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 andsub-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 grantedthey 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 thefirst 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 cannotbe 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 Spokanecarpenters 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 prosperousdays 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 andthirty-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 conductorcompare 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 haveyougot?’ 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 goodold-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 anysystematic 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 developingthem 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.
SOLVING THE RAILROADS’ HUMAN PROBLEM
Insome of the real wisdom that wrote certain portions of the present Transportation Act it was decided that the newly created Railroad Labor Board should be kept entirely separate and distinct from the Interstate Commerce Commission. The one had neither authority nor jurisdiction over the other. They were even apart geographically; the one at Chicago, the other at the national capital. There was a definite and convincing reason advanced for this segregation. It was argued, with genuine good sense, that the business of wage-making should be kept entirely separate and apart from that of rate-making. In other words, wage-making was to be based upon living-costs—the sort of thing that the Lane Commission tried to do, even though hurriedly, and that the railroads themselves had failed to do.
That the Railroad Labor Board, once appointed, took its new task seriously, I do not for a moment doubt. I think that it tried and still is trying to solve the entire question in a really scientific and human fashion. It is a political board, to be sure. It could hardly escape being a political board. But I believe that it is rather better than the majority of its kind. It is a common experience here in America that these newly created boards are likely to rank higher in their personnel at their outset than after they have become old stories and pliable in the hands of the professional politicians.
Yet I am not at all sure that the Railroad Labor Board was a necessity, not at any rate as a permanent organization. We Americans are all too prone to create boards and commissions for almost every sort of conceivable situation. We dote uponchairmen and upon directors. We adore secretaries and under-secretaries and under-secretaries to under-secretaries and all the rest of it. It is a national weakness, and an organization like our Railroad Labor Board is after all but a single expression of that weakness.
Contrast that cumbersome method of ours with one which was adopted in Great Britain but a year or two ago and which so far has apparently given absolute satisfaction to both the rail workers and their employers over there.
Under the wage agreements between the railway workers of the United Kingdom and their executives the wage-scales have been fixed upon a basis which permits them to rise or fall as the cost of living rises or falls. These agreements were signed more than a year ago. The official charts issued by the British Board of Trade, and held by all save a few of the most radical of labor leaders to be both accurate and impartial, are taken as the basis of the railway wage. The charts come as the result of repeated and regular investigations by the Board of Trade agents into house-rentals, clothing, foodstuffs, and all the other essential factors that enter into living costs. Upon them an arbitrary reckoning of 125 points was fixed as the maximum that these should reach after the period of after-the-war readjustment was fixed.
But despite this fixing of a purely arbitrary figure the cost of living refused to stay put. It steadily rose until two years after the signing of the Armistice the Board of Trade figures had reached 169 points. And British railway wages had risen even more than ours. A station-porter, who in the pleasant English days before the coming of Armageddon had been content to receive fifteen shillings a week, found himself in January, 1921, receiving sixty-six, an increase of considerably more than 300 per cent. To-day he is getting a little less pay. At the time that these paragraphs were being written the Board of Trade’s entirely arbitrary but very scientific reckoning of living-costs had already dropped to 141 points and was going down further yet. The station-porter’s weeklywage had dropped three shillings, and Sir Eric Geddes, the British minister of transport, was beginning to predict that a continuation of this lowering of wage-costs would be reflected in the not distant future in lowered passenger-fares and freight-rates.
For definitely it is fixed that for each five points that the Board of Trade’s cost of living report drops or rises the railway employees’ wages shall drop or rise a shilling a week. But they shall never drop to the depths of the former pay-envelope; minima have been fixed ranging all the way from 200 per cent. of the pre-war wages upward. In the case of our station-porter the minimum of the future is to be forty shillings a week, which is considerably better than fifteen. Yet fifteen was in truth an outrageously low figure, even eight or ten years ago. British railway wages were then decidedly too low. Now they are nearer a fair figure, and so are likely to remain.
