Beyond the Last Mile

(See Cover) Lumbering along a street in Washington, an old railroad fireman named H. E. Gilbert recalled his private meeting with the President of the U.S. earlier that day. Gilbert turned to his companion. "You know," he said, "today's events make me prouder than ever that I'm an American. Where else in the world could an old country boy like me say no to the President and then walk out of his office?"

That no, uttered two weeks ago, resounded across the nation. By turning down the presidential proposal to have U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg act as arbitrator in the railroad labor dispute, Ed Gilbert, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, and the four union leaders who joined him, brought the old struggle to its last mile. And in uttering his predictable no, Gilbert demonstrated the fact that no man better represents the issues in the great featherbedding fight.

Old Iron Jaw. Members of his union call Gilbert "Old Iron Jaw," and the nickname fits his character as well as his physiognomy. For more than four years, he has kept on saying no. He says it quietly, often with a mild smile, but the answer nevertheless has an oak en firmness about it.

Fireman Gilbert's character and personal style are marvelously well suited to his role as a rearguard battler, a staver-off of the future. He is, says an official of Gilbert's union, "oldfashioned, unsophisticated and basic." He does not smoke or drink, and rarely swears. He once joined a country club but soon quit because he disapproved of the drinking the other members did. His recreations center on his home in a suburb of Cleveland: broiling steaks in the yard, playing pingpong, showing home movies. He and his wife sometimes have guests for square dancing in the basement. On his $29,300-a-year salary, he allows himself one uncharacteristic extravagance: a coral-colored Cadillac. It is really not an extravagance, he says. He has to travel a lot in the course of his presidential duties, and he says he can get around much more readily in his car than by public transportation. And in a big car "you don't get so jostled and tired as you would in a small car."

One Fare Short. Gilbert was born in 1906 on a little farm near Ethel, Mo., and even the town fits the pattern--its population was close to 300 then, is now about 250. When he was eight he started working on his father's horse-drawn delivery wagon. After he finished high school in 1925, he got a job with an Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe signal gang, working along the tracks from Missouri to Chicago. Earning $22.56 a week, pretty good money in the mid-1920s, he married his longtime sweetheart. Bent on settling in Chicago, he went on to the big city alone because he did not have enough money for her fare. As soon as he could get a railroad pass, he brought his bride to Chicago. For nine years Gilbert worked as a fireman on the Alton Railroad. In those days railroad firemen worked hard. In heat so intense that it once made his nose bleed, Gilbert sometimes shoveled as much as 20 tons of coal in the course of a 16-hour day. He signed up as a member of Chicago Lodge 707 of the Brotherhood (he still retains his membership in that local), but he never in his years as a working fireman took part in any railroad strike.

While Gilbert was shoveling coal in the mid-1920s, U.S. railroads began introducing the first diesel locomotives. Powered by an internal combustion engine, the diesels needed no firebox, no pile of coal--and no fireman. The diesels came onto U.S. railway tracks very gradually, and as late as 1937 fewer than 1% of the nation's locomotives were diesels. In that year the Brotherhood of Firemen foresightedly negotiated a contract with major railroads calling for two-man train crews. Fire or no fire, there was to be a fireman aboard.

Ed Gilbert himself never featherbedded aboard a diesel. Before the Alton line switched from steam locomotives, Gilbert laid down his shovel and moved into a new career as a fulltime union official. Elected president of Lodge 707 in 1931, he moved on to the Brotherhood's headquarters in Cleveland in 1942 as a clerk, promptly started a climb up the ladder of union bureaucracy by wrestling with a 90-day crash course in shorthand so that he could be come a stenographer (he still uses shorthand to take voluminous verbatim notes at meetings). Blessed with an adhesive memory for names and faces, he firstnamed countless delegates at Brotherhood conventions over the years, and in 1953 he first-named his way into the presidency of the Brotherhood.

Spirit of '73. As president of the Firemen, Gilbert has been simply a preserver of past union gains. In a speech to a Brotherhood convention two weeks ago, he characteristically called upon the members to confront the crisis of '63 with the "spirit of '73." He meant not 1973 but 1873.

