The Railroad Problem. Edward Hungerford
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stood their long, hard turns with the ticket-punch. A recent and a peculiarly gifted chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission—Edgar E. Clark—was for many years a passenger conductor; his pride in his calling of those earlier years is unbounded.
Here I have shown you in a word the two strongest of the four types of railroad organized labor. For while there are organizations among some other forms of the railroads’ employees, switchmen, telegraphers, and the like, it is the engineers, the firemen, the conductors, and the trainmen who hold the whiphand of authority over the railroad executive and the politician alike. They have a power that is to be feared—they have said it themselves. And the politicians, the public, a good many of the biggest railroad executives have believed it. Once in a while you will find a railroad executive—like that stern old lion, Edward Payson Ripley, who brought the Santa Fé Railroad out of bankruptcy into affluence and became its president—who states his disbelief and states it so plainly that there can be no doubt as to its meaning. For a long time Ripley has seen the handwriting on the wall. And so seeing, he has had small patience with the weak-kneed compromise that invariably has followed the so-called recurrent crises between the four big brotherhoods of the railroads and their employers. There is nothing weak-kneed about Ripley and the rapidly growing group of executives rallying about him. It must come to an issue, open warfare if you please. In such a war either the railroads or their labor will win. But upon the victory, no matter how it may go, definite economic policy may be builded. You cannot build either definite or enduring policy upon compromise. Our own Civil War and the weak-kneed years of compromise that preceded it ought to show that to each of us, beyond a shadow of a doubt.
We are just passing through one of the periodic “crises” between the railroads and their four big brotherhoods. These “crises,” which, up to the present time at least, have always ended in wage adjustments of a decidedly upward trend, are apt to be staged on the eve of an important election. They invariably are accompanied by threats of a strike—the German der Tag reduced to an American rule of terror. These threats are so definite as to leave nothing but alarm in the public breast.
Then arbitration may be brought to play upon the situation. There is a vast amount of understanding—accompanied by a still greater amount of misunderstanding. The big leaders of the big brotherhoods are no fools. They are skilled in the new-fangled science of publicity. And so are the railroads. Yet finally the men get their increased wages—or a good part of what they have asked. And finally the cost is slipped along to the public, in the form of increased passenger fares or freight tariffs. Then, sooner or later, the brotherhood railroad employee feels the increased cost of transportation distinctly reflected in his own rising cost of living. He feels it distinctly, because an instinctive idea of the manufacturer or the distributor is to add on the transportation cost to his manufacturing and selling cost, with something more than a fair margin. Thus a general increase of five per cent in freight rates may only mean that it costs a fraction less than two cents more to ship a pair of shoes from Boston to Cleveland. But the manufacturer in Boston is tempted to add five cents to his selling cost—to cover not only the increase in transportation, but other manufacturing-cost increases, less definite in detail but appreciable in volume. The wholesaler, under the same pressure from a steadily advancing cost of maintaining his business, makes his increase ten cents, and the retailer, not immune from the same general conditions which govern the manufacturer or the wholesaler, protects himself by placing an extra charge of twenty-five cents to his retail patron. If the final patron—the man or the woman who is to wear the shoes—protests, the retailer informs him that the recent increase in freight rates—well advertised in the public prints—is responsible for the new selling price. So has the increase in freight rates been magnified—both in reality and in the public mind.
It is when the brotherhood man or his wife or daughter buys the shoes that they begin to pinch—economically, at least. It is not only shoes, it is clothing, it is foodstuffs, it is coal—the pressure gains and from every quarter. Then the brotherhood man—engineer or conductor or fireman or trainman—rises in lodge-meeting and demands a better wage. His margin between income and outgo is beginning to narrow. He has a family to rear, a home to maintain—a pride in both. In the course of a short time the men at the top of the brotherhoods feel this mass pressure from below. They must yield to it. If they do not, their positions and their prestige will be taken away from them. So they get together, decide on the amount of the relief they must have, and begin their demands upon the railroads. And when the railroads, with their well-known cost sheets ever in front of them, show resistance, the threats of strike once again fill the air. Gentle, peace-loving folk of every sort become alarmed. There is turmoil among the politicians, of every sort and variety. After that, arbitration.
President Wilson in his recent address to Congress, in his accurate, authoritative way, laid great stress upon this very point of arbitration. He had laid stress upon it in the crisis of September, 1916—when it looked as if railroad union labor and the executives of the railroads had come to an actual parting of the ways—and the country was to be turned from threats into the terrorizing actuality of a strike. Only Congress, which seems rarely able to realize that it can ever be anything else than Congress and so bound to its traditions of inefficiency, chose to overlook this portion of the President’s solution of the situation. It granted the eight-hour day—so called—but it was deaf to arbitration.
Said President Wilson in his address:
To pass a law which forbade or prevented the individual workman to leave his work before receiving the approval of society in doing so would be to adopt a new principle into our jurisprudence, which I take it for granted we are not prepared to introduce. But the proposal that the operation of the railways of the country shall not be stopped or interrupted by the concerted action of organized bodies of men until a public investigation shall have been instituted which shall make the whole question at issue plain for the judgment of the opinion of the nation is not to propose any such principle.
The President is nearly always right—particularly so in domestic affairs. But never, in my knowledge, has he expressed himself with greater vigor and strength than in this particular instance. Not that the principle is apt to be popular—quite the reverse is probable. There are employers of a certain type, also employees of a certain type, whose bitterness against any fair measure of arbitration is unyielding. The great railroad brotherhoods have never shown any enthusiasm over the idea, despite the fact that the two countries in which arbitration is strongest and most successful—Australia and New Zealand—are controlled by organized labor.
There are railroad executives also who have been opposed to arbitration save where they might manipulate it to serve their own selfish ends. But these are the types of railroad chiefs who are beginning to disappear under the new order of things in America. Theirs was another and somewhat less enlightened generation—particularly in regard to social economics. And even in the railroad the old order is rapidly giving way to the new.
There is a class in America which enthusiastically receives arbitration—compulsory arbitration—and demands that it be extended in full to the railroad, as well as to every other form of industrial enterprise. I am referring to the average citizen—the man who stands to lose, and to lose heavily, while a strike of any magnitude is in progress. He is an innocent party to the entire matter. And he must be protected—absolutely and finally.
That is why we must have arbitration—compulsory arbitration, for any arbitration which is not compulsory and practically final, is useless. We have had the other sort already and it has brought us nowhere. We had arbitration of the uncompulsory sort before the critical days at the end of last August. In the final course of events both the railroads and their brotherhood employees ignored it. And the average man, the man in the street, was ignorant of the fact that it had even been tried.
After that sort of arbitration comes compromise, and compromise of that sort is a thin veil for failure. And failure means that the whole thing must be gone over once again. The circle has been completed—in a remarkably short space of time.
It all is a merry-go-round, without merriment; a juggernaut which revolves upon a seemingly unending path. Yet he is a real juggernaut. For while the brotherhood man may seek and obtain relief upon the lines which I have just indicated—how about the salaried