Not that any fair-minded man would wish a return to the outrageously long hours, low pay, and difficult working conditions of say twenty years ago that it tolerated and condoned. But there ought to have been a happy medium between those conditions and the ones of to-day. It should not have been so very difficult after all to figure out a fair compensation and fair hours and keep a reasonable amount of affection and loyalty in the heart and mind of the employee for the property that he serves. Without these perfectly human qualities working for it within its personnel no railroad, limited as we have just seen by overwhelmingly difficult conditions of superintendency and inspection, can operate at anything like efficiency. It suffers and suffers greatly. And its patrons suffer in consequence.
For here again, Blinks and Jinks, does the railroad business differ from yours. If you cannot inspire your workers to affection and loyalty, and through these to efficiency, you fail. Your factory or your store closes. But the community that you served may not suffer greatly—not for any length of time. It readjusts itself; it buys its cotton at another mill, its dress-shirts at the store across the street.
But if your railroad should shut down, unless it should happen to be a sort of fifth wheel in an unusually competitive territory, the whole community would suffer tremendously, immediately and permanently, while any perceptible lowering of the quality of its railroad service brings instant trouble and discomfort to it. When, as a war measure, the old-time station-agent, reared in loyalty and tradition to render a real service to his public, became even for a time the government bureaucrat, the traveling public quickly realized the difference. And no other one thing perhaps has done more to render the phrase “government railroad” more obnoxious to the average American to-day than the conduct toward them of many railroad employees during the twenty-six months of Federal control. That the men in control of the Railroad Administration took steps, well-planned but fairly impotent, to bring about better politeness and courtesy among the railroad servants is not to be denied. But the problem was quite beyond them, the distances between the administration offices at Washington and the men themselves much too far to be efficiently traversed. Letters and bulletins urging courtesy were puerile. The railroad rank and file laughed at them. Why courtesy? They were autocrats. Did not the first director-general himself proclaim that in the earliest days of his regency at Pueblo and again at El Paso? After such proclamation these courtesy bulletins were to be regarded as just so much waste paper.
Blinks and Jinks both know that in their business courtesy comes through contact. Blinks in his big retail store knows that courtesy is one of the invaluable and irreplaceable assets of his business. So he not only preaches it but inspires it through contact, through knowing his sales-people as well as the rest of his working force personally, and through trying to help them work out the many little problems that perplex their lives. Comparatively few—a mere nothing—of Jinks’s employees ever come in personal contact with his customers. Yet he too has found long since that courtesy pays dividends, plain dollars-and-cents dividends. And so he too is preaching it, has well-salaried experts, under the title of social workers, who give their days toward bettering the lot of his factory family, with the courtesy idea well in the forefront of their endeavors. Through personal contact the thing is accomplished, and with it enthusiasm and efficiency—all together the sort of thing that we have learned to call morale.
That this morale, the old-fashioned tradition of American railroading, can be returned to us I do not doubt. It cannot be easily accomplished. It will require a deal of study, and the exercise of great tact and diplomacy. It will have to be preceded by an end of union-baiting and of the more subtle but nevertheless bitter attacks upon government regulatory bodies. That there will have to be less governmental regulation or else the private operation of our railroads will collapse, is the handwriting that already is written upon the wall. That a lessening of such regulation will of itself bring the best blood of the land once again to American railroading or a better spirit of loyalty and energy and initiative to the present personnel, I do not for one minute believe. If that were so, the solution of our vexing problem would be easy. We simply would have to put the hands of the clock backward again, return to 1887 or thereabouts, and, presto! our troubles would be over.
Unfortunately no such quick cure awaits the sick man of American business. The restoration of his health, putting him soundly upon his feet once again, requires a great deal of study and of thought. Already I have hinted at two possible embrocations in this very sore spot of his labor relationships—the readjustment of wages (it is hardly going to be possible to lower them far again unless possibly under some adaptation of the very sane British method which we have just seen) and the beginning of an organized movement to recruit and direct the best of our young men into a business which normally should have great fascination for them. There is another ointment which I have saved for the last.
Coöperation beats regulation. It always has and it always will. Already we have quoted Vice-President Atterbury of the Pennsylvania as saying that in the future the employees should have direct representation in the management of the carriers. That is one of the few 100-per-cent.-right statements. Carried to the final degree of actuality it would mean employee representation upon a railroad’s directorate. That such a representation would be a benefit to labor I shall not deny. But I am thinking of quite another thing, of the vast benefit that it would be to the railroad itself. There is the real kernel of the nut.
Some day we shall progress to the point where the directorates of our railroads will be very real directorates indeed, not groups of busy and harried bankers dropping in once a week for an hour or two for their twenty-dollar gold-pieces. The farce that such a representation is necessary to a proper protection of the underwritings will then be completely exploded. Possibly the most successful single private business in America, Standard Oil, is to-day operated upon the continuous directorate principle. Its directors give their entire time to the company upon whose board they sit. They are paid generous salaries for their entire time. They are experts in the refining and the selling of oil. And the board which sits each business day at eleven fritters away no time whatsoever in listening to the fads and whimsicalities of inexpert representation.
Some day some one of our railroads may have the vision and the enterprise to adapt that plan to itself. If so it does it will at one time have solved many of the most vexatious present-time problems of its operation. The curse of absentee landlordism will then disappear almost automatically. And if that railroad has the future vision and enterprise, and the courage, to place at least one or two genuine labor representatives upon its board, 99 per cent. of its labor troubles will also disappear, also automatically. Already it has been suggested that future railroad legislation insist that such representation be made. I should hate to see such a step taken, by law. It would be worthless. It would be merely multiplying the evil of over-regulation from which our roads already are suffering. But I should dearly love to see the step taken in the only way it should be taken—from the heart of an American railroad itself, as a matter of good sentiment, good tradition, good business sense. Then and then only would it bring its great reward—a revival of loyalty, energy, ambition—the reincarnation of the spirit of our fine American railroader of yesterday.