THE SECTION GANG
In the section-boss and his men is vested the responsibility of making the steel highway safe. A singlebroken rail may send the best driven locomotive into the ditch—a mass of tangled and useless scrap iron.
“Up where?” he asks once again—then answers his own question: “To some stuffy sort of office? Not by a long shot! I’m built for the road, for track work. This road needs me here. We’re only single-track as yet on this division; but next summer we’ll be getting eastbound and westbound, and then a bigger routing of the through stuff. Tonight the fastest through train in this state will come through here, at nearer seventy miles an hour than sixty, and my track’s got to be in order—every foot of the 37,000 feet of it.”
“That’s your job,” you say to him.
“Part of it,” he replies. “My job is seven miles long and has more kinks to it than an eel’s tail. See here!”
He points to a splice-bar, almost under your feet. You look at it. You are frank to admit that it looks just like any other splice-bar that you have ever seen; but the section-boss shows you a discoloration on it, hardly larger than a silver dollar.
“Salt water from a leaky refrigerator car did that. We’ve got to look out for it all the time—especially on the bridges.”
You choke a desire to ask him how he knows and merely inquire:
“Are you responsible for the bridges too?”
“To the extent of seeing that they are O.K. for train movement. My job includes tracks, switches,drains, crossings, switch and semaphore lamps. We get out on our old hand-power Mallet here and make every sort of emergency repair you can think of—and then some more—on telegraph wires, culverts, signals, and the interlocking. We’ve got to know the time card and keep out of the way of the regular trains. Every little while a special comes along and we have to dump our little Pullman in the ditch—without much time for ceremony. We’ve got to know as much about flagging as the trainmen. And sometimes we have to act as sextons.”
“Sextons?” you venture.
He thumbs a little notebook.
“Last year I performed the last rites over seven cows, two sheep, and a horse. My job has a lot of dimensions.”
He puts his book back in his pocket and draws out a circular letter which the general manager at headquarters has been sending out to all the track-bosses. He hands it to you, with a grin. It says:
More than any other class of employees you have the opportunity of close contact with the farmers who are producing today that which means tonnage and therefore revenue for the company tomorrow. Have you ever thought of cultivating the farmer as he is cultivating the fields? A friendly chat over the fence, a wave of the hand as you pass by, may mean a shipment of corn or cattle—just because you are interested in him. For your company’s welfare as well as your own, cultivate the farmer.
More than any other class of employees you have the opportunity of close contact with the farmers who are producing today that which means tonnage and therefore revenue for the company tomorrow. Have you ever thought of cultivating the farmer as he is cultivating the fields? A friendly chat over the fence, a wave of the hand as you pass by, may mean a shipment of corn or cattle—just because you are interested in him. For your company’s welfare as well as your own, cultivate the farmer.
The railroad can and does do a lot of efficient solicitation through its fixed employees in the field; theopportunities of the station agent in this wise are particularly large. And there is a good deal of real sense in this particular circular. Yet the section-boss seems to regard it as distinctly humorous.
“The big boss sits in his office or in his car,” is his comment, “and I think he forgets sometimes that he was once a section man himself and working fourteen hours a day. The farmer doesn’t have a lot of time for promiscuous conversation, nor do we. We’ll wave the hand all right—but a chat over the fence? Along would come my supervisor and I might have a time of it explaining to him that I was trying to sell two tickets to California for the road. No, sir, we’re not hanging very much over fences and chatting to farmers. Under the very best conditions we work about ten hours a day. And there are times when a sixteen-hour law, even if we had one, wouldn’t be of much account to us.”
“What times?”
“Accidents and storms! When we get a smash-up on this section or on one of my neighbors’ we all turn to and help the wrecking crew. I’ve worked fifty-one hours with no more than a snatch of sleep and without getting out of my clothing—and that was both accident and storm. It’s storm that counts the most. It’s nice and pretty out here today, even if a little warmish. Come round here next February, when the wind begins to whistle and the mercury is trying to hide in the bottom of its little tube, and help me replace rails in a snow-packed track.”
Against conditions such as these the railroad finds no little difficulty in securing good trackmen. Thesection-boss will tell you how, until about twenty years ago, these were largely Irishmen, with a fair mixture of Germans and Scots—even a few Englishmen. The Italians began coming over in droves a little more than a quarter of a century ago and almost the first men they displaced were the Irish trackmen on our railroads. Perhaps it would be fairer to say they took the jobs which the Irishmen were beginning to scorn. The latter preferred to become contractors, politicians, lawyers. What is the use of driving like a slave all day long, they argued, when you can earn five times as much by using your wits?
