since became part of his day's work. And to do that day's work he must
work long hours and hard--as you have already seen--must be denied the
cheeriness and companionship of men of his kind. He frequently must locate
his family and himself far apart from the rest of the world. All of this,
and please remember that his average pay is about one-third of the average
pay of the engineer. It is plain to see that no powerful brotherhood
protects him.
If space permitted we could consider the car-maintainer. His is an equally
responsible job. Yet he, too, is unorganized, submerged, underpaid. His
plight is worse than that of the station agent--and we have just seen how
Blinks of Brier Hill earns his pay. As a matter of fact Blinks is rather
well paid. There are more men at country depots to be compared with
Fremont--men who give the best of their energy and diplomacy and all-round
ability only to realize that their pay envelope is an appreciably slimmer
thing than those of the well-dressed trainmen who ride the passenger
trains up and down the line. The trainman gets a hundred dollars a month
already--and under the Adamson law he is promised more.
This, however, may prove one thing quite as much as another. It may not
prove that the trainman is overpaid as much as it proves that the station
agent is underpaid. Personally, I do not hesitate to incline to the latter
theory. I have learned of many trainmasters and road foremen of engines
who have far less in their pay envelopes at the end of the month than the
men who are under their supervision and control. And there is not much
theory about the difficulty a road finds, under such conditions, to
"promote" a man from the engineer's cab to the road foreman's or the
trainmaster's office. In other days this was a natural step upward, in pay
and in authority. Today there is no advance in pay and the men in the cab
see only authority and responsibility and worry in such a job--with no
wage increase to justify it.
Down in the Southwest this situation is true even of division
superintendents--men of long training, real executive ability, and
understanding who are actually paid less month by month than the
well-protected engineers and conductors of their divisions. There is no
brotherhood among station agents, none among the operating officers of the
railroads of America. And yet for loyalty and ability, taken man for man,
division for division, and road for road, there are no finer or more
intelligent workers in all of industrial America. Still the fact remains
that they are not well-paid workers.
When is a man well paid?
According to the public prints, Charlie Chaplin, that amusing young clown
of the movies, receives from a quarter to half a million dollars a
year--according to the ability of his most recent press agent. I happen to
know that a certain missionary bishop down in Oklahoma receives as his
compensation $1,200 a year--although he never is quite certain of his
salary. With due respect to the comedian of the screen-drama, does anyone
imagine that his influence in the upbuilding of the new America is to be
compared for a moment to that of the shepherd of the feeble flocks down
in the Southwest?
Your economist will tell you, and use excellent arguments in support of
the telling, that the wage outgo of the land is fixed, in definite
proportion to its wealth. Granting then that this is so--one thinks twice
before he runs amuck of trained economists--is it still fair to infer that
the track foreman or the car-maintainer or the station agent is amply
paid? And is it equally fair to infer that the pay of these three classes
of railroad employees, so typical of unorganized transportation labor,
could be raised by lowering the pay of organized employees without leaving
these organized employees actually underpaid? And what assurance has the
average man, the man in the street, that any reduction in the pay of the
engineers, the conductors, the firemen, and the trainmen--if such a
miracle actually be brought to pass--would result in a corresponding
increase in the pay of the other eighty-two per cent of the labor of the
railroad?
These are questions that must be answered sooner or later. In the present
situation it looks as if they would have to be answered sooner rather than
later. With them come others: Assuming still that our economist with his
belief that the wage outgo of the entire nation is correct, is it not
possible that the railroad as an institution is not getting its fair
proportion of the national total? I have just shown you how eighteen per
cent of the railroad's employees receives twenty-eight per cent of their
pay-roll. It would be equally interesting to know the percentage of
national wage which goes to all the employees of all the railroads.
I cannot but feel when I realize the great annual total of wages which are
being paid in the automobile and the war-munitions industries, to make
striking instances, that the railroads are by no means receiving their
fair share of the national wage account. Even the salaries paid to
railroad executives, with the possible exception of a comparatively small
group of men at the very top of some of the largest properties, are not
generous. There has been much misstatement about these salaries. Because
of these misstatements it is unfortunate, to say the least, that the
railroads have not followed a policy of publishing their entire
pay-rolls--from the president down to office boy.
But the fact remains--a fact that may easily be verified by consulting the
records of the Interstate Commerce Commission--that railroad salaries are
not high, as compared with other lines of industry in America. That is one
reason why the business has so few allurements to the educated young
men--the coming engineers of America. They come trooping out of the high
schools, the technical schools, the colleges, and the universities of our
land and struggle to find their way into the electrical workshops, the
mines, the steel-making industry, the automobile shops, the telephone,
even to the new, scientific, highly developed forms of agriculture. Few of
them find their way to the railroad.
This is one of the most alarming symptoms of the great sick man of
American business--his apparent utter inability to draw fresh, red blood
to his veins.[6] A few of the roads--a very few indeed--have made distinct
efforts to build up a personnel for future years by intelligent
educational means. The Southern Pacific and the Union Pacific have made
interesting studies and permanent efforts along these lines. But most of
the railroads realize that it is the wage question--the long, hard road to
a decent pay envelope in their service, as compared with the much shorter
pathways in other lines of American industry--that is their chief obstacle
in this phase of their railroad problem.
