Now, about Those Rules . . .

Labor

He was a hefty, 62-year-old locomotive engineer, Steve Jackson of Kansas City, Mo. Said he:

"Now you take the matter of watches. I paid $96 for mine. It's gotta be cleaned every 18 months and inspected twice a month--it can't ever vary over 30 seconds. Now, when I got to have it inspected in Ft. Scott, the Kansas end of my run, I got to walk ten blocks out of my way. What I want is for the company to pay the $3.50 for the cleaning and give me two hours twice a month for inspection time. See what I mean?"

Switch Foreman William Gunter, who has spent 36 of his 62 years with the Wabash Railroad, broke in:

"There's this night differential pay raise of 10-c- an hour we're asking. Night work's tricky in the yards. Maybe your lantern goes out. Maybe you miss a moving step in the dark. We ought to get more money for that."

"Now, here's another mighty important matter," boomed Jackson. "Say a freight engineer has to lay over in Ft. Scott 18 hours. For 16 of those hours he doesn't get paid. And for all practical purposes, he's working. He's on call all the time and he can't go out to a movie or even for a beer.

"For two of those hours he gets paid at his regular rate--that is, unless he gets a fast, light freight back to K.C. and makes it in five hours instead of eight. Then the railroad doesn't pay him for the two hours penalty time. Why, I don't know. We're asking that the engineer gets paid for those two hours, no matter how fast he gets back to K.C. And we also want the penalty time to begin after twelve hours instead of after 16."

Jackson drew a long breath and Switchman Gunter took it up from there. "Suppose the dispatcher holds up a freight two or three hours before he gets a spot for it. The crew doesn't get paid the first 15 minutes he's fiddling around. And then there's this assigning crews to different types of work. Say a crew's worked eight hours on a packinghouse job and the yardmaster says to make up another train afterwards and it only takes two hours. We want eight hours pay for the second job."

"Now, here's a few other things," resumed Engineer Jackson, deliberately. "We want sick leave, and vacations with pay. And if we got to make a statement to a claim agent we want to get paid regular time for it. And then there's this technical matter of terminal pay."

If Engineer Jackson wanted to get technical, he could have rattled off any number of the bewildering rules that govern his brotherhood and the rail operators. Most of the rules were 40 years old, or older; many were outworn; many no longer made sense. It was a rare railroader who knew them all, or understood 75% of them.

Government factfinders, running into brotherhood demands for such rules changes as ice water for cabooses, free cleaning and pressing of uniforms, desks for passenger conductors and proposals that would result in seven days' pay for one day's work, threw up their hands.

When the operators countered with changes that proposed to wipe out all the gains in working conditions that the brotherhoods had made in 50 years of bargaining, the factfinders threw in the sponge. Under the strike settlement, another year would be taken to straighten them out.

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