I have no quarrel with the labor union, as such. Were I in the ranks I would belong to a union and give it my loyal support. Monopoly and combination of capital beget as a corollary a labor trust. You and I are powerless to eliminate the effect of such natural, economic forces. We can, however, help control the effect of these forces, preferably by reason. There are so many of the primal instincts and passions still extant in human nature that at times diplomacy exhausts itself and falls back upon the protection of forces offensive and defensive, active and passive.
You see that it is merely a phase of a general problem that a disproportionate amount of your time is taken up by affording an opportunity for delegates to make their lodges believe they are earning their per diem and expenses. What matters it to the locomotive engineers if their importunities cause scant attention to the unspoken rights of your clerks and trackmen? Why not figure out just what proportion of your time the different organizations are entitled to, shut off senatorial courtesy and limit debate accordingly?
Whatever you do, have your division superintendents present at your negotiations. Do not flatter yourself that your own wonderful ability will enable you to take a sound position on every question that may arise. Such deliberations are staff work and, unlike line administration, are not a one-man function. The final decision should rest with you, but in the meantime get all the light you can. Under the unit system the superintendent can be thus spared from his division to help save the company money because there is always a competent man to perform his duties, and a provision all along the line for automatic successions to meet just such incidents of service. It should be as easy for a chief assistant superintendent, familiar with the routine, to assume the superintendent's regular duties any day as for the second dispatcher to work the first trick. When your mechanical assistant conducts his shop negotiations, by all means insist that he direct the superintendent to send in each mechanical assistant superintendent to assist in the conferences.
One reason that the labor situation has gotten away from us is because the matter has been handled on too large a scale. The tendency has been to consider the abstract possibilities rather than the concrete effort. A superintendent of a 140-mile division once recommended approval of an application for increase in wages of his milk train crew, because the men on the next division were getting as much for running only 105 miles. Investigation showed that his men were on duty less than six hours, of which the total time consumed in handling milk cans was a trifle over an hour. Each general manager is inclined to believe that his men will get the worst of it as compared with other roads. He has been inclined to yield when he should have been firm. The further away from the concrete local conditions the negotiations can be conducted the more vulnerable are the officials. The labor leaders know this, and the more divisions or the more roads they can bunch in a single negotiation or arbitration the more unwieldy becomes the proposition and the greater the gain for labor. This condition of things was partly inevitable, is now partly avoidable. Uniformity may be deadly. Standardization can be run in the ground, as was shown when a West Virginia agent of the Chesapeake & Ohio painted his wooden-leg orange color with maroon trimmings.
Affectionately, your own,
D. A. D.
LETTER XIII.
A DEPARTMENT OF INSPECTION OR EFFICIENCY.
Chicago, July 1, 1911.
My Dear Boy:—One of the easiest things to measure, because definite in terms and limited in quantity, is money. The things which money may represent are hard to measure because often intangible and indefinite. The money account may or may not reflect efficiency in performance. Have we not been grasping at the shadow of money at the expense of the substance, effect? Consider, if you please, the working of a bank, perhaps the corporate institution in whose efficiency the public has the greatest confidence. In a small country bank one man does all the work. Later he requires a clerk or a bookkeeper. As the bank grows there are self-suggesting divisions of labor along such well defined positions as teller, paying or receiving, cashier, vice-president, president, etc. In the first place, the same man handles the money and its written representations, the accounts. When we reach the stage of having both a teller and a bookkeeper, the one is a check on the other, because of a difference in point of view. I do not understand that a bank considers its bookkeepers more honest than its tellers or vice versa. The bookkeeper came along to check the teller, not because of such marked variations in humanity, but because of the volume of business. There was more than one man could do.
The large corporations, including the railways, seem to have followed governments into a fundamental fallacy in the matter of money and accounting. Because, now and then, in spite of safeguards, a trust is violated and money embezzled, a remedy is sought by segregating in administration all activities having to do directly with fiscal affairs. The ultimate effect is dwarfing to administration and fatal to maximum composite efficiency. In a compact establishment like a department store or a large manufacturing plant, the closer contact of the departments concerned minimizes the evils of this segregation. The operations of a government or of a railway extend over so much territory that such close contact is impossible. The result is that our bookkeeper is too far away from the paying teller. The bookkeeper then arrogates to himself fancied qualities of a superior being blessed with a rectitude born of the guardianship of money. Yes, we must have the transactions of one man checked by another more or less disinterested. This is not alone a question of integrity, but concerns the failings of the human mind. The more conscientious and careful the engineer the more does he desire a check on his own calculations by competent persons. We accept the estimates of the engineer, swallow them whole sometimes. We tell him to go ahead and blow in the company's money or credit to accomplish a desired result. This is because we have confidence in his professional ability. When it comes to one of the components of his constructing work, the disbursement of real money, a lay function, we balk. We say to him, this is so different that your vouchers and checks are worthless until mulled over by a distant circumlocution office. This office, it is true, has no first hand, practical knowledge of what you are doing, but because this is money we feel safer by imposing such a check. When the bookkeeper sat in the same room, like a bank, and checked the engineer, this was a good working hypothesis. Did we not outgrow it long ago? We trust the engineer to hire a thousand men, to incur a legal obligation for us to pay them. Why send the pay-rolls several hundred miles to be checked by a lot of boys? Why not let the engineer disburse, subject to a real check, after the fact, by a competent disinterested inspection of his work?