Work, Wages & Willard

Work, Wages & Willard

U. S. railroads chuffed slowly into 1932 last week, almost stalled on the long eco-nomic upgrade. An anxious nation joined to help boost them over the hump of Depression. The slippery track had been sanded by upping freight rates. Credit power had been stepped up with a special revenue pool for weak roads. The right of way was being cleared for loans from the prospective Reconstruction Finance Corp. All this gave a helpful impetus to the country's prime industry but it was not quite enough. Last week were concluded final arrangements for nation-wide wage negotiations which the carriers hoped would be their "highball," that swift lantern sweep which sends live steam roaring into the cylinders and starts the train rolling again.

Ogre into Spectre. Fashions in national antipathies change. One does not have to be very old to remember when the railways were collectively represented as an Ogre, a vicious monopoly, the farmer's foe and the shady stock speculator's darling. Within a generation they have become trusted public servants. Present now is a possibility far more terrifying to politicians and financiers than the old-time Ogre. Suppose the roads were to go bankrupt? Suppose the Government were forced to take them over? What incalculable hardship would fall upon State, county and municipal governments --many of them already in financial straits --if they were deprived of tax revenue from the carriers' property and earnings? This shadowy spectre, remote but real, produced an extraordinary unity of action on the part of bankers, businessmen, industrialists and government officials to "save the railroads."

"Beneficent Tightwad." When the roads asked the Interstate Commerce Commission for a 15% rate increase, few executives expected to get it. Instead, a selective surcharge--calculated to increase total U. S. rail revenue about 3%--was allowed, with a string to it. The money accruing from the increase, stipulated the I. C. C., must be given to weak roads to help them meet their fixed charges. The Association of Railway Executives balked, offered to pool the money and lend it won their point. Last week the machinery for this distribution. Railroad Credit Corp., was set in motion. Time limit for roads to pay in their first new freight rate profits to the pool is March 31. Payments may be made as early as March 11. Head of the corporation is Edward Grant Buckland, board chairman of New York, New Haven & Hartford R. R. Cheerful President Buckland, onetime assistant professor of law at Yale, said that he expected to collect $75,000,000 during 1932. He was confident that this would prevent further failure of railroads to meet their interest requirements. "The corporation," explained he, "can be described as a 'beneficent tightwad.' Beneficent, because it was formed for that purpose; tightwad, because the money it will disburse will not be its own but rather money belonging to the participating members. We shall endeavor to repay every cent of it."

This year the roads, whose net operating income dropped 40% in 1931, will have to meet $270,000,000 worth of maturing obligations, a tenth of which is due this month. President Hoover has estimated that 17% of the carriers will not be able to meet their interest payments without assistance. Because they have already passed into receivership or default, 13 roads, including Wabash, Ann Arbor, Seaboard Air Line will be ineligible for help from the pool.

Wages. The 3% emergency surcharge was not the sole benefit resulting from the roads' appeal to the I. C. C. They were able to show the public that they had pared maintenance costs to the edge of safety; that they could not avoid taxes and fixed charges on bonds because these were established by law; finally, that the only remaining solution to railroad ills seemed to be a reduction in wages. It was an unpleasant "but, they claimed, unavoidable fact. Many carrier executives and office workers had already taken salary cuts.

The operator of a steel mill or a dairy or a garage can cut his employes' wages at will. The employes may protest, strike, picket his plant, but nothing more. Not so with railroad operators. First step required by the Railroad Labor Act for altering the wage scale on a railroad is a 30-day notice of intention to the unions. Arbitration and mediation go step by step up to the Federal Board of Mediation. If no agreement has been reached at this stage, the President of the U. S. appoints a committee by whose ruling the contesting parties are expected to abide. This long legal procedure might require a year or more.

Fully awake to the gravity of their emergency. Eastern executives met month ago to consider negotiating voluntary wage reductions. Day later the Western managers met to discuss the same proposition. Then a national meeting of railroad presidents was called at the Biltmore in Manhattan. It started before noon, lasted until 5 p. m. There was plenty of operating department oath-swearing and table-pounding. By this time the impetuous Westerners -- stout Lewis Warrington Baldwin of Missouri Pacific, white-headed Lawrence Aloysius Downs of Illinois Central, bald James Edward Gorman of Rock Island--were for dropping the idea of negotiation, filing their notices at once and fighting the matter out with Labor. But the spirit of conciliation prevailed, thanks principally to a 70-year-old gentleman whose jolly round head is adorned with a sugarloaf hat and gold-rimmed spectacles--President Daniel ("Uncle Dan") Willard of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

Swap? Behind closed doors in Cleveland last week convened the Railway Labor Executives Association. Present were the officials of 21 unions. They were the spokesmen for 1,250,000 men who work on U. S. railways, earn $2,250,000,000 a year. Bulwarks of the association, though numerically far in the minority, are the Big Four Brotherhoods: firemen & enginemen, trainmen, conductors, engineers, to the number of 310,000. President of the firemen & enginemen's brotherhood is David Brown Robertson, who started railroading as an engine wiper on the Pennsylvania. He is also chairman of the executives' association, is therefore the Voice of organized railroad labor.

Chairman Robertson's delegates had met in Chicago three weeks before, had gone home to get authorization to meet and treat with the executives committee of nine headed by Mr. Willard. This accomplished, the R. L. E. A. returned to Cleveland, sent "Uncle Dan" a telegram naming Chicago as the place and Jan. 14 as the date of their joint conference.