Of recent years there have been few Irishmen in track service—an occasional section-boss like the man to whom we have just been talking—and with the exception of Wisconsin and Minnesota, practically none of the men from the north of Europe. Even the better grades of Italians have begun to turn from track work. They, too, make good contractors and politicians and lawyers. In the stead of these have come the men from the south of Italy, Greeks, Slavs, a few Poles, and a few Huns. These seem particularly to lack intelligence. Yet they seemingly are all that the railroad may draw upon for its track maintenance.
These were the conditions that prevailed up to the beginning of the Great War in Europe. Since that time the situation has grown steadily worse. With the tightening of the labor market, with the inadequate rates of pay in both the car and right of way maintenance departments of the railroads, the average railroad manager is hard pressed today to keep his linein order. Sometimes he fails. And a distinct factor in the run-down condition of so many of our second-and third- and fourth-grade railroads is not alone their financial condition, to which we already have referred, but quite as much their utter inability to summon track labor at any price within their possibility. It is rather difficult, to say the least, to get a section foreman at three dollars a day when Henry Ford is paying five dollars as a minimum wage in his Detroit factory and munition manufacturers are even going ahead of this figure. I myself have seen grass growing this last summer in the tracks of some mighty good roads. And weeds between the ties and the rails are all too apt to be the indication of even worse conditions—not quite so perceptible to the eye.
It is this very polyglot nature of the men who work upon the track which has operated against their being brought into a brotherhood—such as those who man the freight and passenger trains. The isolation of the section-bosses and their gangs, as well as the dominance of the padrone system among the Italians until very recently, have been other factors against a stout union of the trackmen. But the mixture of tongues and races has been the chief objection. You do not find Italians or Slavs or Poles or Greeks on the throttle side of the locomotive cab or wearing the conductor’s uniform in passenger service, although you will find them many times in the caboose of the freight and the Negro fireman is rather a knotty problem with the chief of that big brotherhood. In fact, it has been rather a steadyboast of the engineers and the conductors that their great organizations are composed of Americans. That fact, of itself, is peculiarly significant.
Yet what are Americans? And how many of those fine fellows who drive locomotives and who captain fancy trains will fail to find some part of their ancestry in Europe, within three or four generations at the longest? We have shown that responsibility is not a matter of color, of race, nor of language. And it is responsibility—responsibility plus energy and ability and honesty—that the railroad seeks to obtain when it goes into the market to purchase labor.
The day has come when the railroad has begun to take keener notice of the personnel of the men to whom is given the actual labor of keeping the track in order. The better roads offer prizes to the foremen for the best-kept sections. The prizes are substantial. They need to be. With hard work as the seeming reward in this branch of service the railroad, even before the coming of the war, was no longer able to pick and choose from hordes of applicants. A dozen years ago it began to fairly dragnet the labor markets of the largest cities; and when it gets men it has to use them with a degree of consideration that was not even dreamed of in other days.
No longer can an autocratic and brutal foreman stand and curse at his section hands. They simply will not stand for it. “Bawlers-out,” as the worst of these fellows used to be known along the line, are not now in fashion. And the track supervisor who used to stand on the rear platform of a train and toss out “butterflies”is far more careful in his criticism. “Butterflies,” be it known, are indited by the supervisoren routeto call the attention of the foremen to track defects in their sections.
The Negro is still in large service in the South—below the Ohio and east of the Mississippi. He is a good trackman—and with the labor market as it stands today, drained to the bottom, it is a pity there are not more of him. Unlike most of the south-of-Europe men, he has strength and stamina for heavy, sustained work. Moreover, he is built to rhythm. If you can set his work to syncopated time he seems never to tire of it. He is a real artist. He cuts six or eight inches off the handle of his sledge hammer and it becomes his “short dog.” Gripping it at the end with both hands he swings it completely around his head and strikes two blows to the white man’s one, no matter how clever the white man may be. And he is actually fond of a bawler-out. He respects a real boss.
The hobo trackman is in a class by himself. He is not the migratory creature that you may imagine him. On the contrary, in nine cases out of ten he can be classed by distinct districts. Thus he may be known as a St. Paul man, a Chicago man, or a Kansas City man, and you may be quite sure that he will venture only a certain limited distance from his favorite haunts. In the spring, however, he generally is so hungry that he is quite willing to undertake any sort of job at any old price, provided free railroad tickets are given.
