Our Railroads To-Morrow Part 7

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, pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s? 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 a.s.sure 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 pa.s.senger 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 a.s.suredly 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 att.i.tude with a British one that came to me not long ago.

"We of Great Britain feel that every British workman is ent.i.tled 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 a.s.surance 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 pa.s.senger 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 ident.i.ty, 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sed. 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 b.u.t.ts 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 subst.i.tute 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 quant.i.ty. 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 ma.s.s-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 pa.s.sing 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 quant.i.ty. 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 a.s.surance 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!