Labor: Tug of War

It required only 660 well-paid (from $440 to $674 per month) railroad tugboat workers, plus a blizzard, to bring complete and even desperate confusion last week to New York City and much of the U.S. Northeast. Early in the week, tugboat-union pickets marched outside Manhattan's Grand Central Station, managed to close the New York Central Railroad. A couple of days later, the New Haven Railroad was forced to shut down. At that point, more than 100,000 commuters had been forced to find new ways of getting to work—and the snowstorm made things tougher to the point of impossibility.

How—and why—could or should so few strikers be able to cause so much trouble? The answer swirled around the most incendiary labor issue of the midcentury: featherbedding.

For more than a year, eleven Eastern railroads have been negotiating with the tuggers' three unions over the size of the crews on 47 diesel tugboats that haul coal and food to Manhattan from New Jersey railheads. The unions, led by the militant Seafarers of A.F.L.-C.I.O. Maritime Chief Paul Hall, demanded a contract guaranteeing the number at the traditional five men. Management held out for the right to cut the crews, but offered to freeze the size for one year, thereafter promised to 1) give 120 days' notice before making any reductions, and 2) submit any disputes to binding arbitration.

When the tuggers struck, many members of the big railroad brotherhoods refused to cross the picket lines—even though the conservative railroadmen have not always seen eye to eye with the fiery tuggers in the past. But to break ranks and submit to management this time, many of the rail unionists figured, would set a precedent affecting all the old featherbedding practices that presently cost the railroads a claimed $500 million a year. Example: by contract, diesel engines must still carry firemen.

Such a precedent would hit hard, because the whole featherbedding issue is due to come to a head late this year. In December 1961, a 15-man presidential commission—equally divided among labor, management and "public" members, and headed by outgoing Labor Secretary James P. Mitchell—will make public a massive list of recommended changes in the archaic railway work rules. Clearly, the unionists thought that now was no time to be conciliatory.