The majority of these hoboes have had experiencewith the shovel. Some of them know more about track than their foremen. Unless the section-boss has had previous experience with hoboes, however, he will get no benefit from their superior knowledge, but will be left to work out his problem entirely alone.
As a rule the hobo becomes independently rich on the acquisition of ten dollars. Then he turns his face toward that town to which he gives his devoted allegiance. He now has money to pay fares; but he does not pay them. Summer is on the land and he likes to protract the joys of the road; so he beats his way slowly home and leaves a record of his migration executed in a chirography that is nothing less than marvelous. The day that masonry went out of fashion in railroad construction and concrete came in was a bonanza to him. On the flat concrete surfaces of bridge abutments and piers, telephone houses and retaining walls, he marks the record of his going and whither he is bound—and marks it so plainly with thick, black paint that even he who rides upon the fastest of the limited trains may read—although it may not be given to him to ever understand.
Down in the Southwest the track laborer is Mexican, while in the Far West he is a little brown man, with poetry in his soul and a vast amount of energy in his strong little arms. The Japanese invasion has been something of a godsend to the railroads beyond the Rocky Mountains. Up in British Columbia, where John Chinaman is not in legal disfavor, you will find him a track laborer—faithful and efficient. On the Canadian Pacific seventeen per cent of the total forceof trackmen is Chinese. At the west end of that Canadian transcontinental, the track gangs almost exclusively are Chinese.
The Jap is not illegal in the United States, however, and he is turning rapidly to railroading. It is only fair to say that he is the best track laborer our railroads have known. He is energetic, receptive, ambitious, intelligent, and therefore easily instructed. His mind being retentive, he rarely has to be told a thing a second time. Though small, he is robust and possessed of powers of endurance far beyond any other race. Furthermore, he is cleanly—bathing and changing his clothes several times a week. His camp is always sanitary and he prides himself on the thoroughness of his work. You may be sure he is carrying a Japanese-English dictionary and that from it he is learning his three English words a day. Track workers from the south of Europe will spend a lifetime without ever learning a single word of English.
There is another class of Asiatic workers that in recent years has begun to show itself along the west coast and this class is far less satisfactory in every way. These are the Hindus. They have drifted across the Seven Seas and marched into a new land through the gates of San Francisco or Portland or Seattle. But as yet they have not come in sufficient numbers to represent a new problem in American railroading. The Japanese already have attained that distinction.
Here, then, is the polyglot material with which our section-boss must work. His name may be Smith, he may have come out of New England itself, and his littlehouse there beside the track is probably as neat as yours or mine. He works long hours and hard, with his body, his hands, and his mind; the men under his authority are more apt to be inefficient than efficient; his responsibility is unceasing. It is not an easy job. And for it he is paid from sixty-five to ninety dollars a month—rarely more. A locomotive engineer is paid three times as much. Yet he is protected by the eight-hour day as his standard of employment, although it is more than likely that his actual hours of work may be even less than eight. And his responsibility is little greater than that of the section-boss.
UNORGANIZED LABOR—THE STATION AGENT
Theprimary schools of railroading are the little red and yellow and gray buildings that one finds up and down the steel highways of the nation, dotting big lines and small. You find at least one in every American town that thinks itself worthy of the title. And they are hardly less to the towns themselves than the red schoolhouses of only a little greater traditional lore. To the railroad their importance can hardly be minimized. They are its tentacles—the high spots and the low where it touches its territory and its patrons.
To best understand how a station agent measures to his job, let us do as we have done heretofore and take one of them who is typical. Here is one man who in personality and environment is representative and the small New York State town in which he is the railroad’s agent is typical of tens of thousands of others all the way from Maine to California. Brier Hill is an old-fashioned village of less than 10,000 population, albeit it is a county seat and the gateway to a prosperous and beautiful farming district. Two railroads reach it by their side lines, which means competition and the fact that the agent for each must be a considerable man and on the job about all of the time. Ourman—we will call him Blinks and his road the Great Midland—has never lived or worked in another town. Thirty years ago he entered the service of the G.M. as a general utility boy around the old brick depot at twelve dollars a month. The old brick depot is still in service and so is Blinks.
In thirty years his pay has been advanced. He now gets $110 a month; in addition his commissions amount to $40 or $50 a month. Engineers and conductors get much more, but the station agent, as we have come to understand, is not protected by a powerful labor organization. There is an Order of Railroad Station Agents, to be sure, but it is weak and hardly to be compared with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers or the Order of Railroad Trainmen. In some cases the station agents rising from a telegraph key have never relinquished their membership in the telegraphers’ union. But, with the telephone almost accepted as a complete success in the dispatching of trains, the railroads see a new opportunity for the efficient use of men who have been crippled in the service; in some cases for the widows and the daughters of men who have died in the ranks. It takes aptitude, long months, and sometimes years to learn the rapid use of the telegraph. A clear mind and quick wit are all that is necessary when the long-distance telephone moves the trains up and down the line.
