THE MAN FACTOR OF THE PROBLEM

Progress in human relationship may be, I think, safely permitted at least the consideration of priority in any understanding of our surpassing railroad problem. For it may also be set down as fairly axiomatic that unless we progress in this phase of transport we cannot expect to go ahead in any other department of it. In its tense importance to the larger question this very human problem can be regarded as foundation-like. Upon it the railroad structure may yet build. Without it, it certainly must fall.

For more than two decades past, imagination, virility, foresight have been upon the wane in our railroads of the United States until to-day with these qualities quite gone upon many of them, the debacle of our national transport machine becomes a doubly depressing picture. The man with an idea may be needed upon our carriers but, as we shall see gradually, he is not often wanted there. They are ruled by conservatism; conservatism carried to the last degree. Yet only yesterday the man with an idea was at a premium in our railroading; our roads themselves were known for their daring, their strength, their progress. To-day too many of the men who operate them are the abject slaves of a system; the only ideas that they safely may advance are those leading to immediate economies. Immediate expenses, even with great and far-reaching economies as their ultimate result, are quite taboo. The railroader no longer may think. Apparently he may only execute.

What is the reason for this—for the human debacle of our carriers following so closely upon the physical, and in many cases responsible for it? Has the American railroader lost his ability to think and to act upon original lines? Has he sunk, with the debris of much of his once proud transport system, almost to the limits of degradation?

A hundred answers will be made to these questions. Some of them will come from banking interests—shrewd men, in banking. These will bear upon the degree of regulation to which our rail carriers are subjected to-day.

“These government sharks have killed railroad initiative,” it will be said time and time again. There is some truth in that answer, yet I think myself there is greater truth in the statement that absentee ownership of the carriers—if I may be permitted to speak frankly, long-distance banker control—has done far more than regulation, either State or Federal, to kill initiative and progress in our transport machine. Wall Street is likely to think too exclusively in terms of dividends; Wall Street does not think enough in terms of men.

People in Wall Street, and a good many others outside of that famous thoroughfare as well, think of the difficulties of our railroad problem as things merely of dollars and cents. They feel that the questions of rates and wages, of income and outgo, are the sole factors to decide the future weal or woe of the railroads. If the rates are put high enough and the wages and other items of expenditure are kept low enough the roads will prosper again. These people feel that the problem is solely an economic one.

I believe that they are wrong. Granted that dollars and cents do enter largely into the problem and its solution, that unless our national system of railroads becomes a real “going concern” it can hope for no continued success, I still feel that the prime point of the entire question is contained in three words, the human factor. This factor comes first, not last. That Wall Street and other cocksure people have in the past placed it behind the problem of finance, is one of the very large reasons why our American railroads are having such extremely hard sledding at the present moment.The human problem of the railroad may be fairly said to be divided into two classes, that of the patron and that of the employee. Before I am done the necessities of the first of these classes will have had attention; for the moment those of the second claim our full interest. There is always that meaningful phrase, “the fine tradition of our American railroading,” that we are using again and again because it stands for something very definite, the thing which was largely responsible for the first upgrowth and strength of our railroads and whose loss within recent years has been chiefly responsible for their downfall. It was that tradition, that old-fashioned affection for railroading and loyalty to it, that made men work, not eight hours, but ten or twelve at a single stretch, and under the stress of a great emergency, such as a flood or a blizzard, sometimes sixteen or twenty-four or even forty-eight hours at a stretch. To-day they will not do this.

Why?

It is not a story quickly told. To understand why the railroader of to-day will not work long hours, even in reasonable emergencies, save under the spur of fearfully high overtime pay, why he goes about with indifference in his manner and a lurking grudge in his heart, one must dive beneath the surface of the situation. There he may find the solution of the loss of our railroad tradition.

The beginnings of that tradition are in the beginnings of the American railroad itself. They root back to the days when the overland carriers were in that same flash stage of development that in our day we have seen come to the motor-car and the motor-truck—the days when romance rode the steel highway, when it was thrusting its stout tendrils here and there and everywhere, when earnings and enterprise and initiative were all alike unlimited, when, in a word, the railroad called in an all but irresistible way to the rich man’s son and the poor man’s too, when the banker’s clerk a president would be and the farmer’s boy had as his supreme ambition the driving of a fast passenger-locomotive.What has become of that farmer’s boy who used to stand in a field for a single idle moment to watch the fast express go sweeping by and dream wistfully of future possibilities, or who stood for a fascinated minute beside the iron horse as it paused at the country depot, studying the intricacies of thrust and gear and bearing? Alas, he no longer covets railroading. It has ceased to enthrall or even interest him, despite the fact that the swing of the pendulum is to-day all in favor of the rank and file of men who work with their hands upon the railroad. Yesterday, in those same golden days of which I have just spoken, the swing was at the other end of the arc. The railroad employee was down; his employer was up. Two years ago this giant pendulum had completed its course. The employer was down, the employee up; and something approaching a social revolution in our railroading had been accomplished.