It has been suggested, and with wisdom, that the railroad should begin to
make a more careful study and analysis of its entire labor situation than
it has ever before attempted. Today it is giving careful, scientific,
detailed attention to every other phase of its great problems. One road
today has twenty-seven scientific observers--well trained and schooled to
their work--making a careful survey of its territory, with a view to
developing its largest traffic possibilities. And some day a railroad is
to begin making an audit of its labor--to discover for itself in exact
fact and figures, the cost of living for a workman in Richmond or South
Bend or Butte or San Bernardino. Upon that it will begin to plat its
minimum wage-increase.
Suppose the railroad was to begin with this absolute cost of living as a
foundation factor. It would quickly add to it the hazard of the particular
form of labor in which its employee was engaged expressed in dollars and
cents--a factor easily figured out by any insurance actuary. To this again
would be added a certain definite sum which might best be expressed,
perhaps, as the employee's profit from his work; a sum which, in ordinary
cases at least, would or should represent the railroad's steady
contribution to his savings-bank account. To these three fundamental
factors there would probably have to be added a fourth--the bonus which
the railroad was compelled to offer in a competitive labor market for
either a man or a type of men which it felt that it very much needed in
its service. Only upon some such definite basis as this can a railroad's
pay-roll ever be made scientific and economic--and therefore permanent.
An instant ago and I was speaking of bonuses. The very word had, until
recently, a strange sound in railroad ears. The best section foreman on a
line may receive a cash prize for his well-maintained stretch of track; I
should like to hear of a station agent like Blinks who knows that his
well-planned and persistent effort to build up the freight and passenger
business at his station, is to be rewarded by a definite contribution from
the pay-chest of the railroad which employs him. Up to very recently there
apparently has not been a single railroad which has taken up this question
of bonus payments for extra services given. To the abounding credit of the
Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railway and its president, Edward Payson
Ripley, let it be said that they have just agreed to pay the greater
proportion of their employees receiving less than $2,000 a year a bonus
of ten per cent of the year's salary for 1916--a payment amounting all
told to $2,750,000. The employees so benefited must have been employed by
the Santa Fé for at least two years and they must not be what is called
"contract labor." By that the railroad means chiefly the men of the four
great brotherhoods whose services are protected by very exact and definite
agreements or contracts. The men of the brotherhoods are hardly in a
position to expect or to demand a bonus of any sort. And it also is worthy
of record that practically every union man, big or little, has placed
himself on record against bonus plans of every sort.
I hope that the example of the Santa Fé is to be followed by the other
railroads of the country.[7] It is stimulating and encouraging; it shows
that the big sick man of American business apparently is not beyond hope
of recovery. For, in my own mind, the bonus system is, beyond a doubt, the
eventual solution of the whole involved question of pay as it exists
today and will continue to exist in the minds of both employer and
employee. Our progressive and healthy forms of big industry of the United
States have long since come to this bonus plan of paying their employees.
The advances made by the steel companies and other forms of manufacturing
enterprise, by great merchandising concerns, both wholesale and retail,
and by many of the public utility companies, including certain traction
systems, are fairly well known. It is a step that, when once taken, is
never retraced. The bonus may be paid in various ways--in cash or in the
opportunity to subscribe either at par or at a preferred figure, to the
company's stock or bonds. But there is little variation as to the results.
And the workmen who benefit directly by these bonus plans become and
remain quite as enthusiastic over them as the men who employ them and
whose benefit, of necessity, is indirect.
* * * * *
In this connection some studies made recently by Harrington Emerson, the
distinguished efficiency engineer, are of particular interest. Mr.
Emerson, while attached to the president's office of the Baltimore and
Ohio Railroad, has had opportunity to study the railroad situation at
close range and in a very practical way. He has placed his carefully
developed theories in regard to the man in the shop and his wage into a
study of the railroader and his pay-envelope. He has gone back into
transportation history and found that at first employes were paid by the
day. But long hours either on the road or waiting on passing sidings
worked great hardships to them. As a more or less direct consequence the
men in train service formed unions and succeeded in establishing the
peculiar combination of pay upon the mile and the hour basis--which has
obtained ever since in general railroad practice. If a train or a
locomotive man was called for duty, even if he never left the station, he
received a full day's pay. This, in Mr. Emerson's opinion and in the
opinion of a good many others who have studied the situation, was as it
should be and the principle should have been adhered to. But to it was
tacked the piece rate of the mile. If a train or locomotive man made one
hundred miles it was considered a day's work, even if made in two hours.
In this way the piece-rate principle became firmly established alongside
of the hourly basis.