That was the year the Brotherhood was founded. An Erie Railroad fireman was killed in a train wreck, and a railroading friend named Joshua Leach set about taking up a collection for the widow and the children. Leach was so distressed about the plight of the widow, left without funds, that he decided to form a firemen's life insurance association. The eleven original members called themselves Deer Park Lodge No. 1, took oaths and made up secret passwords. From that small beginning grew the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen (engineman is an old-fashioned word for fireman).

In 1877, members of the young union took part in the U.S.'s first nationwide strike, which erupted when depression-hit railroads imposed wage cuts. Railroad workers struck in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Reading, Louisville, Chicago. Strikers destroyed locomotives, fought with antistrike citizens, finally gave up after battling state and federal troops. Chastened by bloodshed and defeat, the Firemen two years later adopted a resolution declaring that the union would "ignore strikes and hereafter settle our grievances with our employers by arbitration."

Chuca Choo, Chuca Choo. Several other railroad unions had the same kind of origin as the Firemen. Working on the railroad was a hazardous way of making a living in the 19th century. Many a fireman was scarred by a boiler explosion, many a yardman was mashed between cars. So often did brakemen fall from atop moving cars that one in three would be injured or killed in the course of a year. Understandably, insurance companies were reluctant to insure railroaders. In the railroad workers' need for insurance the first rail unions had their beginnings, as fraternal insurance societies. The unions still show traces of their small-scale, fraternal antecedents. There are 21 major rail unions today, and some of them still like to think of themselves as "brotherhoods" and "orders" rather than ordinary labor unions.

The long history of railroading in the U.S. has seen only one even partly successful attempt to gather all railroad workers into a single industrial union. That was the American Railway Union, founded in 1893 by fiery Socialist Eugene Debs. The A.R.U. rapidly became the biggest union in railroading, with 150,000 members. It was a boisterous, confident organization, and at meetings members liked to sing a rousing fight song that began

The union train is coming fast,

Chuca choo, chuca choo, and ended

Our engineer is E. V. Debs,

On him there are no spider webs,

And no one now the fact denies

That on our union are no flies.

But there was trouble around the bend. On May 11, 1894, Debs called out the workers in Chicago's Pullman shops, and the result was one of the bloodiest strikes in U.S. history. The A.R.U. was among its many casualties.

Since then, railroad labor has remained fragmented (see box), despite occasional merger talks between various rail unions in recent years. The older railroad unions long steered clear of the main line of U.S. unionism. Of the five "operating" rail unions, only three have joined the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and two of those did not enter the federation until recent years.

Creeping Obsolescence. Both the Brotherhood and the railroads reached their peak in the decade before 1920. Since then the companies have been afflicted with competition from trucking, and the rail unions with creeping obsolescence. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen had 126,000 members in 1920, has only 78,000 today, and if it were not for "work rules" that the railroads want to get rid of, the union's membership would be much smaller.

The railroads, acting jointly, have announced their intention of revising the work rules and the wage-base formula that the unions won over the course of generations. The old rules and formulas, largely antiquated by technological changes, hinder them with additional and unnecessary costs of $600 million a year, the railroads claim. Under the work rules that foster featherbedding, many thousands of railroad workers do little or no necessary work.

While the railroads were prospering, management put up with the extra costs imposed by work rules. But by 1956, beset by shrinking profits, the railroads told the unions that the time had come to start revising the rules. After strenuous negotiations, the two sides agreed to shelve the issue for three years. When the three years expired in 1959, the railroads set out to alter the work rules. Featherbedding, said Daniel P. Loomis, president of the Association of American Railroads, is "a handmaiden of the ruinous inflationary spiral. For the good of all America, something drastic must be done about this destructive growth. And 1959 is the year of decision."

"Harsh, Inhumane." Of course it was not the year of decision. That was still four years away.

Negotiations began in November 1959, bogged down in a year of bickering and mutual charges of failure to bargain in good faith. Toward the end of 1960, both parties asked President Eisenhower to appoint a commission to study the dispute. Ike created the Rifkind Commission, headed by onetime Federal Judge Simon Rifkind. After 14 months of hearings and on-the-rails investigations, the commission issued a report recommending extensive revisions in work rules and wage-base formulas.

