Here, then, is the polyglot material with which our section-boss must work. His name may be Smith, he may have come out of New England itself, and his little house there beside the track is probably as neat as yours or mine. He works long hours and hard, with his body, his hands, and his mind; the men under his authority are more apt to be inefficient than efficient; his responsibility is unceasing. It is not an easy job. And for it he is paid from sixty-five to ninety dollars a month—rarely more. A locomotive engineer is paid three times as much. Yet he is protected by the eight-hour day as his standard of employment, although it is more than likely that his actual hours of work may be even less than eight. And his responsibility is little greater than that of the section-boss.
CHAPTER VI
UNORGANIZED LABOR—THE STATION AGENT
The primary schools of railroading are the little red and yellow and gray buildings that one finds up and down the steel highways of the nation, dotting big lines and small. You find at least one in every American town that thinks itself worthy of the title. And they are hardly less to the towns themselves than the red schoolhouses of only a little greater traditional lore. To the railroad their importance can hardly be minimized. They are its tentacles—the high spots and the low where it touches its territory and its patrons.
To best understand how a station agent measures to his job, let us do as we have done heretofore and take one of them who is typical. Here is one man who in personality and environment is representative and the small New York State town in which he is the railroad’s agent is typical of tens of thousands of others all the way from Maine to California. Brier Hill is an old-fashioned village of less than 10,000 population, albeit it is a county seat and the gateway to a prosperous and beautiful farming district. Two railroads reach it by their side lines, which means competition and the fact that the agent for each must be a considerable man and on the job about all of the time. Our man—we will call him Blinks and his road the Great Midland—has never lived or worked in another town. Thirty years ago he entered the service of the G.M. as a general utility boy around the old brick depot at twelve dollars a month. The old brick depot is still in service and so is Blinks.
In thirty years his pay has been advanced. He now gets $110 a month; in addition his commissions amount to $40 or $50 a month. Engineers and conductors get much more, but the station agent, as we have come to understand, is not protected by a powerful labor organization. There is an Order of Railroad Station Agents, to be sure, but it is weak and hardly to be compared with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers or the Order of Railroad Trainmen. In some cases the station agents rising from a telegraph key have never relinquished their membership in the telegraphers’ union. But, with the telephone almost accepted as a complete success in the dispatching of trains, the railroads see a new opportunity for the efficient use of men who have been crippled in the service; in some cases for the widows and the daughters of men who have died in the ranks. It takes aptitude, long months, and sometimes years to learn the rapid use of the telegraph. A clear mind and quick wit are all that is necessary when the long-distance telephone moves the trains up and down the line.
Blinks, being typical, does not belong to a labor organization. Although he was an expert telegrapher with a high speed rate, he did not happen to belong to the telegraphers’ organization. Instead there is in him a fine vein of old-fashioned loyalty to the property. He was all but born in the service of the Great Midland; he expects to die in the harness there in his homely old-fashioned office in the brick depot at Brier Hill. His is the sort of loyalty whose value to the road can hardly be expressed in mere dollars and cents.
If you would like to know the truth of the matter, you would quickly come to know that the real reason why Blinks has never joined a union is that he holds an innate and unexpressed feeling that he is a captain in the railroad army, rather than a private in its ranks. For he is secretly proud of the “force” that reports to him—chief clerk, ticket agent, two clerks, a baggagemaster, and three freight-house men. Not a man of these draws less than seventy dollars a month, so there is not much difference in their social status and that of the boss. No one has been quicker than he to recognize such democracy. He prides himself that he is an easy captain.