Our Railroads To-Morrow

by Edward Hungerford

It is however a transportation question to know what the railroads themselves purpose to do about bettering the situation between the workers and themselves. We have hinted at the expressed intentions of a high officer of the Pennsylvania. So far so good; but not very far. If the foolish national agreements are to be completely abrogated—and apparently they are to be—what improvement in the relationship between the carrier and its employees is to be substituted for them? We have seen the move toward the establishment of local boards of arbitration by individual groups of the carriers. So far so good again; but again, not so very far. The per-hour wage has frequently been set down as the gold standard of railroad pay. Yet to-day in the eyes of the operating heads, at least, it is no standard whatsoever, save in shop-work where they reckon it as but a very base alloy and where they would regard piece-work as platinum—set with diamonds, at that. All of which of course is from the point of view of the executives, and not at all from that of their workers.

But what are the railroads going to do about the recognition of real merit and real industry in the individual worker? I do not mean the brilliant fellow who forces his way to the top. Frequently it is the plodder, the man unseen, unknown, who is the most valuable human cog of the transport machine. Will the railroad, huge machine that it is, find him out and give his loyalty, his industry, his energy—in many cases, his initiative too—the recognition that they demand? Can it do this even if it will? I have known many a railroad manager to complain to me that the reason he could not gain a greater efficiency out of his workers was because of the very scattered and attenuated location of his job. Real supervision, like that of a factory or a large office, was out of the question. Men might and did loaf on their jobs. Conversely it is of course equally difficult to discover real merit along the line, particularly the modest and conservative type of merit.

What too is the railroad going to do about adjusting hours of labor for its workers so that, whenever it is possible, the worker shall sleep at home? We have seen already in the pages of this book how often this is not possible for the employees engaged in the operation of the trains. In a little while we shall come to the vast possibilities of the use of the gasolene-motor unit in local passenger transportation upon our standard railroads, and I shall be urging as a corollary to its introduction a much increased service as well. It ought, by a little skillful planning, to be possible to use the eight hours of a railroader’s time to extremely good advantage, both to himself and to his employer, by an ingenious dovetailing of runs. Up this line, across that, back on a third—the possibilities are as infinite and as fascinating as those of a game of chess, and all giving the maximum of eight hours’ service to the railroad, as well as the square deal to its worker. Could more be asked?

And then, for a final question, what is our American railroad going to do about the assurance of continuous employment to its workers? We have touched upon this question already. It is a particularly serious one, not alone in shop-work but in every other department of the railroad. The fear of losing one’s job becomes at all times a decided factor both in the statistics of labor turnover and in the individual morale of the worker. In a single instance of a typical large trunk-line railroad a total force of 80,895 workers in June, 1920, had been reduced by June, 1921, to but 56,091 and has been dropping ever since, which means quite naturally that the men who remain are spurred to the best of endeavors. The road tested this the other day. It asked all of its employees to go out in their spare hours and see if they could solicit some freight for it. In ninety days these men, entirely apart from the regular solicitation forces of the line, had brought in more than 1400 car-loads of freight which otherwise would have gone to its competitors. A good percentage showing was made by the mechanics and other workers of one of its smaller shops. Yet in the early part of 1920 the men at this shop had all gone out on strike because a train accident had delayed the arrival of their pay-envelopes for two brief hours!

Here then is morale brought back in a perfectly human fashion, yet I doubt if in a good one. In the long run fear cannot make loyalty or initiative or ambition. The day will come when abounding prosperity will return to the carriers, when the labor markets across the land will be empty of possible material. Then labor may remember. Memory is quite as human a trait as fear. And the pendulum will be set high again at the workers’ end of its arc.

I feel that we shall be compelled to find far better ways of bringing loyalty and initiative and ambition into the hearts of our workers of to-morrow—the other qualities that go into the making of that highly modern term “morale”—and so bring back a genuine revival of our American railroad tradition. We shall start of course with a good wage. We already have that. The average annual wage of the American railroader is now $1700 for eight hours of daily work. In 1913 he worked ten hours a day and received but $761 on an average. His hourly wage is now about 150 per cent. more than it was eight years ago.

Remember all the while, if you will, that I am not urging that the railroader is overpaid to-day. I do not believe that upon the average he is any more than well paid—in all cases not even that. And I do believe that these entire pay arrangements are still far from being upon an entirely just and equitable basis; the conditions of his working arrangements, so very vital to the return of our American railroad morale and tradition, are still in the infancy of a really scientific and human adjustment. Here again the situation is open to further explanation.

There are, roughly speaking, three classes of railroad employees. The railroad president and the small group of high-priced executives closely about him constitute the first of these classes. This is small in number. It contrasts with the two millions and a half of the rank and file of railroad employees in the United States.

Here then are the right and the left wings of our railroading. Between them is a third class, not often in the public eye, but in many ways the keystone of the arch of operation. This third class, not large in numbers, consists of the minor officers of the various active departments of the railroad. It is an immensely valuable factor in successful operation; in fact the great driving force behind it. Yet its position is not a happy one. At all times it is a buffer; it is caught between the upper and the lower stones of a mill which attempts to grind finely. From below comes the natural and unending pressure to increase expenses; from the high executive offices above comes another, to hold down expenditure. From somewhere between these grindings the division superintendent or engineer or mechanical superintendent must produce results. Of necessity, his is a driving job.

Ofttimes it has been a thankless job as well. For there has been little outside protection for this valuable central class of railroad labor. Numerically it is not large enough nor important enough to command the favor of influential politicians. As we have just seen, the rank and file does. This is at least well paid. And as the railroad man at the bottom has received attention, so has the railroader at the top. The executives have always succeeded in taking good care of themselves. They know that the large financiers and banks and other institutions which to-day are the heavy stockholders of our railroads are utterly dependent upon them. Without them their securities would fall even flatter than already they have fallen, which means that the railroad president and his important vice-presidents can command salaries that are at least commensurate with those paid in other industries. Their worries are those that come from their responsibilities, not from their pocketbooks.