Management accepted the Rifkind report; the unions rejected it. Ed Gilbert called it "harsh, inhumane and retrogressive." From April to July 1962, the two parties banged heads through 32 bargaining sessions, a dozen of them under the auspices of the National Mediation Board. When the railroads an nounced that they would proceed to put the Rifkind recommendations into effect, the unions brought suit in Federal District Court in Chicago. The judge refused a permanent injunction against the rules changes, but the union carried its case to the Federal Court of Appeals and then on to the Supreme Court. Last March the court handed down a unanimous opinion rejecting the union claim that new work rules would violate the Railway Labor Act.

After that decision, the railroads set an April deadline date for putting the new rules into effect. To head off a strike, President Kennedy set up an emergency board, headed by ex-Judge Samuel Rosenman, an old New Dealer. The Rosenman panel in effect backed the Rifkind recommendations. Again the railroads generally endorsed the panel's findings, and again the unions rejected them.

Two weeks ago, with a strike threatened on July 11, President Kennedy won another delay, this one for 19 days, by persuading the management negotiators to postpone the implementation of the rules revisions while a new six-man presidential panel put out still another report. Last week the panel submitted a factual, 15-page review of the issues in the dispute, offered no recommendations for settlement.

The Missing Cushions. Ironically, in view of all the struggling the unions did during those four years, the rules revisions scheduled to go into effect next week are much tougher than the railroads themselves feel they need to be. Rifkind's report recommended that the release of unneeded workers be cushioned with long advance notices and generous severance payments, plus retraining, with the railroads paying 75% of the cost. In accepting the Rifkind report, the railroads agreed to supply all the recommended cushions. But the long battle in the federal courts was fought over management's original 1959 proposals, which lack most of the cushions. Having won the court battle, management decided that to switch to the Rifkind recommendations would give the unions an opportunity to challenge them and begin a new round of delays in the courts.

The rules revisions scheduled to go into effect would: 1) get rid of the firemen on diesel locomotives; 2) alter the antiquated wage-base formula; 3) give management virtually unlimited right to introduce technological changes; 4) wipe out the distinction between the work performed by road crews and yard crews, thus permitting interchange of labor without duplication of effort; 5) allow management to stipulate the number of men needed on train crews. By far the most important of these management goals are the first two: the wage base and the firemen.

Wages & Work. The old-fashioned wage-base formula was set up in 1919, while the Government was running the railroads. Based on average train speeds a lot slower than today's, the formula essentially established 100 miles of travel as the basis for a full day's pay. The railroads want to change that base to 160 miles a day, say the change would save them $128 million a year. When Judge Rifkind finished studying the thicket of existing wage practices, he cracked: "Whoever invented that system belongs to the Rube Goldberg Club." Items:

sbAn engineer and a fireman traveled the 430-mile round trip from Breckenridge, Minn., to St. Paul, working a total of 9 hr. 20 min.; yet each got 4.3 days' pay--$88.84 for the engineer, $77.45 for the fireman.

sbA passenger-train engineer making the 225-mile run between Washington and New York in four hours was in the terminal three more hours, collected more than $48 -- or 21 days' pay.

sbSix two-man engine crews were required to make the 1,044-mile streamliner run from Richmond to Miami. Between them, the crews collected a total of 20.9 days' pay for an 18-hr. 40-min. trip.

sbA yard crew came on duty in Baker, Ore., two hours early to unload cattle for an hour and a half. They then worked their regular shift, getting off an hour early, then came back for another three hours. The gang put in 11 1/2 hours of actual work; yet each man collected 32 hours' pay. To compound the complexity, a yard crew in La Grande, Ore., claimed that they should have been called in to Baker for the extra work. On that basis, each man from La Grande succeeded in collecting three days' pay--figured on the distance he would have traveled to Baker (one day's pay) if he had gone, the day's work he would have done if he had been there, and the distance (one day's pay) he would have traveled home if he had gone to work in Baker.

Yet unions defend the pay-rules system on the ground that it is good for the railroads. Says G. E. Leighty, chairman of the Railway Labor Executives Association and a member of the presidential panel that reported this week: "The truth is that the railroads, since they pay their train-service employees no Sunday or holiday pay, night differentials, away-from-home expenses or other premium payments . . . actually save under present work rules among their operating workers."