Blinks, being typical, does not belong to a labor organization. Although he was an expert telegrapher with a high speed rate, he did not happen to belong to the telegraphers’ organization. Instead there is in him a fine vein of old-fashioned loyalty to the property.He was all but born in the service of the Great Midland; he expects to die in the harness there in his homely old-fashioned office in the brick depot at Brier Hill. His is the sort of loyalty whose value to the road can hardly be expressed in mere dollars and cents.
If you would like to know the truth of the matter, you would quickly come to know that the real reason why Blinks has never joined a union is that he holds an innate and unexpressed feeling that he is a captain in the railroad army, rather than a private in its ranks. For he is secretly proud of the “force” that reports to him—chief clerk, ticket agent, two clerks, a baggagemaster, and three freight-house men. Not a man of these draws less than seventy dollars a month, so there is not much difference in their social status and that of the boss. No one has been quicker than he to recognize such democracy. He prides himself that he is an easy captain.
“We work here together like a big family,” he will tell you, “although I’m quite of the opinion that we’re about the best little collection of teamwork here in the village. Together we make quite an aggregate. Only two concerns here employ more help—the paper mill and the collar factory.”
You are a bit astonished at that—and at that you begin to think—not of the relation of the town to the railroad but rather of the railroad to the town. You ask Blinks as to the volume of the business his road does at his station. He hesitates in replying. That is rather a state secret. Finally he tells you—although still as a secret.
“We do a business of $50,000 a month,” he says quietly, “which is as much as any two industries here—and this time I’m making no exceptions of the paper mill or the collar factory.”
Quickly he explains that this is no unusual figure. And figures do not always indicate. Smithville, up on another division, is only a third as large and does a business of $20,000 a month. There are paper mills here and inasmuch as they handle their products in carload lots on their own sidings there is need of a large force around the station. On the other hand, a neighboring town of the same size shows about the same monthly revenue and needs a station force much larger than Blinks’s. For its leading industry is a paint factory, without siding facilities. Its products move in comparatively small individual boxes, requiring individual care and handling—that is the answer.
“You work long hours and hard hours?” you may demand of Blinks.
He shakes his head slowly.
“Long hours a good deal of the time, but not very often hard hours,” he tells you. “My work is complicated and diverse but it is largely a case of having it organized.”
Indeed it is complicated and diverse. There are only four passenger trains each day up and down the line, but the rush of freight is heavy, particularly at certain seasons of the year. And both of these functions of the railroad as they relate to Blinks’s town come under his watchful eye. In addition, remember that he is the express agent and is paid a commission both on thebusiness bound in and on the business bound out of his office, as well as the representative of the telegraph company. The telegraph company pays him nothing for handling its messages, but from the express company he will probably average forty-five dollars a month, particularly as his brisk county-seat town is one in which the small-package traffic does not greatly vary at any season of the year. Down in the Southwest, where a great amount of foodstuffs moves out by express within a very few weeks there are men who may, in two months, take several hundred dollars, perhaps a check into four figures from the express company. The gateway to a summer resort is regarded as something of the same sort of a bonanza to the station agent. Still Blinks, if he would, could tell you of a man at a famous resort gateway who lost his job through it. The president of his road was a stickler for appearances. On a bright summer day when vacation traffic was running at flood tide, his car came rolling into the place. Word of it came to the station agent, but the station agent was lost in an avalanche of express way-bills. He should have been out on the platform in his pretty new cap and uniform. At least that was what the president thought. So nowadays that station agent gives all his time to the express way-bills. There is a new man for the cap and uniform, and when the president of that railroad arrives in the town he is greeted with sufficient formality.
As a matter of fact the express companies prefer to maintain offices wherever it is at all possible. Thebonanza offices for the railroad agents are few and far between and when the railroad begins to find them it is apt to part. So Blinks can consider himself lucky that his commissions do not run over fifty dollars a month. That means that the express company will not attempt anything as suicidal as establishing its own office in Brier Hill and his own modest perquisite is not apt to be interrupted.
