Public Policy: An End to Featherbedding

For nearly a decade, the men who run the nation’s railroads have been battling doggedly to eliminate the union-imposed “featherbedding” that the railroads claim costs them an unnecessary $500 million a year. Most of the time, it has seemed a losing fight. Last week in Washington the tide unexpectedly turned when a presidential arbitration commission decided that the Order of Railroad Telegraphers was unjustified in demanding the right to veto job cutbacks on the Chicago & North Western Railway.

Last week’s ruling was the work of Sylvester Garrett, 50, a Pittsburgh lawyer who earned his reputation as an arbitrator in steel industry disputes and was appointed three weeks ago by President Kennedy to end a month-long telegraphers’ strike against the C. & N.W. (The other two members of the arbitration board—C. & N.W. Chairman Ben Heineman and Telegraphers’ President George Leighty—canceled each other out.) The essence of Garrett’s decision was that al though the C. & N.W. must discuss proposed layoffs with the union, the final decision would be the railroad’s alone. To soften the blow to the union, the railroad agreed to give the union 90 days’ notice of firings and to pay discharged telegraphers 60% of their annual earnings for as long as five years.

The decision will have little immediate impact at the C. & N.W., where tough-minded Ben Heineman, who has already eliminated 600 telegraphers, plans to keep on all but 70 of the remaining 1,000 anyway. But in the long run it marked a stunning setback for the telegraphers. A year ago, Leighty’s union extracted from the giant Southern Pacific a virtual guarantee to keep on all its telegraphers until their death or retirement and, with that encouragement, the telegraphers have since demanded a veto over job cutbacks on 33 other railroads. Now Garrett’s decision rather than the S.P. settlement will almost certainly serve as the precedent in future negotiations between the railroads and the telegraphers. More important yet, last week’s ruling will weaken the hand of all rail unions in their fight to defy the recommendations of the presidential board, which last February urged the elimination of 40,000 diesel-locomotive “firemen” and other unneeded workers on U.S. railroads.