Exhibits: Page. 1. Comparative summary of average daily compensation of railway 2. Rules, regulations, and rates of pay for employment in train and Southern Railway Company Louisville and Nashville Railroad 3. The pension features of foreign railways. B. Western Railroad Company of France.... 910 914 914 916 920 921 932 933 956 C. Jura-Simplon Company pension fund.. 959 D. German Empire, invalidity and old-age pension features. 959 961 966 G. Organization and plan of the pension department of the 967 4. Employer's liability 970 A. Court decisions on employer's liability in railroad cases, 970 I. Decisions illustrating the interpretation of common- 970 II. Decisions affirming fellow-servant rule and the prin- 1039 rule 1052 IV. Decisions interpreting specified statutory extension 1065 V. Decisions on power of contract for release of liability. 1094 B. Employer's liability laws. 1123 Index of report on labor organizations, labor disputes, and arbitration Index of report on railway labor.. 1137 1161 1167 RAILWAY LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES. INTRODUCTION. § 1. SCOPE AND PURPOSE OF THE REPORT. The scope of the report is to present the condition of railway labor in its leading features and to discuss the chief topics of interest concerning the condition of railway employment in the United States. The plan originally adopted, in accordance with the scope as just stated, proved too comprehensive for thorough treatment within the limits of time and space allotted to this report, and necessitated that the emphasis be laid on a few general problems. One of the chief aims of the report is to present in a connected way some account of many topics relating to railway employment that have been touched upon in the testimony on transportation topics already considered by the Industrial Commission. At the same time it is not desirable to duplicate to any appreciable extent the material already collected and so ably summarized in the digest to the transportation volume of the Industrial Commission's reports.1 Therefore the first duty of your expert agent was to collect, directly for himself, data relating to the chief topics to be treated. There are in the United States 189,294 miles of railroad, owned by upward of 2,000 corporations. Many of these companies are consolidated or their roads leased to other companies, which operate them. Many of these corporations of course own only a few miles of line. It was therefore possible to select 62 railroads which actually operated 146,005 miles of line, or over 77 per cent of the total mileage of the country. To these roads the following set of questions was sent asking for replies and statistics covering leased lines or total number of miles operated, and also asking for printed copies of reports of the corporations relating to any of the topics specified: QUESTION SHEET FOR INFORMATION ON RAILROAD LABOR. 1. Name of road. 2. Miles operated. 3. Total number of employees. 4. Requirements for admission to various grades of service. 5. Rules for discharging and promoting employees. 6. Is technical education furnished by the railroad to its employees? If so, to what extent and for what grades of service? 7. Do you have a blacklist for employees discharged for serious offenses? 8. What is the average length of the working-day for the various grades of service, the average daily wages, and the annual income of the same? 9. Are the men paid for extra time? If so, how much? 10. What percentage of the employees in the various grades of service are required to work on Sunday? 1 Vol. IV, Transportation, Industrial Commission Reports, Washington, 1900. 11. What forms of company relief and insurance or beneficial associations are supported in part or in whole by the company? 12. Do you make any objection to employees being members of railway brotherhoods or orders or other labor organizations? 13. What percentage of the men in various grades of service belong to such organizations? 14. What methods do you pursue in the settlement of strikes and disputes among your employees? Have you had recourse to either State or national arbitration boards; and if so, with what result? Replies to this question sheet were received from all of the larger railroad companies to which it was sent, and from a total of 40 companies operating 112,353 miles of road, or 59.3 per cent of the total mileage of the United States, and employing 633,023 men, or 68.1 per cent of the total number of railway employees in the United States. The information thus obtained was supplemented through correspondence and personal interviews with the leading railroad officials and the leading representatives of railway labor in different parts of the country. The literature of the subject is too extensive, covering so wide a range of topics, for any one to say that he has exhaustively examined it; frequent references will be found throughout the footnotes in the following pages to the more important publications relating to the several topics discussed. The reports and publications of the Interstate Commerce Commission and of the United States Department of Labor are, of course, the chief sources of information and the most generally available ones. The experience and practice of foreign railroads and some comparisons of the conditions of employment are considered. Throughout the following pages your agent has attempted so far as possible to supplement the material brought out in the testimony before the Industrial Commission and for this reason has treated some topics more comprehensively and others less so than would probably have been the case had this report been prepared without any reference to the work the Industrial Commission has already done. The same thing is also true to a lesser degree of the relation of this report to other governmental publications, such as those of the Department of Labor and the Interstate Commerce Commission. References are frequently given to such reports and their contents briefly noted where an entirely independent discussion of the topic in hand would have required a more extensive use of these materials. Perhaps their ready accessibility to the general public is a further justification of this method. It is hardly necessary to state that the chief aim or purpose of the report has been to gather and present information rather than to argue a case. Many of the topics treated are extremely controversial, and great care has been exercised merely to present the facts and to avoid the expression of opinion. There are a few judgments expressed concerning the advisability of legislation on the subject of railway labor, but for the most part, even where the material selected clearly suggests legislative remedies, the inferences to be drawn have been left to the judgment of the Industrial Commission in framing its final report. § 2. SUMMARY OF RESULTS. The report is divided into four parts, the first of which treats of the general conditions of railway employment under which is discussed the number of railway employees, their geographical distribution, the intensity of railway employment as measured in the number of employees per mile, a few comparisons of the number of employees per mile of line in the United States with that of the leading countries of Europe, and finally the relations which railway employment bears to other occupations. It will be noted that railway employees i the United States constitute an army of nearly 