Why the American railroad wage could not have been fixed upon some basis as this is difficult to understand. The fairest, the broadest-minded, the most human of our railroad executives across the land say that 90 per cent. of their difficulties with their men would be wiped out entirely if only they could have direct dealings with them. Witness the example which I showed in the preceding chapter; the big and representative road which sought to install a piece-work scheme and, working through the leaders of the shop-crafts unions, found that its actual shopmen had not been consulted at all in the entire transaction.
The Pennsylvania railroad has fought desperately for the privilege of direct dealings with its employees. Three years ago its operating vice-president, General W. W. Atterbury, upon his return from France where he had had charge of the movement of our American troops and munitions, went on record as saying that the time had come for the rank and file of our railroaders to have a distinct voice in the operation of the properties. This does not mean in this instance thatthe Pennsylvania would become enthusiastic over the admission of direct labor representatives to its board of directors; such a genuinely progressive step still is quite beyond its imagination. But it has sought—and, I believe, honestly sought—to establish some sort of direct relationship between the great body of its workers and its executive officers.
In accordance with such a plan the Pennsylvania started more than a year ago toward the election of employee representatives from its various shops. It turned its back upon the national officers of the shop-crafts union and said frankly that it preferred to deal separately with its various shops and their men as distinct and separate entities. One of the sharpest quarrels that the railroad managements have had with the national agreements has arisen from the fact that these contracts take no pay-roll cognizance of whether a worker is living in a big city, such as Philadelphia, or a very small one, such as Bradford—either Pennsylvania or Ohio. Under the national agreements the Southern Pacific would have to give the same pay to a station-agent at Orange, California (which is almost heaven), as to the agent at Winnemucca, in the Nevada desert (which is something less than heaven). In other days the Winnemucca man was given what corresponded to a bonus salary, in order to compensate him in part for the bleakness of his surroundings. Under the national agreements it was a little difficult to get a good man to go to Winnemucca—to put the matter mildly.
The Pennsylvania in accordance with its expressed home-rule principle held that the employees elected as shop-craft representatives must be bona fide workers upon the pay-rolls of the Pennsylvania railroad. The shop-crafts union leaders claimed the right to have the names of the local organization officers appear upon the ballots. The national headquarters of the shop-crafts union also made loud protest. It appealed to the Railroad Labor Board, which deliberated ponderously upon the crisis and then ordered the Pennsylvania to proceedtoward a new election, this time along national and not along individual shop lines.
The Pennsylvania protested against the Labor Board’s ruling. Its protest was not heeded. The board after a rehearsing stood by its decision. Then the Pennsylvania appealed to the courts, where the entire matter is at present ensnarled. The railroad is loud in its protestations that it is not attacking the Railroad Labor Board as an organization; that it merely is seeking to keep it within the bounds laid down by the intent and purpose of the remarkable Transportation Act, which, in the long run, may come merely to a fine use of words.
The other railroads have not as a rule joined with the Pennsylvania in this protest. On the contrary they have proceeded rather rapidly in conforming to the Labor Board scheme, by joining in groups to set up local courts of arbitration with their men in various large centers of the land. Is this because they have loved the Labor Board idea? I hardly think so. I think that the real reason is because they have realized that in the difficult hour of transition from governmental to private operation—and, consequently the almost inevitable lowering of wages—the Railroad Labor Board, and the Railroad Labor Board almost alone, stood between the nation and a general and calamitous strike of transportation workers. This of course was before the coming of the industrial slump and the release of several million workers into the labor market. It was a real factor in helping to prevent the strike in October, 1921, which so many of the railroad executives really wanted and which the railroad workers, knowing from the outset that they would be beaten, did not want.
For these things alone the Railroad Labor Board probably has been worth all this cost—and the cost has not been small. Yet that there could not be a more direct pathway to them than the creation of a brand-new expensive political commission I shall always deny. I have shown the direct shortcut that Great Britain took in railway wage adjustment. Is it inconceivable that the United States might not occasionally take a short cut of her own in these labor situations? Was the creation of another political board an absolute necessity?