Firemen & Featherbeds. The railroads want to revoke their 1937 concession to the Firemen's Brotherhood and get rid of the firemen on diesels in freight and yard service. These firemen do no necessary work, the railroads say. Firemen would continue to ride in the cabs of passenger trains to serve as safety lookouts. Some diesel engineers frankly agree that firemen are dispensable. "I don't really need him," says an Ohio engineer, "but he's handy to have around. He gets four hours' sleep and I get four hours' sleep." Another diesel engineer tells of a fireman who always brought bedroom slippers to work. "I didn't mind that so much, but it got to be too much when he brought blankets one night, then complained he couldn't sleep because I had the lights on in the cab."

Fireman Gilbert can intone plenty of arguments against removing firemen from diesel locomotives--he has had a lot of practice at that. "Practical railroaders," he says, "rate the locomotive fireman as the most valuable safety factor available to the industry. His presence has meant the difference between disaster and saving lives and property on many occasions."

But Gilbert has a farther-reaching argument in favor of continuing his fight to keep the firemen on the diesels: "We can never forget that we are representing human beings, and that management is representing money. There is a big difference. You can always mint more money. But you can't mint new lives."

Painful Alternatives. President Kennedy has no direct power to halt a railroad strike. He has exhausted all the procedures of delay provided by the Railway Labor Act. The Taft-Hartley Act, with its provision for an 80-day injunction against a strike, does not apply to the railroads. The President cannot ask the companies to delay once again the effective date of the work-rules revisions, because last time he promised the railroad representatives that he would not in any event ask for any more delays.

Aside from the unlikely possibility of persuading the unions to accept the management plan or enter into serious negotiations toward a compromise settlement, the President had only two courses open to him, and both would require congressional approval: seizure of the railroads or compulsory arbitration, requiring both sides to accept the verdict of Government-appointed arbitrators.

Both courses were exceedingly unattractive to Kennedy, as they would be to any President. Seizure would inflict an injustice upon the companies, which had gone along with virtually every Government verdict, recommendation and request put forward during the four years of the dispute. Furthermore, seizure would not really resolve the dispute: either the U.S. Government would have to impose the new rules while operating the railroads or the issues would drag on unresolved. Compulsory arbitration would settle the dispute all right --almost certainly resulting in an affirmation of management's right to impose its planned revisions--but would anger organized labor, a prospect that few politicians can regard without anxiety.

Congress desperately, prayerfully hoped to avoid both alternatives. Last week Congress was in a state of dismay about the threat of a strike. Many a Congressman feared that a recorded vote on a compulsory-arbitration bill might cost him his seat, whether he voted for it and outraged the unions or voted against it and outraged the public. "I just pray it won't come up here," fretted a Democratic Congressman. "I don't want to touch this thing with a ten-foot pole."

Loyalty, Loyalty, Loyalty. But the hopes and fears of Congress, like those of the President and the public, could not exorcise the threat of a rail strike. The companies were determined, after many delays, to put revised work rules into effect. Ed Gilbert was determined to fight, and if necessary, to strike. He held that the members of his union expected him to postpone defeat as long as he could. Says an official of the union: "What the Brotherhood requires of its president, and what it gets from Ed Gilbert, is loyalty above all. Loyalty, loyalty, loyalty. And that means he doesn't sell us out." In Gilbert's session at the White House, President Kennedy argued that he had already gone "beyond the last mile" with the Brotherhood. But Gilbert wanted to go a few miles more.

Sooner or later, however, Gilbert is going to lose his battle. A total rail strike would hit the economy of the nation and the lives of its citizens with a devastating wallop. On the first day, roads leading into big cities would be clogged with monumental traffic jams as millions of suburban rail commuters tried to get to work in automobiles. After ten days, serious food shortages would show up in metropolitan areas, and not long afterward many factories, including all major automobile plants, would shut down for lack of materials. Within a month, many millions of breadwinners all over the U.S. would be laid off, most defense production would cease, and the nation's stricken economy would be sinking into paralysis. President Kennedy has said that a nationwide railroad strike would be "intolerable," and few of his fellow citizens who do not belong to railroad unions would be likely to disagree with him.

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