The railroad employee—succinctly the two million and a half of the rank and file of railroad workers—had become a political asset. Two million and a half direct votes are a bait that few shrewd politicians can ignore. That it was not ignored has in recent years been shown repeatedly, in the passage, by this State legislature and that, of various protective statutes for the railroaders, some of them good and some of them absurd; in the thrusting through Congress of the Adamson Eight-Hour Law; and in the extreme deference shown by the first Federal director-general of railroads to the big brotherhoods and other unions of transport employees, with the final result that those groups of railroad labor which had remained unorganized up to the period of Federal control proceeded to organize themselves. The stake was too good.

Incidentally it may be stated that in past years the average railroad executive was himself the largest single force toward the propagation of trade-unionism within his industry. While decrying its steady growth he placed a premium upon its advantages. Let me explain. A few years ago, say ten or fifteen, at the most, there were but four important unions of railroad employees—the four great brotherhoods of train workers: engineers, firemen, conductors, and trainmen. These were and still are high-grade organizations, extremely independent, refusing for many years even to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor. The men who conducted them were high-grade men of great principle and considerable vision. They fought for the rights of their fellows and fought well, with the result that there were few times when train employees were not adequately paid.

At that time the rest of railroad labor, with the very few exceptions, had no national organization; its individual loyalty was given instead to the properties for which it worked. With what result? Here is one glowing instance.

Conductors, then and now, belonged almost without exception to their strong trade organization, the Brotherhood of Railroad Conductors. It took good care of its own. A conductor on a fairly good run might easily earn from $175 to $200 a month, even in those prosaic days of butter at twenty-five cents a pound. It was a good pay, yet one could hardly say that the average conductor was overpaid. For he was far more than a mere train employee, particularly if he had a passenger run. He was a great point of personal contact between a railroad and its patrons. Upon his tact and diplomacy and understanding, or lack of these qualities, his road might rise or fall. True at all times, this was intensified in hotly competitive territory. A good conductor might easily bring or hold patrons for his road, a poor one drive them away to the other line.

Yet I think you will agree with me that at least an equal point of contact between the railroad and its patron is the man with whom he comes in contact before he boards the train—the station-agent. His tact and diplomacy and understanding have a good deal to do with attracting patronage to the road. Yet it was not more than a decade ago that I found in a certain small brisk Eastern city of some twenty-five thousand people the chief representative of an important railroad working seven days a week, twelve or fourteen hours a day, and paid $85 a month. He knew what the conductors who ran the trains past his station were receiving and it rankled.

This was not an unusual case, this high-grade man, working long hours in his office at the passenger station and between trains scurrying out through the town to sell tickets to possible travelers over his line—it was in a genuinely competitive territory. It was all too typical. More than one railroad in past years paid its dividends out of the exploitation of its labor, and to-day is reaping the benefit of its short-sightedness. One can imagine the ease with which the former United States Railroad Administration was able to help bring about a strong union organization of railroad station-agents and employees!

Mr. McAdoo was not asleep to the possibilities of this situation. We already have seen how from the outset he extended to labor a place in his cabinet and placed the entire vexed wage situation in the hands of a special commission headed by the late Franklin K. Lane. Now in all fairness and in simple justice to the Railroad Administration it should be set down that no matter what its motive it did seek to place railroad labor on a more scientific and more human basis with relation to its employer than any private corporation had ever succeeded in giving it. It tried to place the railroad wage on a basis more directly in accord with living costs, and less with mere supply and demand. Similarly it endeavored to better the working conditions of the rank and file of the railroaders. That in some of these last cases, particularly those of certain of the so-called national agreements, eventually it went entirely too far, is not to be denied. That is now proved by the willingness of the new Federal tribunal, the Railroad Labor Board out at Chicago, to abrogate these agreements as soon as the individual carriers shall have succeeded in making new ones with their workers.