These are political questions, not primarily those of transport, and therefore I shall not answer them here further than to suggest that if the Railroad Labor Board makes at least one thorough, scientific, and impartial study of living-costs in this country—in big towns as well as in small, in North, in South, in East, in West—it may perhaps justify its existence and pave the way toward the adoption of some such simple method as we saw adopted overseas more than a year ago.
It is however a transportation question to know what the railroads themselves purpose to do about bettering the situation between the workers and themselves. We have hinted at the expressed intentions of a high officer of the Pennsylvania. So far so good; but not very far. If the foolish national agreements are to be completely abrogated—and apparently they are to be—what improvement in the relationship between the carrier and its employees is to be substituted for them? We have seen the move toward the establishment of local boards of arbitration by individual groups of the carriers. So far so good again; but again, not so very far. The per-hour wage has frequently been set down as the gold standard of railroad pay. Yet to-day in the eyes of the operating heads, at least, it is no standard whatsoever, save in shop-work where they reckon it as but a very base alloy and where they would regard piece-work as platinum—set with diamonds, at that. All of which of course is from the point of view of the executives, and not at all from that of their workers.
But what are the railroads going to do about the recognition of real merit and real industry in the individual worker? I do not mean the brilliant fellow who forces his way to the top. Frequently it is the plodder, the man unseen, unknown, who is the most valuable human cog of the transport machine.Will the railroad, huge machine that it is, find him out and give his loyalty, his industry, his energy—in many cases, his initiative too—the recognition that they demand? Can it do this even if it will? I have known many a railroad manager to complain to me that the reason he could not gain a greater efficiency out of his workers was because of the very scattered and attenuated location of his job. Real supervision, like that of a factory or a large office, was out of the question. Men might and did loaf on their jobs. Conversely it is of course equally difficult to discover real merit along the line, particularly the modest and conservative type of merit.
What too is the railroad going to do about adjusting hours of labor for its workers so that, whenever it is possible, the worker shall sleep at home? We have seen already in the pages of this book how often this is not possible for the employees engaged in the operation of the trains. In a little while we shall come to the vast possibilities of the use of the gasolene-motor unit in local passenger transportation upon our standard railroads, and I shall be urging as a corollary to its introduction a much increased service as well. It ought, by a little skillful planning, to be possible to use the eight hours of a railroader’s time to extremely good advantage, both to himself and to his employer, by an ingenious dovetailing of runs. Up this line, across that, back on a third—the possibilities are as infinite and as fascinating as those of a game of chess, and all giving the maximum of eight hours’ service to the railroad, as well as the square deal to its worker. Could more be asked?
And then, for a final question, what is our American railroad going to do about the assurance of continuous employment to its workers? We have touched upon this question already. It is a particularly serious one, not alone in shop-work but in every other department of the railroad. The fear of losing one’s job becomes at all times a decided factor both in the statistics of labor turnover and in the individual morale of the worker. In a single instance of a typical large trunk-linerailroad a total force of 80,895 workers in June, 1920, had been reduced by June, 1921, to but 56,091 and has been dropping ever since, which means quite naturally that the men who remain are spurred to the best of endeavors. The road tested this the other day. It asked all of its employees to go out in their spare hours and see if they could solicit some freight for it. In ninety days these men, entirely apart from the regular solicitation forces of the line, had brought in more than 1400 car-loads of freight which otherwise would have gone to its competitors. A good percentage showing was made by the mechanics and other workers of one of its smaller shops. Yet in the early part of 1920 the men at this shop had all gone out on strike because a train accident had delayed the arrival of their pay-envelopes for two brief hours!
Here then is morale brought back in a perfectly human fashion, yet I doubt if in a good one. In the long run fear cannot make loyalty or initiative or ambition. The day will come when abounding prosperity will return to the carriers, when the labor markets across the land will be empty of possible material. Then labor may remember. Memory is quite as human a trait as fear. And the pendulum will be set high again at the workers’ end of its arc.
I feel that we shall be compelled to find far better ways of bringing loyalty and initiative and ambition into the hearts of our workers of to-morrow—the other qualities that go into the making of that highly modern term “morale”—and so bring back a genuine revival of our American railroad tradition. We shall start of course with a good wage. We already have that. The average annual wage of the American railroader is now $1700 for eight hours of daily work. In 1913 he worked ten hours a day and received but $761 on an average. His hourly wage is now about 150 per cent. more than it was eight years ago.
