Any officer who is retired with a pension, on account of ill health, before he is sixty years of age, may, if he recovers his health, be recalled to duty at the discretion of the head of his Department or of the Treasury. Under such circumstances the officer receives the salary of his new office and so much of his pension as shall be sufficient to make his total income equal to the original pension. Under the foregoing rule two officers were made respectively postmaster at Bristol and postmaster at Hastings.
Before the Tweedmouth Committee, Mr. Uren, President of the Postmasters’ Association, protested against such “blocking of some of the best offices by pensioners…. Here are two good offices, one with $4,000 a year, and the other with $2,750, which are taken up by pensioners who recover their health, and so block a line of promotion…. I only mention these as the two most recent cases with which this sort of thing has happened, but they are not the only occasions by a good many, which I am instructed to bring before your Committee as a fair subject for consideration.” Mr. Crosse, another witness, added: “The Postal Clerks’ Association also desire to endorse the evidence put forward by the Postmasters’ Association as to the anomaly and injustice of certain postmasters being retained in the service who are in the receipt of pension and salary from the Department.”[388]
Mechanical Equality Demanded
Prior to August, 1891, the postmen of metropolitan London were divided into two classes: the second class, with wages rising from $4.50 a week to $6, by annual increments of $0.25 a week; and the first class, with wages rising from $6 a week, to $7.50, by annual increments of $0.25 a week. In consequence of the rapid growth of the postal business, however, the postmen frequently passed through the second class into the first class, not in six years, but in from two to five years. But the rate of promotion from the second class into the first differed materially in the several metropolitan branch offices, because of the unequal growth of business at those several offices. That inequality of promotion violated the ideal[389] of the civil servants, which is, that all should fare alike; and therefore, the postmen demanded that the division into two classes be abolished, and that every postman should rise, by stated annual increments, from the initial wage of $4.50 to the final wage of $7.50. But the abolition of classification would put an end to the possibility of those rapid passings through the stages between $4.50 and $6 that had been of frequent occurrence in the past in some of the metropolitan branch offices. By way of compensation for the loss of that chance the postmen demanded that the annual increment be increased beyond $0.25 a week.
The Department, in August, 1891, abolished the classification of the postmen, but it refused to raise the annual increment. It said that the rapid promotion from $4.50 to $6 that had characterized the past had been an accident, that it had not been foreseen, and that the men who had entered the service while it had obtained had not acquired a vested right to it. In 1896 the men who had been postmen prior to the abolition of classification appeared before the Tweedmouth Committee with the statement that they “were under the impression that it was an official principle that no individual should suffer by the introduction of a new scale of promotion or wages.” They demanded compensation for the fact that they had lost, in 1891, the possibility of passing in less than the regular time from the wage of $4.50 to that of $6. They stated that they were prepared to show that “they had suffered material pecuniary loss … amounting in some cases to about $500.”[390] All of which goes to show that in the British Post Office service the abolition of a grievance can in turn become a grievance.
Equality, not Opportunity
Before the Tweedmouth Committee appeared also the representatives of the telegraphers, to demand the abolition of the division of the telegraphers into classes, with promotion by merit between the classes. They demanded amalgamation into a single class, in which each one should pass automatically from the minimum pay to the maximum, provided he was not arrested by the efficiency bar, to be placed at $800 a year. Mr. E. B. L. Hill, Assistant Secretary, General Post Office, London, began his discussion of this demand by quoting with approval the conclusion of the Telegraph Committee of 1893, which was: “We have taken great pains to investigate this matter. Almost without exception the provincial postmasters and telegraph superintendents were opposed to an amalgamation of the classes, and gave the strongest testimony to the value of the present division [into classes] as a means of discouraging indifference, and encouraging zeal and efficiency. We think … that for purposes of discipline it is desirable to maintain the division of the establishment into two classes.” Mr. Hill continued by saying that in the course of the last three or four years he had changed his opinion, and had come to the conclusion that amalgamation into one class must come. “The staff seems to desire, first of all, equality, and the abolition of classification seems to insure the fulfillment of that wish. At the same time classification is a valuable incentive to exertion and efficiency….”[391]
Opportunities Rejected; Increased Pay Demanded