This last, however, seems to be much easier planned than actually accomplished. Months are slipping by and some of the outrageous and expensive agreements still stand, along with some others which are neither outrageous nor expensive. The very worst of the lot, the meticulous arrangements under which a small job on a locomotive headlight (to make a single possible but rather typical instance) required six or eight men because each was a specialist and no man could infringe upon another’s specialty, are going now and going rather rapidly. There is an apocryphal story around one Eastern railroad town to the effect that the changing of an air-hose connection on a Pullman sleeping-car one day more than a year ago cost the railroad forty dollars—a small job which two ordinary capable mechanics would have been glad to perform for but two or three at the most. Instances such as these have been multiplied. A farmer’s boy who lived close to a railroad in the Middle West and who received five dollars a month and an occasional trip-pass to Chicago and back for oiling and watching an automatic electric pump at an obscure siding saw himself rated as an electrician and in receipt of $185 a month (standardized wage) without having lifted one finger toward the bonanza. It was heyday for the rank and file. The Lane Commission, which really did much scientific work on this wage question despite the exceedingly great time pressure and the war crisis under which it worked, started the ball rolling, yet in what seemingly was a very fair and reasonable fashion. It was after that, even after Mr. McAdoo’s actual term of office as director-general, that the real damage was done. The pendulum swung then, and swung far. From a point where the wage-scale was unfair to the railroad employee it came toward a point where it was unfair to the railroad investor.

This was particularly true in the case of the shop-craft men. They seem to have been the real offenders in the situation. With the position of the men in the train service, the members of the brotherhoods, I can have little else than great sympathy. Their plight at this moment is deplorable. At the best, they catch the hard end of railroading, the long, unconscionable hours, the stress of bad weather, the nights away from home, all the other difficult conditions of life upon the road. I do not believe that there have been many times when these men have been seriously overpaid. The score is far more apt to lie upon the other side of the table.

True it is that even in these branches of railroad service the unreasoning form of national agreement has crept in. I can remember not so many years ago up in northern New York when if a switch-crew was sent down to one of the paper-mills to get a box-car it was paid two hours’ pay for two hours’ work. That was fair pay—and it was not. A switch-crew even in dull times could hardly exist on the prospect of getting no more than two hours’ pay out of twenty-four. Gradually the pay for such a job—any job at all—was set at a minimum of half a day. That seemed fair. A little later this minimum, no matter how small the job, was set at a full day’s pay. Even that might have been fair were it never abused. Let me illustrate.

Here is a yard-crew kicking around in Watertown yard. The first thing that happens in a brisk day is that an engine derails somewhere south of the junction. It is not a serious mishap, and the yard-crew, acting as a wrecker, cleans it up in ninety minutes or thereabouts and gets a full day’s pay. An hour later that same crew has to take a box-car two miles down the Cape Branch to a paper-mill, another ninety minutes perhaps, and another full day’s pay for every man Jack of the crew. They sit around for three hours in the yardmaster’s cabin and settle all the affairs of the New York Central railroad. In two or three more hours a careless switcher sends two flat-cars off the end of the siding up at Sewall’s Island. Our little crew is again a wrecker. It goes up to the Island, puts the derailed cars on the track again,—another ninety minutes of actual work,—and draws a third full day’s pay. Three days’ pay in eight or nine hours is not bad. I should like to be able myself to turn the trick.

This is an exceptional case, of course—and it is not. Some strange things are possible in the national agreements which were foisted upon the Railroad Administration during the control of Walker D. Hines. I do not believe that Hines himself ever realized how strange they might become—his own large railroad experience would have guarded him against them.

When the versatile Henry Ford embarked not so many months ago on the difficult and time-honored business of running a railroad he was not greeted with any warm-hearted reception dinner by the American Railway Association. He probably was not even asked to join the association. Its members had heard of Mr. Ford as a shatterer of traditions. And traditions, as you already know, to the heart of the old-time railroader are like unto the ten commandments themselves. I have no brief for Mr. Ford, any more than for Mr. McAdoo. He is not an economist, although he would like to think himself one. He is a mechanic, a super-mechanic if you please. And he has a glorious knowledge of men, their strength and their weaknesses. Yet this is not criticism. These last qualities are much needed in our American railroad situation to-day. By this time there is almost a superfluity of economists in it.

Mr. Ford at the outset sought to solve the railroad labor question by straddling it—by tearing up all the cumbersome and complicated standardized national agreements between the men of the small railroad that he now owns and substituting for them a generous minimum wage and the right of the road to utilize a man at whatever work it pleases, within his established eight hours of labor. On Mr. Ford’s railroad an employee may possibly drive a locomotive for ninety minutes and then spend five hours and a half washing car windows, or trucking cases upon a freight-house platform. And the astonishing thing is that in this one instance at least the plan apparently is working.