Management and Labor discreetly muffled their words last week on the eve of their meeting. But there was no dearth of straws in the wind. Significant was the fact that, effective Jan. 1, 15,000 shopmen on the Southern Pacific accepted a voluntary pay cut of 10% for one year, with the understanding that no further reduction would be made irrespective of the outcome of the Chicago meeting. Simultaneously the Southern Pacific served notice of 15% reductions on its other organized employes. Many a line had already done likewise as a precaution against a deadlock at Chicago.

Most observers from President Hoover down were optimistic that a voluntary agreement might be reached in Chicago. The roads apparently would be satisfied with a 10% cut which would save them $200,000,000 per year in wages. It was reported in Cleveland that the unions might well agree to it, or at the most try to swap reductions for a 6-hour day and 5-day week.

Not the least reason for optimism was the selection of the railroads' chief rep-resentative--"Uncle Dan." An up-from-the-tracks man, he enjoys the unanimous respect of organized railroad Labor. On his own line this takes the form of something approximating beatification. The judgment of B. & O. employes on him is: "One square guy!" Many a road used President Willard's "B. & O. Plan" to settle the shopmen's strike of 1922. As they prepared to sit down and thresh out together the first major wage problem since 1916, workers and operators of 249,000 U. S. rail miles felt that if anyone could oil the way to a solution it was Daniel Willard.

"Uncle Dan" Willard was born on a farm near North Hartland, Vt. during the first year of the Civil War. The first locomotive he saw ran by the farm on the old Central Vermont. Aged 16, he taught school for a spell. Aged 17, he was sent to Massachusetts Agricultural College. Bad eyesight compelled him to give up his studies, get a job in a track gang. Three years later he was an engineer on the Connecticut & Passumpsic River, now a part of the Boston & Maine. Then he went West. When next seen he was "hogging" (driving a locomotive) on the Lake Shore & Michigan with a pair of red mittens on his hands and a book or two under the cab seat. There is good reason for "Uncle Dan" to sympathize with the 500,000 men laid off railroads in the past two years. The business depression of 1883 took him out of his cab, put him to work as a conductor on the Soo. From conductor he started up the long grind of a rail-road operating man's career: trainmaster, assistant superintendent, superintendent.

When a railroad official gets a chance for a better position on another line, not infrequently he takes a subordinate or so along with him. When Frederick Douglass Underwood left the Soo to become general manager of the B. & O. he took Superintendent Willard along as his assistant. That was in 1899. Two years later Mr. Underwood became president of the Erie, asked Mr. Willard to accompany him. "Uncle Dan" went along as general manager. In 1910 he returned East to become president of the road he had left nine years before.

In 1910 the B. & O. was a great, rusty T-shaped giant. The top of the T ran from Philadelphia to Washington. The stem split, one line reaching out to Chicago, the other ending just over the Mississippi River at St. Louis. Corporate headquarters were at the top of the stem, in Baltimore.

When he took charge, one of the first things President Willard did was cancel all advertising. "We'll start again when we have something to advertise," he said. Having spent nearly half a billion on his railroad in the past 20 years, "Uncle Dan" now has something to advertise. He has authorized copy written this way: "70,000 of us invite you to travel on the B. & O."

A tangible improvement of the Willard administration was the acquisition of tracks into Jersey City, although, unhappily for "Uncle Dan," not yet across the Hudson River into New York. President Willard has worked longer and harder than any other man for the Eastern four-system unification plan. Under him Chicago & Alton was taken over as a western B. & 0. link. Last week B. & O. began operating the Buffalo. Rochester & Pittsburgh as a division of its system.

The atmosphere of "we're-all-B. & O.-men-together" is one President Willard likes to get into his bulletins. Sample: "No matter how hard we try, we cannot make the B. & O. the greatest, straightest or richest railroad, but we can. if we try hard enough, create for it the reputation of being the best railroad in the world from the point of service." A prime Willard maxim: "Be a good neighbor." Farmer boys and girls up and down his line get settings of eggs. Officials are sent to make friends with local shippers. And in 1927 "Uncle Dan'' put on a 23-day pageant ("The Fair of the Iron Horse") outside Baltimore to show what his road had accomplished in its century of existence.

It is generally agreed throughout the system that no one works harder on the B. & O. than President Willard. He gets up early, works late. Once he told Jim, porter of his office car, No. gg, to wake him at 5 a. m. As the dawn was breaking, the blackamoor felt a tug at his covers, looked up into "Uncle Dan's" smiling face. "Wake up, Jim," said President Willard. "It's 5 o'clock."

There is a good deal of confusion as to who has ridden on No. gg. The fact is that no one except President Willard and his officers ride on it. If they are important enough, celebrities traveling over the B. & O. are given the Maryland.

Just as no one rides on No. 99, few get inside "Uncle Dan's" white stucco house, which hides behind trees in Baltimore's smart Roland Park. There he lives with his wife and his two orphaned grandchildren, whose parents died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. He plays his violin occasionally, is a wretched golfer. Like many a railroad man, he goes to the office on Sundays. Like many railroad children, his grandsons like to go along, too. He owns the farm where he was born, farms it. He belongs to the Unitarian Church, drinks a little, smokes a little.

When he was on the Wartime Council of National Defense he saw a good deal of Walter Sherman Gifford. After the War, Mr. Gifford saw that Mr. Willard was made a director of American Telephone & Telegraph Co. Mr. Willard saw that Mr. Gifford was made a fellow trustee of Johns Hopkins University.

The typical railroad president is not always the typical railroad man. Often they come by their positions through the legal department. This month "Uncle Dan" completes the 71st year of his life, the 22nd of his presidency. This week he will be a principal figure in discussions involving the welfare of more than half the trackage on earth. He has health, the respect of his associates, a comfortable share of the world's goods. More important to 1,250,000 rail employes who are also involved, is the fact that he is not just a railroad president. He is a rail-road man.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.