Labor: Toward the End of the Line

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After years of arguments, after numerous postponements, after reports by presidential panels and decisions by U.S. courts, the great battle of the railroads highballs this week toward the end of the line. Last week's postponement, agreed to at the crisis request of the President, will almost certainly be the last. Now all parties involved in the struggle are under pressure: the railroad companies, the five operating railroad unions, all the other workers who would be kept off the job by a nationwide railroad strike, all the business enterprises whose operations would soon be hindered or halted, the President, the Congress, and the U.S. public. This time the long-fought and far-reaching dispute, bound up in the process of moving an old method of transport into modern methods, must come to some kind of resolution.

Four Is More than Ten. At the core of the dispute are the "work rules" that the operating rail unions got from management in the course of three generations of strikes, strike threats and negotiations. Technology has outmoded many of the rules. Firemen used to shovel coal on steam locomotives; on today's diesels a fireman still rides along in the cab, doing no necessary work. The pay scale of many railroad workers is based on the quaint rule that a man gets a full day's pay for 100 miles of travel, with the result that an engineer on a fast express may get $39.95 for four hours' work while his counterpart on a slow freight may get $34.33 for ten hours.

The railroads charge that the work rules add up to "featherbedding," impose extra costs of $600 million a year. The companies want to revise the rules, gradually unload 65,000 workers, mainly firemen, and switch to a more realistic wage basis. The five operating unions say they will strike the moment the railroads put their proposed new rules into effect.

"To the Brink." The unions involved often make it sound as if the railroads' determination to revise the work rules were capricious and tyrannical. In fact, the work rule changes are similiar to those recommended by a presidential commission and approved by another presidential panel (see box following page). And management's right to change the rules has been upheld in the federal courts. Against that weight of neutral and expert opinion, the unions have wielded only one really persuasive argument—the threat to strike if the companies do what the U.S. Government has repeatedly said they have reasons and the right to do.

In mid-June, President Kennedy called representatives of the two sides to the White House and warned that "the whole future of free collective bargaining" was at stake. Kennedy asked the management men to agree to another postponement of the deadline for putting the new rules into effect. Reluctantly, the railroads shifted from June 18 to 12:01 a.m. July 11.