It may be that Mr. Ford has reached the solution of the problem. I am not at all sure that he has not. But I feel that if he has, a large number of railroad executives and sub-executives will forget their annoyances at the Detroit gentleman’s publicity methods in connection with his personal railroad and begin to call him blessed. They have had little good fortune as yet in handling the standardized national agreements with their men, which were their unwilling inheritance from Uncle Sam, railroader sublime. The agreements still stand despite the professed entire willingness of the Railroad Labor Board to abrogate them, for the simple reason that no acceptable substitute for them has yet been brought forward. The Labor Board has made some rather sweeping rulings in cutting down overtime payments and the like, however—all to the cost of the rank and file of the railroaders. Their position steadily becomes less and less enviable.

In October last they took the 12 per cent. cut in their wages—roughly speaking, half a billion dollars. They did not want to take that; the hot-heads in the organization talked “strike” and a national tie-up of our rail transport machine. If it could have been achieved it would have been a real national calamity. As it was, the country had a very bad state of nerves over the mere possibility of the thing. The strike was an impossibility. Many of the railroad executives in their hearts wanted it. With labor conditions as they were across the country, with the unwillingness (to put it mildly) of the average man to have his comfort and necessities interfered with no matter how much right or justice might be involved in the situation, the executives held all the cards. The leaders of the men knew that. Therefore there was no strike. Strikes are rarely popular when times are dull.

Perhaps it is knowing this that a certain group of railroad executives—there is no great unanimity in the matter—is steadily pressing toward a further wage reduction of another 10 per cent. I shall refrain from comment upon the wisdom or unwisdom of such a further step at this time. That the very executives who are urging it are, I think, none too sure of their position is indicated by the fact that they are coupling the proposed reduction with vague suggestions that if it is granted they will reduce their freight-rates, at least, correspondingly. The idea of reducing rates to build up traffic apparently does not even come into the reckoning.

Would you understand this situation better? Then come back with me for a moment to those humming summer days of 1920 when the railroads of the United States were still in record-breaking traffic. It is June, 1920; a sluggish hot evening in the city of Chicago. Eight railroad engineers, members in good standing of their brotherhood, are set upon by a gang of organized thugs—in the picturesque phraseology of the railroaders, a “wrecking crew”—in the shadows of the great Northwestern Terminal, and so badly beaten up that they have to be sent to the nearest hospitals for treatment. Yet the Chicago newspapers of the very next morning announced with a sort of smug optimism that “satisfactory progress” was being made with the switchmen’s strike. They predicted an early break-up of the entire “outlaw” walk-out (which had been in progress since the preceding April), and apparently without a definite knowledge that each ensuing twenty-four hours were seeing the whole outrageous business gain in its vicious strength.

Up to that time we had had almost every thing difficult and disagreeable in our railroad debacle except physical violence. It then seemed to have embarked upon this final phase of badly disordered industrialism. The Chicago imbroglio was not particularly exceptional. Brotherhood men all over the country, members of the most powerful unions that this land has ever known, literally went to their work nightly in fear and in trembling. In few of our big cities is police protection to-day at its highest point of efficiency—for a variety of reasons, which need no particular explanation here and now. This means, in turn, that rowdyism and thugism are at high-water marks. When these are organized by brains and financed with plenty of real money they seem to go all unchecked. And loyal railroaders of every sort suffer the penalty, in the first instance at least, with the dear old public as usual in the rÔle of the greatest sufferer and the final judge.

Outrageous as it really was, the outlaw strike was one of the most human that this country has ever seen. It came as the logical result of official stupidity and procrastination. In January, 1919, the various groups of railroad employees, appalled, as was every other form of worker, by not only the steady but the extremely rapid increase in living costs, made applications for wage raises beyond those that the labor commission originally had granted—the so-called billion-dollar increase. So did other forms of labor ask for wage raises—and got them. The applications of the railroad workers remained under consideration after eighteen months. The Railroad Administration, even though it continued in full control of our carriers for fourteen months after the wage applications had been filed, passed the buck—and permitted the national agreements. That was politics. The recently created Railroad Labor Board sitting out at Chicago was going over all the testimony again, making solemn and voluminous proceedings of a business that might be decided, tentatively at least, in a week of real work. That was politics again.