His is routine work and intricate work. He writes enough letters in a week to do credit to a respectable correspondence school and he makes enough reports in seven days to run three businesses. His incoming mail arrives like a flood. There are tariffs, bulletins, more tariffs, instructions, more tariffs, suggestions—and still more tariffs. The tariffs, both freight and passenger, are fairly encyclopedic in dimensions and the folks down at headquarters fondly imagine that he has memorized them. At least that seems to be their assumption if Blinks can judge from their letters. Every department of the road requests information of him, and gets it. And when he is done with the railroad he realizes that he is violating biblical injunction and serving two masters, at least. For the express company is fairly prolific with its own tariffs and other literature. And the telegraph company has many things also to say to Blinks there in the old brick depot.
THE STATION AGENT
He is the human tentacle of the railroad; the flesh-and-blood factor by which itkeeps in touch with many, many thousands of patrons.
Yet the wonder of it is that Blinks endures it all—not only endures but actually thrives under it. In a single hour while you are sitting in his dingy, homy little office just back of the ticket cage, you can seethe press of work upon him. He has just finished a four-page report to the legal department, explaining the likelihood of the road’s being able to stave off that demand for an overhead crossing just back of the town; there is a letter on his desk from the general freight agent asking him for a “picture” of the business at Brier Hill, which means a careful analysis of its industries and trade—not an easy job of itself. There is an express package of $25,000 in gold destined to a local bank, over in the corner of the ticket cage. Blinks keeps a bit of watchfulness for that “value package” down in the corner of his mind while a thousand things press in upon it. Number Four is almost within hearing when a young man and his wife appear at the window, baggage in hand, and demand a ticket via Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Sedalia to Muskogee. The young ticket clerk tears madly through a few dozen tariffs, scratches his head blankly—and Blinks has to jump into the breach. In thirty seconds he has the right tariff.
“I think the through one way is thirty-four sixteen,” he smiles at the patrons, “but I had better look up and make sure.”
His memory was right—but Blinks takes no chances.
“Can we get a stop-over at Urbana?” asks the woman.
The station agent dives into a tariff, after a moment nods “yes.”
“Wonder if we could go around by Jefferson City and stop off there?” inquires the man, “I’ve relatives there.”
Blinks starts to say “yes,” then hesitates. Wasn’t there a special bulletin issued by the Missouri Pacific covering that detour? or was it the Katy? He finds his way through twenty or thirty tariff supplements. He knows that if he makes a mistake he not only will be censured, but will probably be forced to make good the mistake from his own pocket—according to the ruling of the Interstate Commerce Law, which he feels is yet to be his nemesis.
Number Four is almost near enough to hear the hissing of her valves but he tells his patrons not to worry—she has a deal of express matter to handle this morning and will tarry two or three minutes at the station. He finds the right ticket forms, clips and pastes them, stamps and punches them, until he has two long green and yellow contracts each calling for the passage of a person from his town to Muskogee. Incidentally he finds time to sell a little sheaf of travelers’ checks and an accident insurance policy in addition to promising to telegraph down to the junction to reserve Pullman space. In six or seven minutes he has completed an important passenger transaction, with rare accuracy. Rare accuracy, did we say? We were mistaken. That sort of accuracy is common among the station agents of America.
When the nervous, hurried, accurate transaction is done you might expect Blinks to rail against the judgment of travelers who wait until the last minute to buy tickets involving a trip over a group of railroads. But that is not the way of Blinks.
“I could have sent them down to the junction on alocal ticket and let them get their through tickets there. But I like those tickets on my receipt totals and I’m rather proud of the fact that they’ve made this a coupon station. My rival here on the R—— road has to send down to headquarters for blank tickets and a punch whenever he hears in advance of a party that’s going to make a trip and a clerk down there figures out the rate. We make our own rates and folks know they can get through tickets at short notice.”
That means business and Blinks knows that it means business.
“But he almost had me stumped on that alternative route via Jefferson City,” he laughs. “They catch us up mighty quickly these days if we make mistakes of that sort.”
The Interstate Commerce Law, as we have already seen, is a pretty rigid thing and lest a perfectly virtuous railroad should be accused of making purposeful “mistakes” in quoting the wrong rate, it insists that the agent himself shall pay the difference when he fails to charge the patron the fully established rate for either passenger or freight transportation. In fact it does more. It demands that the agent shall seek out the patron and make him pay the dollars and cents of the error, which is rather nice in theory but difficult in execution. The average citizen does not live in any great fear of the Interstate Commerce Law.
