Granted then that this great wall is to be kept, and assuming that the railroads can tide over their present personal deficiencies, how can this distressing situation be avoided in the future? Easily enough. It comes down in final analysis to a wage question. Our railroads can and should establish courses in the various phases of their business in many of the large colleges and training-schools across the land; they should have methods of systematically scanning the output of these schools and of securing for themselves at least their fair share of it for proper training toward executive possibilities. Other industries in America long since have shown the possibilities of such methods. Yet even such a program will fail if the salary inducement is not made both fair and attractive. I spoke but a moment ago of the lack of curvature, the tendency toward right-angledness of the salary line between the top class of railroad personnel and the bottom. It too has arisen in other businesses, and they have had to solve it. Here is one case in particular.
It is a nation-wide utility company, not transportation, but in a large sense akin to it. It divides itself between the Atlantic and Pacific into various subsidiary companies, each fairly autonomous. These companies, working in coöperation, have evolved a salary plan that is attractive to their personnel. The company heads each receive as an average from $35,000 to $40,000 a year. Immediately beneath them are their vice-presidents, three or four at from $20,000 to $25,000; beneath these in turn a group of ten to a dozen sub-executives at $15,000 to $18,000, and then a large group (thirty-five or forty men) at from $10,000 to $12,500 annually. The curve irons out to a comfortable rotundity. The salary appeal stands strongly; the opportunity of getting into that third sizable executive group of good wage standard is large enough to bring young men out of college to these companies in a larger number than they can accept, which gives them a most excellent opportunity to pick and choose.
A plan such as this would be easily applicable to almost any one of our American railroads of to-day, which almost invariably are under-staffed rather than over-staffed. And the first objection to it, the cost, is discounted by the fact that even to a comparatively small line it would not add more than 5 or 6 per cent, to the pay-roll—perhaps not more than a fraction of 1 per cent, to the total operating cost. The utility company which I have just quoted boasts that it could cut its entire pay-roll down to a maximum of $5000 a year for all of its officers and still reduce its total pay-roll cost less than a mere 1 per cent., which speaks volumes for the even distribution of its official salaries.
Given a broad-minded fairly planned salary scheme such as this—and having provided always that the scheme was well advertised—and the average railroad ought to begin to pull itself through on this difficult question of supplying a fresh quantity of proper officer personnel for itself. To this might well be added, as has already been suggested, a systematic plan for teaching the various phases of transport in many of our schools and colleges and then closely scanning the output of these classes for future executive material. That such a plan would work and would be worth far more than its comparatively modest cost, is the opinion of far-seeing men within the railroad industry as well as outside of it. That more attention is needed to this vital phase of our transport problem is clearly indicated by the action of the Pennsylvania railroad immediately after coming out from government control, in appointing a high personnel officer with a title and prestige none the less than vice-president.
The problem of personnel and its continuous and permanent supply, long since recognized by other of our industries than that of railroading by the appointment of well-paid specialists with staffs trained to handle it at best efficiency, is not in itself a particularly perplexing one. A fair degree of study and thought will solve it almost invariably. One reason perhaps that so many of our railroads have not met it properly up to the present moment is because only yesterday it became apparent as a really vital matter, not merely to their success, but to their very continuance. It was but yesterday that trades-unionism became a dominating and fairly autocratic force in their operation, that the traditional stairways of progress from the engine-cab or the caboose or the little yellow depot became so firmly closed and abandoned, and that the railroads were really forced to look out into the broad world beyond for future personnel.
Our railroaders as a rule have not lacked technical ability. They have not lacked honesty. They are not lacking in these qualities to-day. Taken man for man I doubt if their high average for both of them could be exceeded by any other American industry or profession, or even equaled throughout the rest of the civilized world. That many of them have lacked both vision and imagination, I am going to contend at other times. For the present it is enough to say that theirs is indeed a difficult job, that, leaving aside the question of securing future executives, the task of the existing ones is very far from a sinecure. The relationship of the human factors in the operating phases alone of our railroads, from the top executives down through the mid-executives to the rank and file, is this very day and minute one of the vastly serious phases of our whole railroad muddle. For just as the problem of new personnel is to an extent a future one, so is the deplorable loss of the old tradition to an extent a past one. There is not much use in crying over spilled milk. The thing to do is to find just what can be saved from the spilling.
Jinks who reads this, and in his more serious moments conducts a cotton-factory, and Blinks, who has the biggest retailing business in his town, may both laugh at the thought that their railroading may be a supremely difficult business. Each of them knows that his is the most difficult business in all the world and has a thousand convincing ways of proving it. But Jinks may summon all his operatives into a hall at five minutes’ notice—he has them all at work inside of a brick wall—and put the fear of the Lord (and of their boss) into their hearts in another five. While Blinks, as a matter of principle, reads the riot act to his clerks every morning as soon as he has unlocked the doors of the store.
A railroad’s employees may be outstretched a thousand miles or more. Remember again that the railroad itself is in truth a narrow ribbon, ofttimes no wider than the right-of-way of a single track, far-reaching and tremendously attenuated. A thousand employees here, and then twenty, thirty, forty miles to the next group of more than a dozen! What a small opportunity for any sort of close superintendency or inspection! How hard the problem of attaining a real morale! With the irregular demands of energy that a railroad makes upon a man’s time—two trains perhaps within the hour, and then perhaps not another for three or four—it can rarely utilize a man’s eight hours at best advantage. While if an employee is at all inclined to idle upon the job how rare the opportunities for loafing—or if not for actual loafing, the failure to work in his allotted hour to the top notch of his ability! These opportunities exist, and unless Mr. Ford’s plan should become a howling success, must continue to exist, in a tremendous variety.
Our station-agent no longer has to work twelve hours a day. Under government control his hours began to approach those of an easy-going banker. He ceased to worry about the prospective passenger who may be thinking of going to California and who by proper persuasion may be induced to go by the S. A.’s line. All of which is another of the many evidences of the decline of our fine old-time railroad tradition.