When the versatile Henry Ford embarked not so many months ago on the difficult and time-honored business of running a railroad he was not greeted with any warm-hearted reception dinner by the American Railway Association. He probably was not even asked to join the association. Its members had heard of Mr. Ford as a shatterer of traditions. And traditions, as you already know, to the heart of the old-time railroader are like unto the ten commandments themselves. I have no brief for Mr. Ford, any more than for Mr. McAdoo. He is not an economist, although he would like to think himself one. He is a mechanic, a super-mechanic if you please. And he has a glorious knowledge of men, their strength and their weaknesses. Yet this is not criticism. These last qualities are much needed in our American railroad situation to-day. By this time there is almost a superfluity of economists in it.
Mr. Ford at the outset sought to solve the railroad labor question by straddling it—by tearing up all the cumbersome and complicated standardized national agreements between the men of the small railroad that he now owns and substituting for them a generous minimum wage and the right of the road to utilize a man at whatever work it pleases, within his established eight hours of labor. On Mr. Ford’s railroad an employee may possibly drive a locomotive for ninety minutes and then spend five hours and a half washing car windows, or trucking cases upon a freight-house platform. And the astonishing thing is that in this one instance at least the plan apparently is working.
It may be that Mr. Ford has reached the solution of the problem. I am not at all sure that he has not. But I feel that if he has, a large number of railroad executives and sub-executives will forget their annoyances at the Detroit gentleman’s publicity methods in connection with his personal railroad and begin to call him blessed. They have had little good fortune as yet in handling the standardized national agreements with their men, which were their unwilling inheritance from Uncle Sam, railroader sublime. The agreements still stand despite the professed entire willingness of the Railroad Labor Board to abrogate them, for the simple reason that no acceptable substitute for them has yet been brought forward. The Labor Board has made some rather sweeping rulings in cutting down overtime payments and the like, however—all to the cost of the rank and file of the railroaders. Their position steadily becomes less and less enviable.
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 rôle 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, passed 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.