In the meantime, in those slowly moving eighteen months, what came to pass? In San Francisco, in Portland, in Seattle, in half a dozen other west coast cities where the wages of unskilled labor had reached an abnormally high figure, the railroad switching-crews had the exquisite pleasure of shunting cars at $4.50 for an eight-hour day into shipyards and other industries where the commonest and most unskilled forms of labor were receiving six and seven and eight dollars a day for the same amount of labor. I do not maintain that shifting box-cars is a particularly expert form of labor. Yet at the least it is a fairly hazardous one. The actuaries of the insurance companies will assure you as to that. And it is a fairly responsible one too. The claim agents of the railroads themselves will bear full witness as to that. They know to their own great sorrow that a box-car filled with breakables cannot be batted back and forth like a gondola of coal or a flat filled with steel angle-iron.

“Responsible, did you say?” snorted the brotherhood engineer of a switcher to me one day, a year or two ago out in the Mid-West. He shouted across his cab as he poked into a siding and pulled out one of John Ringling’s long circus trains. “You’d think it was responsible if you’d see the amount of signing off I have to do for this trick before I can cart her out of the roundhouse. They’re right too. She may be eleven years old—you can see by the maker’s plate there over the steam-chest—but she’s still worth a good fifteen thousand dollars in the open market to-day. And I’m responsible for her. For five dollars. While the fat-heads that are up on the main streets of this town manicuring the cobblestones for the city fathers are getting six dollars—and no responsibility whatsoever.”

Here are two of the reasons why I have just called the walk-out of the railroad switchmen one of the simplest and the most logical of all the strikes in the country. The eighteen months of inexcusable procrastination in coming to a decision in this railroad wage matter was a third and a far greater one.

Yet remember that the switchmen were not the only aggrieved parties to this situation—this seemingly impossible situation that has quickly become an actuality. Other forms of railroad labor suffered quite as much if not more from official procrastination and official indifference. A passenger trainman rode with me a year or two ago across northern Idaho.

“Don’t you go putting any pieces in your paper,” said he, “saying that all of the train-crews are making the big money. A few are. But they are mighty few.”

He swung quickly to his own case. He was on his run, across three States from Spokane, Washington, to Paradise, Montana, seven days a week, 365 days out of the year. For this he was pulling down $150 a month—$120 for his straight time and the other $30 as overtime. Around him in Spokane carpenters were getting $1.25 an hour and plumbers $1.50—and working five and one half days a week or, at the most six. They all owned cars, and Saturday afternoons and Sundays they went fishing. The brakeman had not been fishing in more than two years. He told me so and I believed him. If you interview enough men in the course of a twelvemonth you will come quite quickly to know the kind that you can believe. It is written in their faces.

“Seven days a week and with two gardens, one at each end of the run; and I make out—nothing more,” he continued. “Last night my wife and I went down to the market and we bought pork-chops. There were six of them—none too many for the three mouths to be fed at home—and the measly things cost me sixty cents, at the rate of forty-five cents a pound. We allow ourselves meat three times a week, not oftener.”

Somehow even though it might have the fervent approval of some of our really high-brow hygienists, I do not like that idea of an American workingman being able to have meat but three times a week. It doesn’t seem quite American. It doesn’t seem quite fair. I do not believe that the average executive, or even the average stockholder of the American railroad, wants such a condition. He assuredly would not want it for any member of his household, or for himself. If he did want such a condition, I should like then to contrast his attitude with a British one that came to me not long ago.

“We of Great Britain feel that every British workman is entitled first to a minimum wage that will insure him decent conditions of living—housing, food, clothing, education for his children, insurance against death and old age—and to a maximum wage that will include these things plus a little share in the profits of the railway business. Otherwise we can never be sure of the coming generation. And a decent coming generation is our one national assurance of continued national strength and security.”

So spake the general manager of a British railway to me one day last year. He sounded a real truth. In their prosperous days our American railroads were decidedly loath to share their profits; some of their more captious critics were not slow to say that they had capitalized their underpaid helpers and were paying dividends on the remainder. A few roads, notably the prosperous Santa FÉ and the Southern Pacific, in the golden days before the war had made a beginning toward bonus and profit-sharing systems but these were in the vast minority. I should like to see those extremely prosperous railroads, the Burlington and the Lackawanna, resurrect the experiment. It should not be left to Henry Ford to accomplish all the railroad experimentation in this country.

Offhand the job of a passenger trainman, such as my friend up on the Northern Pacific, may not seem to be a particularly strenuous one even though it is long-houred. Here is a harder one. On a test running across Wyoming not long ago the husky boy with the shovel in the engine-cab tossed six thousand pounds of coal an hour from the tender into the fire-box. The run was six hours long. If you do not even yet get the measure of his job, go down into your cellar, find that there are eighteen tons of coal there and then shovel it from one side of the cellar to the other—in six hours. Repeat the entire process three or four times in the course of a week and then write and tell me which you had rather fire on—a coal-burner without a mechanical stoker, an oil-burner, or one of those big electric locomotives up on the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul, where the fireman’s chief job is to keep awake against the lazy droning of the motors to be prepared in the always-possible emergency that he may have to take control of the craft.

