“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 butts 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 illustration 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 substitute 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 quantity. 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.