THE LABOR PLIGHT OF THE RAILROAD

Some eighteen per cent of the 2,000,000 railroad employees of the land, receiving a little over twenty-eight per cent of their total pay-roll, are affiliated with the four great brotherhoods—of the engineers, the firemen, the conductors, and the trainmen. In fairness it should be added that the reason why this eighteen per cent in numerical proportion, receives twenty-eight per cent in financial proportion, is that the eighteen per cent includes the larger proportion of the skilled labor of the steel highway. Offhand, one would hardly expect a track laborer to receive the same wages as Freeman, whose skill and sense of responsibility entitles him to run the limited.

Yet how about this section-boss, this man whom we have just interviewed as he stands beside his job, the man who enables Freeman’s train to make her fast run from terminal to terminal in safety? Remember that in summer and in winter, in fair weather and in foul, this man must also measure to his job. He must know that his section—six or seven or eight or even ten miles—is, every inch of it, fit for the pounding of the locomotive at high speed. You do not have to preach eternal vigilance to him. It long since became part of his day’s work. And to do that day’s work he must work long hours and hard—as you have already seen—must be denied the cheeriness and companionship of men of his kind. He frequently must locate his family and himself far apart from the rest of the world. All of this, and please remember that his average pay is about one-third of the average pay of the engineer. It is plain to see that no powerful brotherhood protects him.

If space permitted we could consider the car-maintainer. His is an equally responsible job. Yet he, too, is unorganized, submerged, underpaid. His plight is worse than that of the station agent—and we have just seen how Blinks of Brier Hill earns his pay. As a matter of fact Blinks is rather well paid. There are more men at country depots to be compared with Fremont—men who give the best of their energy and diplomacy and all-round ability only to realize that their pay envelope is an appreciably slimmer thing than those of the well-dressed trainmen who ride the passenger trains up and down the line. The trainman gets a hundred dollars a month already—and under the Adamson law he is promised more.

This, however, may prove one thing quite as much as another. It may not prove that the trainman is overpaid as much as it proves that the station agent is underpaid. Personally, I do not hesitate to incline to the latter theory. I have learned of many trainmasters and road foremen of engines who have far less in their pay envelopes at the end of the month than the men who are under their supervision and control. And there is not much theory about the difficulty a road finds, under such conditions, to “promote” a man from the engineer’s cab to the road foreman’s or the trainmaster’s office. In other days this was a natural step upward, in pay and in authority. Today there is no advance in pay and the men in the cab see only authority and responsibility and worry in such a job—with no wage increase to justify it.

Down in the Southwest this situation is true even of division superintendents—men of long training, real executive ability, and understanding who are actually paid less month by month than the well-protected engineers and conductors of their divisions. There is no brotherhood among station agents, none among the operating officers of the railroads of America. And yet for loyalty and ability, taken man for man, division for division, and road for road, there are no finer or more intelligent workers in all of industrial America. Still the fact remains that they are not well-paid workers.

When is a man well paid?

According to the public prints, Charlie Chaplin, that amusing young clown of the movies, receives from a quarter to half a million dollars a year—according to the ability of his most recent press agent. I happen to know that a certain missionary bishop down in Oklahoma receives as his compensation $1,200 a year—although he never is quite certain of his salary. With due respect to the comedian of the screen-drama, does anyone imagine that his influence in the upbuilding of the new America is to be compared for a moment to that of the shepherd of the feeble flocks down in the Southwest?

Your economist will tell you, and use excellent arguments in support of the telling, that the wage outgo of the land is fixed, in definite proportion to its wealth. Granting then that this is so—one thinks twice before he runs amuck of trained economists—is it still fair to infer that the track foreman or the car-maintainer or the station agent is amply paid? And is it equally fair to infer that the pay of these three classes of railroad employees, so typical of unorganized transportation labor, could be raised by lowering the pay of organized employees without leaving these organized employees actually underpaid? And what assurance has the average man, the man in the street, that any reduction in the pay of the engineers, the conductors, the firemen, and the trainmen—if such a miracle actually be brought to pass—would result in a corresponding increase in the pay of the other eighty-two per cent of the labor of the railroad?