Here is a final instance or two of what I mean.

From one point in California to another 170 miles distant is a typical operating division of one of the biggest roads in our Southwest—a little longer than typical Eastern operating divisions in fact. It is provided that freights moving from the one to the other shall do so at the average rate of twelve and one-half miles an hour; which means thirteen hours and thirty-six minutes for the division. That therefore becomes its official running-time. Anything beyond that fairly good lapse of continuous labor was paid for as overtime “pro-rata.” In other words, the train-crew was paid the same figure for its sixteenth hour of continuous service as for its first one, and the incentive for the railroad to cut down its overtime is gone. That is why the rank and file of railroaders were fighting so strenuously three years ago to gain time-and-one-half pay for their overtime, beyond a basic eight-hour day. It is the only way that they could see for bettering their actual conditions of labor—for getting in that occasional fishing-trip or the journey with the wife over the hills in the long-distance jitney.

Let us translate this more definitely and more intimately, and come to the exact testimony of a Great Northern fireman operating out of Havre up in northern Montana. He speaks, under the promise of no revelation whatever as to his identity, with great frankness. It is not easy for a railroader to speak frankly, particularly to a stranger. It is not encouraged in railroad circles, to put it frankly. But this man—he is a keen, upstanding American of the best type—speaks to you through me with absolute frankness. He begins with one or two observations as to the rank and file of railroaders in general to-day.

“When I started in this game,” he says, “the men I worked with were mostly single and had neither dependents nor home ties. Their conversation consisted mainly in stories of the road, whose location wanders from Portland, Maine, to Seattle or to Winnipeg—‘the Peg’—to Pocatello, to New Orleans, or to San Francisco. Conductors in charge of a train were very rarely men who had been ‘made’ upon that road; seniority did not mean much; men went from job to job as their fancy dictated. They tell a story up this country about a conductor and an engineer that will illustrate my point.

“You will begin by understanding that the rules of this road, as well as of all the others, provide for a standard watch—a watch that has been passed upon by a qualified and registered watch-inspector. There is also a rule that the conductor compare time with the engineer before starting out upon any trip. In each division-office there is a ‘watch register,’ and every watch must be compared with the ‘standard clock’ and any difference between them noted upon the register. The rule states specifically that no watch can be called correct that is even thirty seconds away from the ‘standard clock.’ Now then.

“This freight conductor over in the eastern end of the State came to the engineer with his orders and handed them up into the cab. After the engineman had finished reading them, the conductor asked: ‘What time have you got?’ The engineer grinned and replied: ‘What time have you got?’ This time the conductor grinned. He reached down into his overcoat pocket and pulled out one of the small tin watches that are advertised across the land as having made the dollar famous. ‘Seven forty-five,’ said he, with great gravity. His friend, the engineer, also assumed solemnity, then pulled a nickel-plated alarm-clock out from under his seat. ‘You’re right, Tim,’ said he, ‘right to the minute.’

“Those days are passed. It takes longer to-day to get a regular run on most roads than it takes for a lawyer or a doctor to complete his college course. Seven years is about the quickest time to a run that amounts to anything. The railroader of to-day takes his work seriously, settles down and tries to be a good citizen instead of the old-time ‘boomer’ [the slang phrase for the former itinerants] that once filled up the business, and not in any way to its credit. But it’s pretty hard being a good citizen under the sixteen-hour law and the Adamson Law which was supposed to provide a real eight-hour day and really never did anything of the sort. If we get in at four o’clock in the afternoon we don’t know whether we are going out again at eight o’clock the next morning or eight o’clock the same evening. The one thing is just as likely to happen as the other. And how can friend-wife count upon her evenings with us at the movies?

“Let me be still more specific.“Let’s stretch that sixteen-hour day of which I was just speaking into a good practical work-day. Let us say that we will call you on the first day of the month for First No. 401 bound west out of Havre here. We will slip you 2450 tons and Mallet articulated compound No. 1801, and make the start at sharp four in the afternoon. Our lad at the fire-box gets sick over at Gilford and we tie you up there, ‘on credit.’ In other words you were four hours and thirty minutes getting to Gilford and yet your time didn’t count after getting your ‘tie-up’ message; not until you are called once again. If by that time you are hungry or sleepy it is not the Great Northern’s fault. It is following the rules of the game, just as every other road across the land is following them.

