RAILROADS: Airing for the Featherbeds

For the first time since World War I, the presidents of the Eastern railroads last week announced they would fight a wage demand of the “Big Five” Brotherhoods.* Before they will consider the 30% raise asked fortnight ago by the unions, the roads want revision of some service rules. Thus management attacked the No. 1 economic monstrosity of railroad labor practice: “featherbedding.”

Featherbed service rules began to get abusive after World War I, when the unions sought to offset layoffs and share speed-up savings by stretching the work. Veteran lobbyists, they also riveted many a cumbersome and costly rule into State safety laws. Then the National Railroad Adjustment Board, founded in 1934, stuffed more down into the featherbeds. Of 7,687 Board decisions up to April 15, the unions won 61%, at least in part. Result: of 1938’s $1,746,140,000 railroad pay, $120,000,000 was for 17,000,000 man-days that had never been worked. Some examples:

> A day’s pay for engineers and firemen in passenger train service is based on 100 miles or five hours, whichever makes the fatter envelope. Thus the engineer on the Santa Fe’s crack El Capitan makes $15.77 for the 2½-hour, 203-mile run between Dodge City, Kans. and La Junta, Colo.

> Union members must never lay hands to other men’s jobs. Thus when a Rock Island train crew did its own switching at Haileyville, Okla., because the yardmen were off duty, the road’s receiver had to pay 1) a full day’s overtime to the road crew for each train switched, 2) a full day’s pay to yardmen although they were not there.

> Result of most of these rules is to keep hourly wages up, annual wages down. Thus the engineer on a crack Eastern train works only ten days monthly but makes $349.60 because of his big mileage total.

Before the Eastern Presidents’ Conference started after such rules last week, Martin Withington Clement, Pennsylvania R.R. boss, was on the trail. Two years ago he won repeal of a Pennsylvania law which put an extra brakeman on every passenger train of more than five cars, every freight over 50 cars. Clement knows the chances of avoiding at least a small pay raise this year are slim. But he also knows a good shakedown of the rules might save the roads enough to pay whatever increase is granted.

Clement used good timing in picking his fight. In the “unlimited national emergency,” an already bad manpower situation will get worse. Thus neither Government nor public will sympathize with a railroad worker whose union rules require him to stay home four to five days a week.

** Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen & Enginemen, Order of Railway Conductors of America, Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, Switchmen’s Union of North America.