These are questions that must be answered sooner or later. In the present situation it looks as if they would have to be answered sooner rather than later. With them come others: Assuming still that our economist with his belief that the wage outgo of the entire nation is correct, is it not possible that the railroad as an institution is not getting its fair proportion of the national total? I have just shown you how eighteen per cent of the railroad’s employees receives twenty-eight per cent of their pay-roll. It would be equally interesting to know the percentage of national wage which goes to all the employees of all the railroads.

I cannot but feel when I realize the great annual total of wages which are being paid in the automobile and the war-munitions industries, to make striking instances, that the railroads are by no means receiving their fair share of the national wage account. Even the salaries paid to railroad executives, with the possible exception of a comparatively small group of men at the very top of some of the largest properties, are not generous. There has been much misstatement about these salaries. Because of these misstatements it is unfortunate, to say the least, that the railroads have not followed a policy of publishing their entire pay-rolls—from the president down to office boy.

But the fact remains—a fact that may easily be verified by consulting the records of the Interstate Commerce Commission—that railroad salaries are not high, as compared with other lines of industry in America. That is one reason why the business has so few allurements to the educated young men—the coming engineers of America. They come trooping out of the high schools, the technical schools, the colleges, and the universities of our land and struggle to find their way into the electrical workshops, the mines, the steel-making industry, the automobile shops, the telephone, even to the new, scientific, highly developed forms of agriculture. Few of them find their way to the railroad.

This is one of the most alarming symptoms of the great sick man of American business—his apparent utter inability to draw fresh, red blood to his veins.[6] A few of the roads—a very few indeed—have made distinct efforts to build up a personnel for future years by intelligent educational means. The Southern Pacific and the Union Pacific have made interesting studies and permanent efforts along these lines. But most of the railroads realize that it is the wage question—the long, hard road to a decent pay envelope in their service, as compared with the much shorter pathways in other lines of American industry—that is their chief obstacle in this phase of their railroad problem.

It has been suggested, and with wisdom, that the railroad should begin to make a more careful study and analysis of its entire labor situation than it has ever before attempted. Today it is giving careful, scientific, detailed attention to every other phase of its great problems. One road today has twenty-seven scientific observers—well trained and schooled to their work—making a careful survey of its territory, with a view to developing its largest traffic possibilities. And some day a railroad is to begin making an audit of its labor—to discover for itself in exact fact and figures, the cost of living for a workman in Richmond or South Bend or Butte or San Bernardino. Upon that it will begin to plat its minimum wage-increase.

Suppose the railroad was to begin with this absolute cost of living as a foundation factor. It would quickly add to it the hazard of the particular form of labor in which its employee was engaged expressed in dollars and cents—a factor easily figured out by any insurance actuary. To this again would be added a certain definite sum which might best be expressed, perhaps, as the employee’s profit from his work; a sum which, in ordinary cases at least, would or should represent the railroad’s steady contribution to his savings-bank account. To these three fundamental factors there would probably have to be added a fourth—the bonus which the railroad was compelled to offer in a competitive labor market for either a man or a type of men which it felt that it very much needed in its service. Only upon some such definite basis as this can a railroad’s pay-roll ever be made scientific and economic—and therefore permanent.

An instant ago and I was speaking of bonuses. The very word had, until recently, a strange sound in railroad ears. The best section foreman on a line may receive a cash prize for his well-maintained stretch of track; I should like to hear of a station agent like Blinks who knows that his well-planned and persistent effort to build up the freight and passenger business at his station, is to be rewarded by a definite contribution from the pay-chest of the railroad which employs him. Up to very recently there apparently has not been a single railroad which has taken up this question of bonus payments for extra services given. To the abounding credit of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa FÉ Railway and its president, Edward Payson Ripley, let it be said that they have just agreed to pay the greater proportion of their employees receiving less than $2,000 a year a bonus of ten per cent of the year’s salary for 1916—a payment amounting all told to $2,750,000. The employees so benefited must have been employed by the Santa FÉ for at least two years and they must not be what is called “contract labor.” By that the railroad means chiefly the men of the four great brotherhoods whose services are protected by very exact and definite agreements or contracts. The men of the brotherhoods are hardly in a position to expect or to demand a bonus of any sort. And it also is worthy of record that practically every union man, big or little, has placed himself on record against bonus plans of every sort.