“Five hours later a train comes along and a relief fireman gets off. You make a fresh start at your trip. You still have eleven hours and thirty minutes to go, out of your sixteen hours of actual on-duty trick. Now see how you go it. While doing some switching at Chester you get a car off the track. After that your engine bursts a flue and dies. They release you once more, again on credit, and until four o’clock in the morning. At nine along comes another engine and you are called once again. You still have eight hours to work. Everything goes all right until you get to Shelby. You get a message there at two in the afternoon to do some switching. The conductor tells the despatcher that if he stops to do this work the sixteen-hour law will get him before he gets in. The division superintendent butts in and says: ‘We will give you credit for being off the track two hours at Chester, and that will give you plenty of time.’

“You cannot beat out the old D. S. He was born to the game. You arrive at Cut Bank at seven o’clock on the evening of the second, having complied with the law, technically at least, and are ordered to deadhead back to Havre on No. 2 leaving in fifteen minutes. You probably have a chance to get just a bite to eat before slipping on No. 2. It is snowing hard, in the dead of the Northern winter in fact, and Two has a time of getting to Havre. It is six hours at least before you swing down in front of the depot there. Before you ever have a chance to get into the depot the call-boy meets you and as you have had your Federal rest—eight hours curled up on a seat in a day-coach—he wants you for First No. 403 to go right back to Cut Bank again. If you don’t want to go you are a bolshevist. Exaggeration? Not one bit of it. I have been myself four days making the trip that I have just described to you, so you see that I could have made my illustration both longer and broader and thicker. If you think that I have exaggerated, stay in your office some day sixteen hours at a stretch, then get on the day-coach of a local train, ride eight hours, and cut in for another sixteen hours of office work again—preferably at writing a railroad book.”

I have let this man close the case for the train service men. He puts it in its full strength and I think that he puts it well. No fair-minded American wants American labor poorly paid, and American railroad labor—upon which so much of our life and property is absolutely dependent—least of all. It has been a sort of tradition in this country that railroad labor should be paid less than similar labor in other industry—just why I never could quite understand, unless it be for the fact that railroad labor until a comparatively recent time has been a little more loyal to its calling than the labor of some other industries that might easily be mentioned specifically. The variety of the business, the opportunities for travel and experience that it gave, have been real factors in holding its wages very slightly yet very perceptibly under normal levels. And in the same way they have been factors in holding it back against normal industrial progress.

When one comes to the question of the shop-craft unions (I shall speak of still other branches of railroad endeavor before I am done) the problem becomes infinitely more perplexing. It is indeed with these newer union affiliations that the railroads are to-day having their greatest difficulties. For the old-time brotherhoods, in which there is a fine flavor of reasonable conservatism, the average working railroad executive has a deal of real respect. Perhaps he realizes how much worse off he and his fellows would be if he had to substitute for them in train operation unions of the sort that are driving him mad in his shop-work. But the shops represent a real perplexity. Some of the roads, beginning with the Erie, have gone so far as to rent their repair-shops at division points for operation by privately organized corporations. In fact the Erie has gone so far as to follow this practice for its track maintenance in certain instances. A private corporation is bound neither by the national agreements of the Railroad Administration or by the rulings of the Railroad Labor Board out at Chicago. It can buy its labor in the open market and at the prevailing market prices—and at the present moment at obvious savings. But the effect upon the morale of a railroad of this remarkable practice of “farming out” inherent parts of its operation I shall leave to your imagination.

That the outside shop can and does work cheaply is shown by the experience of a plant in Buffalo which upon an actual invested capital of $80,000 cleaned up more than $100,000 actual profits in 1920 and expected to double this figure in 1921. Yet it was able to repair freight-cars for the railroads entering that important railroad point for about $600 each, which was about $200 less than the roads could do it for themselves.

There is a railroad executives’ side to this situation, and it is a big side indeed. A certain large road in the central portion of the country decided to put the matter squarely up to its shop forces before proceeding toward the leasing of its repair facilities to outside companies, as we have just seen. It called in the heads of its shop-crafts unions and put the cards squarely on the table before them. It wanted to go back to piece-work, the method by which each and every man was paid for what he actually accomplished, a good old-fashioned American way of running a shop or any other sort of business. The McAdoo administration abolished piece-work in the railroad shops across the land, and the output fell off greatly both in quality and in quantity. The railroads to-day are having a fearful time getting it installed again.