Remember all the while, if you will, that I am not urging that the railroader is overpaid to-day. I do not believe that upon the average he is any more than well paid—in all casesnot even that. And I do believe that these entire pay arrangements are still far from being upon an entirely just and equitable basis; the conditions of his working arrangements, so very vital to the return of our American railroad morale and tradition, are still in the infancy of a really scientific and human adjustment. Here again the situation is open to further explanation.
There are, roughly speaking, three classes of railroad employees. The railroad president and the small group of high-priced executives closely about him constitute the first of these classes. This is small in number. It contrasts with the two millions and a half of the rank and file of railroad employees in the United States.
Here then are the right and the left wings of our railroading. Between them is a third class, not often in the public eye, but in many ways the keystone of the arch of operation. This third class, not large in numbers, consists of the minor officers of the various active departments of the railroad. It is an immensely valuable factor in successful operation; in fact the great driving force behind it. Yet its position is not a happy one. At all times it is a buffer; it is caught between the upper and the lower stones of a mill which attempts to grind finely. From below comes the natural and unending pressure to increase expenses; from the high executive offices above comes another, to hold down expenditure. From somewhere between these grindings the division superintendent or engineer or mechanical superintendent must produce results. Of necessity, his is a driving job.
Ofttimes it has been a thankless job as well. For there has been little outside protection for this valuable central class of railroad labor. Numerically it is not large enough nor important enough to command the favor of influential politicians. As we have just seen, the rank and file does. This is at least well paid. And as the railroad man at the bottom has received attention, so has the railroader at the top. The executives have always succeeded in taking good care ofthemselves. They know that the large financiers and banks and other institutions which to-day are the heavy stockholders of our railroads are utterly dependent upon them. Without them their securities would fall even flatter than already they have fallen, which means that the railroad president and his important vice-presidents can command salaries that are at least commensurate with those paid in other industries. Their worries are those that come from their responsibilities, not from their pocketbooks.
But the middle class of the railroad personnel—like the middle class of the world outside—is caught to-day, not only with responsibility for its job, but with a deal of worry too for its wallet. Salaries between the upper and lowest classes of railroad workers take a fearful fall. In theory they should form a gentle curve, a sloping sort of descent. In practice, too, they should curve. In truth they do not. They drop. I have known of repeated cases where the superintendents of railroad divisions—a railroad superintendent is supposedly the prince of a transportation principality—have actually received less than some of the locomotive-engineers who are working for them. In any such scheme of affairs the incentive or desire for promotion cannot be very great.
As a matter of fact very much of that desire or opportunity for promotion passed away long ago, which is one of the significant reasons for the sad decline of our American railroad tradition, and which is also one of the most alarming symptoms of the serious illness of our sick man of American business. He is making no provision for the future—in this serious necessity of providing good new railroading blood for oncoming years. There should be fresh generations of material for future railroad executives tramping forward, and there are none.
“Over-regulation,” says one transportation executive at once, and leaves us in the belief that here is the sole cause of this sad deficiency.
He is right—partly right. For more than twenty years therailroad business in the United States has been under constant attack—rightly or wrongly, and generally both. A business under constant attack is not one that makes a large appeal to a young man just seeking about for a future career. One of the very ablest of our railroaders, Daniel Willard, president of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, recently went on record as saying that at the present time he could not recommend the business in which he has spent a lifetime as a proper opening for his son.
Add to these things the fact that the business itself has taken very little thought as to the morrow in this vital question of renewing personnel—has not only failed to establish courses in various phases of railroading in the technical schools across the land, or made any concerted effort to bring the best of their graduates to their ranks, but for years has ridiculed and humiliated these highly trained young men when they have sought to enter its doors—and one may easily perceive why the best of our young men in recent years have not gone into railroading. The automobile industry, mining, electrical work, manufacturing of nearly every sort, the professions, even retailing, have called to them, and not in vain. Each has received its fair proportion of them. But railroading has been left aside.