I hope that the example of the Santa FÉ is to be followed by the other railroads of the country.[7] It is stimulating and encouraging; it shows that the big sick man of American business apparently is not beyond hope of recovery. For, in my own mind, the bonus system is, beyond a doubt, the eventual solution of the whole involved question of pay as it exists today and will continue to exist in the minds of both employer and employee. Our progressive and healthy forms of big industry of the United States have long since come to this bonus plan of paying their employees. The advances made by the steel companies and other forms of manufacturing enterprise, by great merchandising concerns, both wholesale and retail, and by many of the public utility companies, including certain traction systems, are fairly well known. It is a step that, when once taken, is never retraced. The bonus may be paid in various ways—in cash or in the opportunity to subscribe either at par or at a preferred figure, to the company’s stock or bonds. But there is little variation as to the results. And the workmen who benefit directly by these bonus plans become and remain quite as enthusiastic over them as the men who employ them and whose benefit, of necessity, is indirect.

In this connection some studies made recently by Harrington Emerson, the distinguished efficiency engineer, are of particular interest. Mr. Emerson, while attached to the president’s office of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, has had opportunity to study the railroad situation at close range and in a very practical way. He has placed his carefully developed theories in regard to the man in the shop and his wage into a study of the railroader and his pay-envelope. He has gone back into transportation history and found that at first employes were paid by the day. But long hours either on the road or waiting on passing sidings worked great hardships to them. As a more or less direct consequence the men in train service formed unions and succeeded in establishing the peculiar combination of pay upon the mile and the hour basis—which has obtained ever since in general railroad practice. If a train or a locomotive man was called for duty, even if he never left the station, he received a full day’s pay. This, in Mr. Emerson’s opinion and in the opinion of a good many others who have studied the situation, was as it should be and the principle should have been adhered to. But to it was tacked the piece rate of the mile. If a train or locomotive man made one hundred miles it was considered a day’s work, even if made in two hours. In this way the piece-rate principle became firmly established alongside of the hourly basis.

“What was the result on railroad operation and costs?” asks Mr. Emerson and then proceeds to answer his own question. He calls attention to the cars weighing 120,000 pounds and having axle-loads of 50,000 pounds that are being run upon our railroads today and expresses his belief that because in our established methods of railroad accounting, operating costs include train men’s wages, but not interest on capital invested in locomotives, cars, trains and terminals; railroad managers, driven by the need to make a showing long since began to plan more revenue tons per train-mile in order to keep down or lessen train-crew wage-costs per ton-mile. This was very well as long as it led to better-filled cars and trains, but the plan quickly expanded into heavier locomotives and heavier cars which necessitated heavier rails, more ties, tie-plates, stronger bridges, reduced grades, and a realignment until all that was gained in tonnage-mile costs was lost in increased obsolescence, unremunerative betterment, and other fixed charges. Even as good a railroader as Mr. Harriman was once led to regret that railroads were not built upon a six-foot gauge instead of the long-established one of four feet eight and one-half inches, because he felt that this would enable him still further to increase train load in proportion to train crew.

A good many railroaders have said that we have reached and long since passed the point of efficiency by increasing our standard of car and train sizes. Mr. Emerson is not new in that deduction. But he puts the case so clearly in regard to the confusing double basis in the pay of the trainmen—the vexed point that is before the Supreme Court of the United States as this book is being completed, because the Adamson so-called eight-hour day omitted the mileage factor, to the eternal annoyance of those same trainmen—that I cannot forbear quoting his exact words:

Piece rates to trainmen should be abolished. The work of trainmen should be classified. There should be short hours and correspondingly high pay for men working under great strain. There should be heavy penalties attached for overtime, although it does not follow that the man who puts in the overtime should receive the penalty. Society wants him to protest against overtime, because it may be both dangerous to the public and detrimental to the worker. The worker should not be bribed to encourage it.

It is evident that pay by the hour with penalties for overtime would encourage lighter and faster trains. Lighter and faster trains would increase the roads’ capacity as well as car and locomotive mileage. Capital expenses would drop. The savings made would be available to increase wages and to pay higher bills for material and to pay better dividends.