Featherbedridden McNear

U.S. railroads are highballing into a labor shortage. Selective Service Headquarters last week ranked railroad labor with coal mining and shipbuilding, urged local draft boards to give all three categories deferments. The Office of Defense Transportation said at least 320,000 new railroad workers must be found by year's end. Retired pensioners are coming back to work.

Yet the terms of most railroad employment still include the man-and-dollar-wasting practices known as featherbedding. These intricate Railroad Brotherhood rules, devised when railroad traffic was shrinking, are aimed at making work and keeping a maximum number of men on the payrolls. Though obsolete and wasteful now, featherbed rules are a sacred cow in labor politics. Few railroad presidents dare monkey with them.

Enter McNear. One of the few is big, brash George Plummer McNear Jr., 50, president of the Toledo, Peoria & Western R.R. An individualist to the last ounce of his 200 lb., Railroader McNear has fought the Brotherhood rules for 15 years. But he finally ran into the U.S. Government. After a bloody three-month strike last winter, the U.S. Government kicked him out of office, seized the T.P. & W.

George McNear got into railroading in 1926, when he spied T.P. & W. on the auction block, outbid giant Pennsylvania R.R. by paying $1,300,000 ($130,000 in cash). T.P. & W. hardly seemed a bargain, but it had one big asset: over its 239 miles of track (between Effner, Ind. and Keokuk, Iowa) transcontinental freight can save days by dodging the Chicago terminal bottleneck. McNear got to work and within 45 days the long-bankrupt road was making money. It has made money ever since. Last year it earned a neat $365,000 on $2,775,000 revenue.

But he never got on with the Brotherhoods. In 1929, McNear rode a cowcatcher through picket lines, thus broke a strike. In his 1932 annual report he harped: "It is time that eight hours' work be given for eight hours' pay." Late in 1940 he started anew, demanded that the Brotherhoods revise their rules before he considered a 30% wage boost.

To McNear one of the worst union rules is that denning a 100-mile run as a day's work, which it has not been for years. He also hates the Brotherhood-built barriers between road and yard work. Present rules say that if a road crew does ten minutes' yard work, all can claim a full day's yardman's pay besides their road pay. Worse still, the regular yardmen can claim a day's pay on the grounds that they were gypped out of a job.*

The Proposition. To the Brotherhoods' demands for wage boosts, McNear counter-proposed "a day's work for a day's pay." In cash per envelope, this meant more pay, not less. Engineers would get $13.44 a day v. $11.57 under Brotherhood rules, firemen $10.41 v. $9.46, etc. But because idle "standby" workers would be eliminated, it meant fewer jobs. McNear ran his road with 55 crewmen a day at the very time the Brotherhoods were insisting it took 83 to do the job.

McNear and the Brotherhoods snorted and haggled for a year. Neither budged an inch. Meanwhile McNear scrapped with the National Mediation Board, the U.S. Conciliation Service, the ODT, the National War Labor Board. His battle cry: "It is high time that someone, somewhere made a start. . . . The mere fact that an employe rides around on a train should not give him the right to fleece the railroads and the shipping public."

Last December, 105 engineers and train-men struck. Amid riots, shootings, burnings, loss of business, McNear tried to break the strike, ran a big help-wanted ad, got 1,000 applicants within a few days. He even got an injunction. Three Brotherhood men were convicted of conspiring to blow up one of T. P. & W.'s biggest bridges. When Government agencies told McNear to arbitrate, he refused, on the ground that the mediation boards were grossly prolabor.

Exit McNear. Last March McNear pulled his most ruggedly individualistic boner. As defense traffic got snarled on his strike-bound railroad (over 150 cars were tied up at one time), he waited three days to answer President Roosevelt's personal appeal for a settlement, then sent a bitterly phrased 5,000-word telegram to the White House--collect. Two days later the Government collared T.P. & W., ousted McNear, put in as Federal Manager John Walker Barriger III, associate ODT director.

Since then peace and traffic have returned to T.P. & W. Because there was nothing wrong with the road's equipment or finances, Barriger's biggest job has been to restore confidence among shippers, many of whom think McNears aims were fine, his methods not. Last week Barriger reported an April gross of $210,000, twice the January total but still below last year. Barriger has rehired all strikers, kept those hired by McNear during the strike, given up picking at the featherbeds.

This week McNear was still unreconstructed. He refused to show up at Government-sponsored arbitration proceedings in Chicago, was probably playing tennis on his $65,000 indoor court in Peoria instead. He had one reason to feel good: two weeks ago--in the first case of its kind--he was acquitted of criminal violation of the Railway Labor Act. But McNear never expected to lose.

Nor does he expect to lose his crusade against the featherbeds. He ran the T.P. & W. efficiently with 35% smaller train crews than the rules require. As the labor shortage gets worse, the lesson is bound to spread. Whether Individualist McNear regains his prestige or not, the featherbed rules are losing theirs fast.

* Some rules are super-fantastic. When a railroad refused to pay a man because he was drunk, the Brotherhoods wangled a half-day's pay with the argument that the man was "only half drunk."

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