The general manager of this road of which I am speaking—he is himself a real red-blooded little man who came up through every phase of railroading through his ability and his sheer energy—told the shop-crafts unions just what he would do and what he would not do and when he would do it. If they would accept piece-work on a schedule 25 per cent. higher than that of 1917 and turn out the same good volume of work that they turned out in 1917, they would be making considerably more than the per-hour basis gave them in 1921. If they would not accept piece-work by a certain specified day he would then proceed to lease these facilities to outside corporations, much as it would hurt the road’s pride to do so.

The men did not accept the piece-work system. And the general manager of the big road went from one end to the other of it leasing its shops just as he said he would do. When he came to the last of them he hesitated. It was the road’s oldest shop. In it there had been made no little railroad history. Sentiment halted him. He thought of tradition. Remember, if you will, that there are as many times in railroading where tradition is a good thing as where it is an exceedingly bad thing.

While he halted a request came to his ear from a personal friend, one of the oldest mechanics in that ancient shop. His old friend wanted to see the big boss—he still called him “Billy.” He came and brought a friend or two with him. He wanted to know why the big shop, with its six thousand workers, had been shut down for so long. The G. M. answered promptly. He told of his proffered plan for piece-work. The old mechanic made him repeat his statement.

“We never heard one word of it, Billy,” he said.“Billy” stayed two more days in that town. On the second afternoon he called a mass-meeting of the shop-workers in the biggest hall in the city. They came, enough of them at least to fill the place to its very rafters. He put the piece-work proposition to those men. They ratified it overwhelmingly. The next day the shop reopened and from that day to this has been a humming center of revivified railroad industry.

There also is still another side to this vexed shop situation, and it too is a big side. I should not be fair if I did not give it at least passing attention.

With their insistence that their shops return to the piece-work system—and it seems to be a perfectly fair demand—the railroads are using every endeavor to bring back their shopmen to the high quality of workmanship that they attained before the days of the World War, and which has not come back since then—not until very recently at least and under the spur of widespread unemployment across the land. Yet, our railroads as a rule—there are a very few exceptions—have been most lax in employing modern or scientific methods of spurring up the production of their shopmen, in quality as well as in quantity. A year and a half ago I made an extensive tour of some of the most forward-looking manufacturing plants in America and found there for myself many ingenious plans for stimulating the interest, the enthusiasm, and the productive ability of the men. Shop committees, education, bonus systems—all these and many other well-tried devices at work, and successfully at work. I was appalled when mentally I compared these factory plans with those of the average railroad shop, which rarely has any at all.

One other thing of even greater importance. In these days no more than those, there still is no assurance to the shop-worker of continued employment. The great haunting fear of being “laid off” forever is just ahead of him.

I recognize clearly the difficulties that would await any systematic attempt to insure continuous employment to the worker in the railroad or any other sort of shop. Yet the fact remains that the railroad shops have not always been as fair as those in outside industries in keeping a well-filled pay-roll, even in seasons of great depression and stress. That such a neglect of human obligation reacted against them in the war-time days is not to be doubted. No really permanent solution of the railroad shop problem—it would be pathetic to regard the process of leasing out the shops to outside corporations as any long-time solution—can afford to ignore this factor.

I have known a railroad under orders from the men away up at the top—the president or the board of directors—to make sweeping and senseless reductions in shop and maintenance forces in order to make a quick showing of apparent savings in operating costs, for financial purposes known best to those same men, higher up. The futility of such moves needs no discussion; what is saved to-day on necessary maintenance of rolling-stock or other physical plant of the railroad must be expended to-morrow, and generally in larger measure. They would be laughable were it not for one thing, the human misery that almost invariably follows in their trail. How very much greater the wisdom that now and then and again tempts a railroad to use a dull season for the repair or even the reconstruction of its equipment, for the rebuilding of lines or even the construction of new trackage!

Therefore I am repeating—and adding—that no permanent solution of our railroad problem can be reached that ignores the right of the faithful and loyal employee to continuous service. It may be necessary to cut his wage. That is a situation that may confront any man in any business or profession. But save for fair cause he has an inherent right to continuous employment. This should be put down as a real fundamental of the railroad industry.

Railroad industry! Railroad tradition! Railroad morale!

Give them a chance. Let us have a scientific way of developing them once again; let us have a scientific yet a simple and humane way of studying out these surpassingly great problems of the human factor in our railroad operation; in the hours and conditions of his working, the cost of his living, the reckoning of his compensation. To such a problem—a problem within a problem—we now have arrived. And we shall begin its consideration.