1,000,000 people and this means that probably nearly 5,000,000 people are dependent upon the wages paid by railroads for their support. The intensity of employment, however, is nowhere so great in the United States as in England and Belgium. With the growth of population, therefore, even without greatly increased mileage, it is altogether probable that for years to come the railroads will absorb an increasing number of wage-earners. In the second place, the daily wages and annual income of railway employees are tabulated for a series of years and for different sections of the country and also for the various grades in the service. In the third place, the hours of labor for men in the leading departments of railway service and the conditions and rules under which men work, the amount of Sunday labor, and the rates of pay, or the absence of pay, for overtime are discussed on the basis of information collected from many sources. It will be noted here that while there is no standard wage and no standard labor day that holds for all sections of the country, nevertheless in general the wages in the best-organized grades of the service compare very favorably with those paid for similar skill and labor in other departments of industry, and that the 10-hour working day is about the average, as it is in industrial enterprises at the present time. The conditions with respect to Sunday labor and with respect to pay for overtime are probably relatively less advantageous for railway workmen than for the rank and file of employees in other occupations. Part II is devoted to the general topic: The requirements of railway service. Under this heading the qualifications for admission to the service, the age, the degree of skill, and previous education required for the various departments of work, the departments to which new men are usually admitted, and the order in which they usually pass from one grade to another, and, finally, the departments to which new men are rarely admitted are discussed and described. Similarly the conditions relating to the same questions on foreign railways are briefly summarized. In the next place both the general and technical education of railway employees, both as regards that which is expected of them before they enter the service, as well as that to which they have access, or are required to take after entering the service, is discussed at considerable length for the United States and reviewed briefly for the leading European countries. Thirdly, difficult problems of railway discipline and the rules in actual practice on American railroads for the discharge and promotion of railway employees are presented. It will be noted that the majority of the roads are developing a system of discipline by which they avoid suspensions and encourage loyal personal service, and thus promote better relations between employer and employed. Lastly, the law with respect to blacklisting, the feelings of distress and despair on this subject to be found among all railroad employees, the claims and practices of the railroads themselves, and the decisions of the courts on this subject are considered, and in this connection also the legal rights (under both the common law and the statute law) of men to strike and to quit work are discussed. Part III treats of the organizations of railway employees. Under this heading for the first time there is brought together a historical sketch of nearly all the railroad brotherhoods and the railroad orders. Their methods of organization, their plan of work, their beneficial departments, their protective features, their financial management, and their educational value are the topics around which this discussion is grouped. Each brotherhood is treated separately, but the same general method of presentation is followed, so that the reader can easily trace out any single topic through the several brotherhoods. In the next place the fraternal and beneficial associations are briefly referred to, and then the educational and religious associations in connection with which the work of the railroad branch of the Young Men's Christian Association is described. The various attempts at federation of the railroad brotherhoods and in general the relation which these organizations have sustained in the past to other labor organizations and the attitude of railway corporations toward labor organizations and toward the question of arbitration of labor disputes are important questions which are briefly treated in this part of the report. Part IV is devoted to a discussion of the relations of railway corporations and their employees. The general tendency manifest on the part of the roads to excise greater care in the maintenance of their labor force and in its improvement is clearly seen in the growth of the railway relief and insurance departments, and very recently in the establishment of superannuation and pension funds. The plan and working of these features of railway management is presented in detail and the statistical results discussed. For the most part only the experience of American railroads is taken into account, but on the subject of railroad pensions, the able report of Mr. Riebenack, presented in Exhibit 3, gives a survey of the practice of foreign roads as well as presenting an authoritative account of the pension fund plan adopted by the Pennsylvania Railroad and the results of its first year of operation. This plan is already being studied and imitated by other large corporations. A brief summary is presented of the leading points relating to employer's liability, a vexed question over which so much railway litigation takes place and on which the rank and file of railway employees are almost a unit in demanding greater legal protection than they have at present. It is a subject to be considered not merely in its relation to railway employees, as has been done in this report, but also in its larger aspects in its bearing on the legal relations of employer and employed in all departments of industry. The legislation of England and that of almost all European countries places them far in advance of the United States in dealing with these questions. A careful examination of the numerous cases which have come up in the last 5 years affecting only one class of employees, namely those in the railway service, seems to be convincing evidence that some limitation of the fellow-servant principle or doctrine of common employment should be embodied in legislation. Lastly the subject to which considerable attention has already been paid by Congress and on which there has been some legislation, namely, that of safety appliances, is briefly reviewed. It will be seen that the corporations have gladly cooperated in the execution of this legislation as soon as they collectively faced the problem and began to realize the economic advantages of uniformity of requirements on this subject. The results of the safety-appliance legislation may well encourage us to go further in social legislation affecting railway employees even where, at the outset, railway corporations individually find it difficult to adjust themselves to it. In the long run they will find that uniformity of control may work out to their economic advantage as well as to that of their employees. The exhibits of the report explain themselves, and have so direct a relation to matters discussed in the text that no additional word of explanation and no summary of their content is necessary. |