"What was the result on railroad operation and costs?" asks Mr. Emerson
and then proceeds to answer his own question. He calls attention to the
cars weighing 120,000 pounds and having axle-loads of 50,000 pounds that
are being run upon our railroads today and expresses his belief that
because in our established methods of railroad accounting, operating costs
include train men's wages, but not interest on capital invested in
locomotives, cars, trains and terminals; railroad managers, driven by the
need to make a showing long since began to plan more revenue tons per
train-mile in order to keep down or lessen train-crew wage-costs per
ton-mile. This was very well as long as it led to better-filled cars and
trains, but the plan quickly expanded into heavier locomotives and heavier
cars which necessitated heavier rails, more ties, tie-plates, stronger
bridges, reduced grades, and a realignment until all that was gained in
tonnage-mile costs was lost in increased obsolescence, unremunerative
betterment, and other fixed charges. Even as good a railroader as Mr.
Harriman was once led to regret that railroads were not built upon a
six-foot gauge instead of the long-established one of four feet eight and
one-half inches, because he felt that this would enable him still further
to increase train load in proportion to train crew.
A good many railroaders have said that we have reached and long since
passed the point of efficiency by increasing our standard of car and train
sizes. Mr. Emerson is not new in that deduction. But he puts the case so
clearly in regard to the confusing double basis in the pay of the
trainmen--the vexed point that is before the Supreme Court of the United
States as this book is being completed, because the Adamson so-called
eight-hour day omitted the mileage factor, to the eternal annoyance of
those same trainmen--that I cannot forbear quoting his exact words:
Piece rates to trainmen should be abolished. The work of trainmen
should be classified. There should be short hours and correspondingly
high pay for men working under great strain. There should be heavy
penalties attached for overtime, although it does not follow that the
man who puts in the overtime should receive the penalty. Society wants
him to protest against overtime, because it may be both dangerous to
the public and detrimental to the worker. The worker should not be
bribed to encourage it.
It is evident that pay by the hour with penalties for overtime would
encourage lighter and faster trains. Lighter and faster trains would
increase the roads' capacity as well as car and locomotive mileage.
Capital expenses would drop. The savings made would be available to
increase wages and to pay higher bills for material and to pay better
dividends.
Beyond this there is little more to be said--at least pending the decision
of the highest court in the land. But no matter how the Supreme Court may
find in this vexatious matter, the fact remains that the union man in
railroad employ will continue to be paid upon this complicated and unfit
double method of reckoning--clumsy, totally inadequate (built up through
the years by men who preferred compromise) and complicate an intelligent
and definite solution of a real problem.
Some day, some railroader is going to solve the question; and, in my own
humble opinion, a genuine solution, worked from the human as well as the
purely economic angle is going to rank with the bonus and other
indications of an advanced interest on the part of railroad executives in
the men as a step toward a betterment of the relations between them.
* * * * *
In my opinion such steps as these that I have just outlined not only would
go far toward solving the frequent "crises" that arise between the
railroads and their employees, but would tend greatly to prevent the
depreciation of the human equipment of the road. Remember that this labor
problem is one which presses hard not only upon the body politic, but upon
the whole human structure of our country. Its solution, as well as the
solution of the physical question, must be not only immediate, but
economic and financial.
All this is bound to result soon in a very great increase in the
railroad's pay-roll. It is an added cost that must be met before the
railroad can come into its own once again. It is quickly obvious that the
great pay-roll must be equalized, that in these days of steadily mounting
cost of living, its unorganized labor--its trackmen, its carmen, its
shopmen, its clerks, its station agents--must be given a fairer chance in
the division of its wages. It needs to pay better salaries to its minor
officers, and it is today handicapped for lack of these.
It is obvious also that it is going to be extremely difficult, to say the
least, for the railroad to reduce the wages of its organized labor. Put
this statement to the ones that have gone before and you can quickly see
the need for very great increases in the railroad's pay-roll in the
immediate future. It is going to be compelled to seek a larger share in
that great portion of the nation's outgo that goes to pay for its labor of
every sort. It can no longer postpone the pressing demands of its
unorganized workers.
The failure to increase their portion of the pay-roll, with its consequent
tendency toward the depreciation, if you please, of much of the human
element in the operation of the railroad, may yet prove to be a problem,
larger and more serious than the failure not alone to increase but to
prevent the physical depreciation of the railroad.
This physical question--the financial plight of the railroad, its great
and growing depreciation account, the consequent deterioration of its
lines, particularly its branch lines--we already have discussed. To that
plight now add the labor plight. No wonder that the great man of American
business lies sick upon his bed. Already we have learned that from a
purely material point of view, the railroad is nine years back of 1917
instead of nine years ahead of this date. Its involved, delicate,
unsettled labor problem shows that nine years is a small lapse indeed
between the tardiness of its labor relations, together with the real
understanding of its human problem, and the general understanding of labor
and social conditions in other lines of American industry.
Yet it is not too late to mend. And just to show that this is possible,
that it is worth while bringing the sick man of American business back to
health again, just for the opportunities of development that stand before
him, I am going to take your time to show you a few of the larger
possibilities of the railroads of the United States.