Stuffing Out of Featherbed

There are only 18 locomotives on the whole 239 miles of the Toledo, Peoria & Western R.R., but some day they may pull every U.S. railroad out of the woods-that is, if the T.P. & W. loses a few more labor battles such as it lost last week.

The T.P. & W. is another name for G. P. McN. (George Plummer McNear Jr.), who owns it-track, ties & rolling stock (TIME, May 18). As a result of last week's decision by a Government-appointed arbitrator, G. P. McN. will have to pay $3,200 a month more in wages, and the Government has still got his railroad. But the sacrosanct featherbed rules of the Railroad Brotherhoods-the rules which make the carriers pay for all sorts of unnecessary work-had taken a disastrous shaking-up.

The shaking started a year ago when the Brotherhoods demanded their nationwide 30% wage boost. G. P. McN., like the other roads, agreed to part of the raise. But unlike the others, he added a proviso and stuck to it-no more featherbedding. Roared he: "A day's work for a day's pay." So last December his engineers and trainmen struck. So G. P. McN. went on running his railroad as usual, except that he used only 55 trainmen instead of 83-the number which the Brotherhoods' featherbed rules would have required for the same work.

Right there G. P. McN. made his big mistake. He found, as Air Associates (TIME, Nov. 10) had found before him, that beating a strike is not healthy so long as the Administration feels the way it does about labor and has wartime powers with which to crack down. After George McNear had refused to arbitrate (as the Brotherhoods had refused to arbitrate with the railroads a year before), President Roosevelt declared that there was an "emergency" on the G. P. McN. This was startling: the road was running, it was paying high wages, it even had a waiting list of men who wanted jobs. But the Government took over the road, thereby pulling the Brotherhoods' chestnuts out of the fire. The Brotherhoods beamed.

The beam soon vanished. The Government as successor of G. P. McN. agreed to arbitration. At hearings in Chicago during May and June some amazing figures came out: under McNear's "day's work for a day's pay," T.P. & W.'s wage bill in April was $18,478. The Office of Defense Transportation figured out that under Brotherhood rules the bill would have been $56,711. Badly jolted by this noncooperative ODT attitude, the Brotherhoods finally said their wage bill would have been $31,000 (still 70% over McNear's figure). The Government-appointed arbitrator hastily called a two-week recess "so the boys can get their signals straight."

The arbitrator last week finally settled with the Brotherhoods, but most of the stuffing had been taken out of their featherbed. The Brotherhoods were awarded wage rates and working rules which would have put the April payroll at $21,678-$3,200 more than McNear's operating cost.

To most U.S. railroad executives the whole affair was utterly fantastic. A little pipsqueak railroad had soundly beaten the giant Brotherhoods, slashed their demands by 75%. Not in decades had a big road extracted more than a handful of fluff from the Brotherhood featherbed. There was only one big hitch: G. P. McN. was still minus his railroad.

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