Blinks, being a practical sort of railroader, is willing to tell you of the line as it works today—of the problems and the perplexities that constantlyconfront him. And occasionally he gives thought to his rival, whose little depot is on the far side of the village.
“Now Fremont is up against it,” he tells you confidentially. “His road is different from ours. We have built up a pretty good reputation for our service. My job is a man’s job but at least I don’t have to apologize for our road. Fremont does. His road is rotten and he knows it. He knows when he sells a man a ticket through to California or even down to New York that the train is going to be a poor one, made up of old equipment, probably late, and certainly overcrowded. And if it’s a shipper Fremont knows that there is a good chance that his car is going to get caught in some one of their inadequate yards and perhaps be held a week on a back siding.
“It keeps Fremont guessing. His business is not more than half of mine and he has to work three times as hard to get it. He catches it from every corner and starves along on a bare eighty dollars a month. And they are not even decent enough to give him anything like this.”
He delves into an inner pocket and pulls out a leather pass wallet. It is a “system annual”—a magic card which permits his wife or himself to travel over all the main lines and side lines of the big road, at their will. He gives it a genuine look of affection before he replaces it.
“When a man’s been fifteen years in the station service of our road, he gets one of these for himself; at twenty-five they make it include his wife anddependent members of his family—which is quite as far as the law allows.”
Blinks laughs.
“They’re generous—in almost every way—except in the pay envelope. And in these days they’re actually beginning to show some understanding of the real difficulties of this job.” There is an instance in his mind. He gives it to you. For the station agent here at Brier Hill still recalls the fearful lecture he got from the old superintendents of his division—within a month after he was made station agent at the little town. They had celebrated the centennial of the fine old town; there had been a gay night parade in which all the merchants of the village were represented. Some of them had sent elaborate floats into the line of march, but Blinks had been content to have his two boys march, carrying transparencies that did honor to the traffic facilities of the Great Midland. The transparencies had cost $6.75 and Blinks had the temerity to send the bill for them on to headquarters. If he had stolen a train and given all his friends a free ride upon it he hardly could have caught worse censure.
But Blinks’s road has begun to see a great light. It has begun to realize Blinks and his fellows are the tentacles by which it is in contact with its territory. As the traffic steadily grows heavier it has relieved him of the routine of telegraphic train orders by establishing a block tower up the line at the top of the hill, where regular operators make a sole business of the management of the trains and so widen the margin of safety upon that division. It has appointed supervisingagents—men of long experience in depot work, men who are appointed to give help rather than criticism—who go up and down its lines giving Blinks and his fellows the benefits of practical suggestions.
It has done more than these things. Today it would not censure him for spending $6.75 out of his cash drawers for giving it a representation on a local fête-day. It would urge him to spend a few more dollars and make a really good showing. It is giving him a little more help in the office and insisting that he mix more with the citizens of the town. It will perhaps pay his dues in the Chamber of Commerce and in one or two of the local clubs, providing the dues are not too high. For the road is still feeling its way.
We think that it is finding a path in the right direction. It has long maintained an expensive staff of traveling solicitors for both freight and passenger traffic—expensive not so much in the matter of salaries as in the constant flood of hotel and food bills. It has ignored Blinks and his fellows—long-established tentacles in the smaller towns—and their possibilities. Now it is turning toward them.
Out in the Middle West they are trying still another experiment. Several roads have begun letting their local agents pay small and obvious transit claims right out of their cash drawers, instead of putting them through the devious and time-taking routine of the claim departments. Under the new plan the agent first pays the claim—if it does not exceed twenty-five dollars, or thereabouts—and the claim department checks up the papers. There may be cases where theroad loses by such methods, but they are hardly to be compared with the friends it gains. An express company has adopted the plan, three or four railroads are giving it increasing use. The idea is bound to spread and grow. And not the least of its good effects will be the increased self-respect of the agents themselves. The trust that the road places in them gives them new trust in themselves.
Blinks has a little way of talking about courtesy—which in effect goes something after the same fashion. He generally gives the little talk when a new man comes upon his small staff.
“The best exercise for the human body,” he tells the man, “is the exercise of courtesy. For it reflects not only upon the man who is its recipient, but in unseen fashion upon the man who gives it.”
After all, railroading is not so much engineering, not so much discipline, not so much organization, not so much financing, as it is the understanding of men.
THE LABOR PLIGHT OF THE RAILROAD
Someeighteen 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 mustknowthat 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 hemust 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 thedifficulty 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 tothat 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 nationalwage 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 apparentutter 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 everbefore 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 oflabor 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 yeara 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 todayand 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 lessdirect 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: