The Railroad Problem Part 6

"Wonder if we could go around by Jefferson City and stop off there?"

inquires the man, "I've relatives there."

Blinks starts to say "yes," then hesitates. Wasn't there a special bulletin issued by the Missouri Pacific covering that detour? or was it the Katy? He finds his way through twenty or thirty tariff supplements. He knows that if he makes a mistake he not only will be censured, but will probably be forced to make good the mistake from his own pocket--according to the ruling of the Interstate Commerce Law, which he feels is yet to be his nemesis.

Number Four is almost near enough to hear the hissing of her valves but he tells his patrons not to worry--she has a deal of express matter to handle this morning and will tarry two or three minutes at the station. He finds the right ticket forms, clips and pastes them, stamps and punches them, until he has two long green and yellow contracts each calling for the pa.s.sage of a person from his town to Muskogee. Incidentally he finds time to sell a little sheaf of travelers' checks and an accident insurance policy in addition to promising to telegraph down to the junction to reserve Pullman s.p.a.ce. In six or seven minutes he has completed an important pa.s.senger transaction, with rare accuracy. Rare accuracy, did we say? We were mistaken. That sort of accuracy is common among the station agents of America.

When the nervous, hurried, accurate transaction is done you might expect Blinks to rail against the judgment of travelers who wait until the last minute to buy tickets involving a trip over a group of railroads. But that is not the way of Blinks.

"I could have sent them down to the junction on a local ticket and let them get their through tickets there. But I like those tickets on my receipt totals and I'm rather proud of the fact that they've made this a coupon station. My rival here on the R---- road has to send down to headquarters for blank tickets and a punch whenever he hears in advance of a party that's going to make a trip and a clerk down there figures out the rate. We make our own rates and folks know they can get through tickets at short notice."

That means business and Blinks knows that it means business.

"But he almost had me stumped on that alternative route via Jefferson City," he laughs. "They catch us up mighty quickly these days if we make mistakes of that sort."

The Interstate Commerce Law, as we have already seen, is a pretty rigid thing and lest a perfectly virtuous railroad should be accused of making purposeful "mistakes" in quoting the wrong rate, it insists that the agent himself shall pay the difference when he fails to charge the patron the fully established rate for either pa.s.senger or freight transportation. In fact it does more. It demands that the agent shall seek out the patron and make him pay the dollars and cents of the error, which is rather nice in theory but difficult in execution. The average citizen does not live in any great fear of the Interstate Commerce Law.

Blinks, being a practical sort of railroader, is willing to tell you of the line as it works today--of the problems and the perplexities that constantly confront him. And occasionally he gives thought to his rival, whose little depot is on the far side of the village.

"Now Fremont is up against it," he tells you confidentially. "His road is different from ours. We have built up a pretty good reputation for our service. My job is a man's job but at least I don't have to apologize for our road. Fremont does. His road is rotten and he knows it. He knows when he sells a man a ticket through to California or even down to New York that the train is going to be a poor one, made up of old equipment, probably late, and certainly overcrowded. And if it's a shipper Fremont knows that there is a good chance that his car is going to get caught in some one of their inadequate yards and perhaps be held a week on a back siding.

"It keeps Fremont guessing. His business is not more than half of mine and he has to work three times as hard to get it. He catches it from every corner and starves along on a bare eighty dollars a month. And they are not even decent enough to give him anything like this."

He delves into an inner pocket and pulls out a leather pa.s.s wallet. It is a "system annual"--a magic card which permits his wife or himself to travel over all the main lines and side lines of the big road, at their will. He gives it a genuine look of affection before he replaces it.

"When a man's been fifteen years in the station service of our road, he gets one of these for himself; at twenty-five they make it include his wife and dependent members of his family--which is quite as far as the law allows."

Blinks laughs.

"They're generous--in almost every way--except in the pay envelope. And in these days they're actually beginning to show some understanding of the real difficulties of this job." There is an instance in his mind. He gives it to you. For the station agent here at Brier Hill still recalls the fearful lecture he got from the old superintendents of his division--within a month after he was made station agent at the little town. They had celebrated the centennial of the fine old town; there had been a gay night parade in which all the merchants of the village were represented. Some of them had sent elaborate floats into the line of march, but Blinks had been content to have his two boys march, carrying transparencies that did honor to the traffic facilities of the Great Midland. The transparencies had cost $6.75 and Blinks had the temerity to send the bill for them on to headquarters. If he had stolen a train and given all his friends a free ride upon it he hardly could have caught worse censure.

But Blinks's road has begun to see a great light. It has begun to realize Blinks and his fellows are the tentacles by which it is in contact with its territory. As the traffic steadily grows heavier it has relieved him of the routine of telegraphic train orders by establishing a block tower up the line at the top of the hill, where regular operators make a sole business of the management of the trains and so widen the margin of safety upon that division. It has appointed supervising agents--men of long experience in depot work, men who are appointed to give help rather than criticism--who go up and down its lines giving Blinks and his fellows the benefits of practical suggestions.

It has done more than these things. Today it would not censure him for spending $6.75 out of his cash drawers for giving it a representation on a local fete-day. It would urge him to spend a few more dollars and make a really good showing. It is giving him a little more help in the office and insisting that he mix more with the citizens of the town. It will perhaps pay his dues in the Chamber of Commerce and in one or two of the local clubs, providing the dues are not too high. For the road is still feeling its way.

We think that it is finding a path in the right direction. It has long maintained an expensive staff of traveling solicitors for both freight and pa.s.senger traffic--expensive not so much in the matter of salaries as in the constant flood of hotel and food bills. It has ignored Blinks and his fellows--long-established tentacles in the smaller towns--and their possibilities. Now it is turning toward them.

Out in the Middle West they are trying still another experiment. Several roads have begun letting their local agents pay small and obvious transit claims right out of their cash drawers, instead of putting them through the devious and time-taking routine of the claim departments. Under the new plan the agent first pays the claim--if it does not exceed twenty-five dollars, or thereabouts--and the claim department checks up the papers.

There may be cases where the road loses by such methods, but they are hardly to be compared with the friends it gains. An express company has adopted the plan, three or four railroads are giving it increasing use.

The idea is bound to spread and grow. And not the least of its good effects will be the increased self-respect of the agents themselves. The trust that the road places in them gives them new trust in themselves.

Blinks has a little way of talking about courtesy--which in effect goes something after the same fashion. He generally gives the little talk when a new man comes upon his small staff.

"The best exercise for the human body," he tells the man, "is the exercise of courtesy. For it reflects not only upon the man who is its recipient, but in unseen fashion upon the man who gives it."

After all, railroading is not so much engineering, not so much discipline, not so much organization, not so much financing, as it is the understanding of men.

CHAPTER VII

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 ent.i.tles 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.senger 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 cla.s.ses 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 a.s.surance 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 pa.s.s--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: a.s.suming 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 inst.i.tution 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 b.u.t.te 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 compet.i.tive 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 pa.s.senger 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 Fe 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 Fe 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 Fe 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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: