LOAFING ON THE RAILROAD

Featherbedding v. an Honest Day's Work

IN a shack in the railroad yards at Antigo, Wis. last week sat four railroadmen: a fireman, a conductor, a brakeman and a flagman. All together, they collect pay totaling $110 a day, not counting fringe benefits. Their job: doing nothing. Earlier this year, the Chicago & North Western Railroad decided to eliminate one of the two switching locomotives at Antigo because there was not enough work to keep them busy. But the road may not remove the idled crew without union permission, and permission had not been given.

Such practices make railroads the most egregiously featherbedded industry in the U.S. Not all examples are so flagrant, but the railroads declare that featherbedding costs them $500 million a year. Now, in the middle of negotiating new contracts, the roads have served notice that they intend to replace the feathers with some spine-stiffening substitutes --at the risk of a strike.

The railroads' chief case is against their 40,000 firemen, who have little or nothing to do in modern diesels. The roads argue that taking some 23,000 firemen off freight runs and yards alone would save them $200 million a year. They also want to change the mileage pay rates set 40 years ago when trains traveled at turtle speed. Under the obsolete rules, a train crew gets a full day's pay for every 100 miles traveled, and conductors and trainmen on passenger trains for every 150 miles--even though the actual traveling time sometimes takes less than two hours. Under the same set of rules, the 20th Century Limited, between New York and Chicago, must have eight engine-crew changes on a 16-hour trip, forcing the New York Central to pay out a total of 19.2 days' pay to 16 men. Some yard crews get a day's pay for moving a train 100 yds.

RAILROAD operators say they have had enough. "The necessity of employing firemen on freight and yard diesels costs the New Haven over $3,500,000 a year," says George Alpert, president of the New Haven Railroad. "This is absolutely unessential." Says E. F. Bidez, vice president of the Central of Georgia Railroad: "In 1958 we paid firemen on freight and switch engines $1,005,000. Considering the fact that we could get along without most of them, that's a good bit of money. It's 50% of the net earned last year." The Great Northern Railroad reports that it paid $21 million for time not worked in 1958.

To these complaints, the unions' reply is that many so-called featherbedding practices are actually required for safety reasons by many states, that cutting down crews would add to railway accidents. (Actually, states with such rules have no better accident records than states without them.) The unions have come to regard featherbedding as a sort of fringe benefit, making up for the fact that railroad men have to sit by the phone for long hours without pay while waiting for a call to work, get no premium pay for nights, Sundays or holiday work, are not paid for away-from-home terminal expenses. Furthermore, despite all the complaints about featherbedding, 800 to 1,000 railroad workers, on an average, lose their jobs every week because of more automation and better equipment. But most of those who lose jobs work in nonoperating (i.e., not on trains) areas; the five operating brotherhoods, which make up only one-fourth of all railroad employees, jealously guard rules that prevent the roads from abolishing jobs.

The unions' most paradoxical argument is that changes in the present rules would actually cost the railroads more than they claim they could save. Railroad workers, whose wages average $2.47 an hour, are paid less than workers in many major U.S. industries. If roads paid overtime, differentials for nightwork. severance pay and other benefits, say the unions, it would cost them $648 million more a year.

THE real argument against featherbedding--from any point of view--is that the practice is killing off business just when struggling U.S. roads need every dollar they can get. Booms Daniel Loomis, president of the Association of American Railroads: "The central issue is simply whether this industry or any industry so beset by rising competition can long survive under work rules that exact millions in pay for work not done or needed."

Many a U.S. railroadman believes that the answer to the problem lies not in charges or recriminations, but in a joint effort on both sides to discover how featherbedding practices can be eliminated without undue hardship. The industry favors a plan adopted by Canadian railroads, which has helped cut down featherbedding by not replacing firemen working on freights or in the yards who have died or retired. Privately, many railroadmen concede that the U.S. situation is not entirely the unions' fault; U.S. railroads are often run inefficiently, with management clinging to ancient practices as fervently as do the unions. Ben Heineman, chairman of the Chicago & North Western Railroad, would like to put railroad employees on an eight-hour day, pay them for overtime as other industries do--and insist on an honest day's work. Says he: "It would be up to the railroads to schedule things so that there wouldn't be much deadheading. The burden would be on the railroads to use their work force wisely."

The problem cannot be solved overnight by any catchall solution. But the first step must be made soon if the U.S. railroads do not want to continue to lose business to their competitors. The four idle men in the shack at Antigo make a shocking example of what can happen when an industry loses its ability to change with the times.

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