Here is a most serious phase of our railroad debacle. It is not one that can be quickly mended. Take the nearest “Who’s Who” and note the birth dates of the railroad men that you find there. With a few exceptions they are not young men. They are getting on in years, while those who know them personally know that their tremendously increased anxieties and responsibilities have grayed them even beyond their years.
A young man whose heart and soul alike thirsted for a better knowledge of the rail transport business recently asked a veteran railroader of my acquaintance how he could get into it. He had been offered a job in the local interchange yard, firing a switch-engine. That job had a good deal of appealto him. He was perfectly willing to don overalls and get down to hard manual work with a shovel. But the old railroader shook his head.
“No, no, Harry, that is not the way that it is being done nowadays,” said he. “Let me advise you.”
Then he explained. Harry might and probably would develop into a good fireman, like President W——. Eventually he would probably have a fine passenger run and get as much money perhaps as his division superintendent, probably more than his trainmaster or his road foreman of engines. But that would end it. He would be a working man, albeit a well-paid working man, but nothing else—never an officer. The new caste in our railroading would hold him tightly down. Far better that he should pocket his pride as a graduate of a pretty good Eastern university and become an office-boy in some railroad office and study all the phases of the business at every opportunity that presented itself. There was chance there of his getting ahead in railroading, perhaps to the very head of it. The taint or stigma of unionism would not be upon his shoulder to draw him down in the estimation of the big men who won and control our carriers.
That was frank talk, but accurate. At last wehaveachieved an industrial caste. The barrier is there. The railroads suffer from it greatly, but the men who to-day control them are not going to remove it. Here and there across the face of the land you will find a few minute exceptions, a trainmaster here, a master mechanic there, perhaps all the way across the land as many as ten or a dozen superintendents who have risen from the brotherhoods. But in our big national organization these few are as nothing. The barrier is being well maintained. And as long as our railroads are owned and operated as at present, it is likely to stay put.
Granted then that this great wall is to be kept, and assuming that the railroads can tide over their present personal deficiencies, how can this distressing situation be avoided in the future? Easily enough. It comes down in final analysis to awage question. Our railroads can and should establish courses in the various phases of their business in many of the large colleges and training-schools across the land; they should have methods of systematically scanning the output of these schools and of securing for themselves at least their fair share of it for proper training toward executive possibilities. Other industries in America long since have shown the possibilities of such methods. Yet even such a program will fail if the salary inducement is not made both fair and attractive. I spoke but a moment ago of the lack of curvature, the tendency toward right-angledness of the salary line between the top class of railroad personnel and the bottom. It too has arisen in other businesses, and they have had to solve it. Here is one case in particular.
It is a nation-wide utility company, not transportation, but in a large sense akin to it. It divides itself between the Atlantic and Pacific into various subsidiary companies, each fairly autonomous. These companies, working in coöperation, have evolved a salary plan that is attractive to their personnel. The company heads each receive as an average from $35,000 to $40,000 a year. Immediately beneath them are their vice-presidents, three or four at from $20,000 to $25,000; beneath these in turn a group of ten to a dozen sub-executives at $15,000 to $18,000, and then a large group (thirty-five or forty men) at from $10,000 to $12,500 annually. The curve irons out to a comfortable rotundity. The salary appeal stands strongly; the opportunity of getting into that third sizable executive group of good wage standard is large enough to bring young men out of college to these companies in a larger number than they can accept, which gives them a most excellent opportunity to pick and choose.
A plan such as this would be easily applicable to almost any one of our American railroads of to-day, which almost invariably are under-staffed rather than over-staffed. And the first objection to it, the cost, is discounted by the fact that even to a comparatively small line it would not add more than 5or 6 per cent, to the pay-roll—perhaps not more than a fraction of 1 per cent, to the total operating cost. The utility company which I have just quoted boasts that it could cut its entire pay-roll down to a maximum of $5000 a year for all of its officers and still reduce its total pay-roll cost less than a mere 1 per cent., which speaks volumes for the even distribution of its official salaries.
Given a broad-minded fairly planned salary scheme such as this—and having provided always that the scheme was well advertised—and the average railroad ought to begin to pull itself through on this difficult question of supplying a fresh quantity of proper officer personnel for itself. To this might well be added, as has already been suggested, a systematic plan for teaching the various phases of transport in many of our schools and colleges and then closely scanning the output of these classes for future executive material. That such a plan would work and would be worth far more than its comparatively modest cost, is the opinion of far-seeing men within the railroad industry as well as outside of it. That more attention is needed to this vital phase of our transport problem is clearly indicated by the action of the Pennsylvania railroad immediately after coming out from government control, in appointing a high personnel officer with a title and prestige none the less than vice-president.
The problem of personnel and its continuous and permanent supply, long since recognized by other of our industries than that of railroading by the appointment of well-paid specialists with staffs trained to handle it at best efficiency, is not in itself a particularly perplexing one. A fair degree of study and thought will solve it almost invariably. One reason perhaps that so many of our railroads have not met it properly up to the present moment is because only yesterday it became apparent as a really vital matter, not merely to their success, but to their very continuance. It was but yesterday that trades-unionism became a dominating and fairly autocratic force in their operation, that the traditional stairways of progressfrom the engine-cab or the caboose or the little yellow depot became so firmly closed and abandoned, and that the railroads were really forced to look out into the broad world beyond for future personnel.
Our railroaders as a rule have not lacked technical ability. They have not lacked honesty. They are not lacking in these qualities to-day. Taken man for man I doubt if their high average for both of them could be exceeded by any other American industry or profession, or even equaled throughout the rest of the civilized world. That many of them have lacked both vision and imagination, I am going to contend at other times. For the present it is enough to say that theirs is indeed a difficult job, that, leaving aside the question of securing future executives, the task of the existing ones is very far from a sinecure. The relationship of the human factors in the operating phases alone of our railroads, from the top executives down through the mid-executives to the rank and file, is this very day and minute one of the vastly serious phases of our whole railroad muddle. For just as the problem of new personnel is to an extent a future one, so is the deplorable loss of the old tradition to an extent a past one. There is not much use in crying over spilled milk. The thing to do is to find just what can be saved from the spilling.
Jinks who reads this, and in his more serious moments conducts a cotton-factory, and Blinks, who has the biggest retailing business in his town, may both laugh at the thought that their railroading may be a supremely difficult business. Each of themknowsthathisis the most difficult business in all the world and has a thousand convincing ways of proving it. But Jinks may summon all his operatives into a hall at five minutes’ notice—he has them all at work inside of a brick wall—and put the fear of the Lord (and of their boss) into their hearts in another five. While Blinks, as a matter of principle, reads the riot act to his clerks every morning as soon as he has unlocked the doors of the store.
A railroad’s employees may be outstretched a thousand miles or more. Remember again that the railroad itself is in truth a narrow ribbon, ofttimes no wider than the right-of-way of a single track, far-reaching and tremendously attenuated. A thousand employees here, and then twenty, thirty, forty miles to the next group of more than a dozen! What a small opportunity for any sort of close superintendency or inspection! How hard the problem of attaining a real morale! With the irregular demands of energy that a railroad makes upon a man’s time—two trains perhaps within the hour, and then perhaps not another for three or four—it can rarely utilize a man’s eight hours at best advantage. While if an employee is at all inclined to idle upon the job how rare the opportunities for loafing—or if not for actual loafing, the failure to work in his allotted hour to the top notch of his ability! These opportunities exist, and unless Mr. Ford’s plan should become a howling success, must continue to exist, in a tremendous variety.
Our station-agent no longer has to work twelve hours a day. Under government control his hours began to approach those of an easy-going banker. He ceased to worry about the prospective passenger who may be thinking of going to California and who by proper persuasion may be induced to go by the S. A.’s line. All of which is another of the many evidences of the decline of our fine old-time railroad tradition.
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 ofsuperintendency 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 courtesycomes 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 dealof 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 visionand 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.