Toward the End of the Line

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.

Last week, as the deadline neared, it had become abundantly clear that the postponement had not brought the two sides any closer to agreement. J. E. ("Doc") Wolfe, chief negotiator for all of the 195 companies involved, said at a press conference that the unions were still trying hard to "blackjack" the railroads into an agreement. H. E. ("Ed") Gilbert, president of the 80,000-member A.F.L.-C.I.O. Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, declared in a speech that "management's attitude of 'no bargaining' has brought the collective bargaining process in our industry to the brink of destruction."

Surprise Proposal. With the deadline crowding in upon him, the President had just two ultimate alternatives, both unpleasant, and both requiring hard-to-get congressional approval: seize the railroads or impose compulsory arbitration. He felt that seizure would inflict a gross injustice upon the railroad companies, which had accepted every Government proposal advanced during the four years of the dispute. But Kennedy was also aware that compulsory arbitration--which would almost certainly result in an affirmation of management's position--would offend organized labor, and he did not want to take the political risks.

In the hopes of avoiding both of these alternatives, Kennedy put forward a surprising and dubious proposal. He urged the two sides to accept Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, former Secretary of Labor, as the arbitrator, with both management and the unions agreeing in advance to accept Goldberg's verdict as final. Meeting with the management and union representatives at the White House, Kennedy asked them to consider the proposal overnight. He then slipped into his office and asked that Firemen's President Gilbert be sent in for a private talk. Smiling gently, Gilbert listened to the President's 25-minute sales talk on the Goldberg proposal.

Next morning, the last day before the deadline, management announced its acceptance of the plan. The union reply was a joint statement read off by Roy E. Davidson, Grand Chief Engineer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. "We are being asked," he said, "to agree to a procedure which we believe could pave the avenue to future compulsory arbitration by custom or practice. This we cannot agree to do."

High-Strung Huddles. The President summoned half a dozen congressional leaders to the White House, quizzed them anxiously on the outlook for pushing a compulsory-arbitration measure through Congress. The legislators made it plain that they wanted to avoid those brambles, that an arbitration bill would not get through Congress without opposition, and that in any event it would be impossible to rush a bill through before the strike deadline.

From high-strung huddles in White House offices emerged another expedient of delay: a plan to set up still another panel, and persuade the railroads once again to delay their deadline while the panel deliberated. Secretly, Kennedy called Railroad Representative Wolfe to his office, urged him to accept the plan. Wolfe argued that presidential panels and federal courts had already spoken, and that the railroads had already agreed to more than enough delays. The President promised that this would be absolutely the last postponement he would ask the railroads to accept. On that promise, Wolfe agreed to the delay. On Wednesday afternoon, with less than eight hours to go, Kennedy called a press conference and, without a trace of triumph in his voice, announced that "the railroads and the unions have accepted this proposal and there will be no strike this evening."

Time to Clear a Track. The President's final-postponement panel consists of six men: Labor Secretary Wirtz; Commerce Secretary Luther Hodges; Inland Steel Corp.'s Chairman Joseph Block; A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany; Railway Labor Executives' Association Chairman George E. Leighty; Norfolk & Western Railway Co.'s President Stuart T. Saunders. Wirtz will serve as chairman, Hodges as vice-chairman.

Despite its high-level membership, the panel is essentially a device of delay. It is not expected to settle the dispute or even try. All it is supposed to do is report to Congress on the facts and issues involved. The Administration hopes that awareness of the issues will make Congress less unwilling to legislate a compulsory-arbitration measure if no other way out is found. Meanwhile, the President gained 19 days in which to get last-resort legislation drawn up, and try to clear a track for it on Capitol Hill. He hopes, of course, that he will yet be able to avoid the political punishments that a compulsory-arbitration measure might bring, but he can hardly hope that, after four unbudging years, Fireman Gilbert and his fellow rail union chiefs will switch their signals before the end of those 19 days.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.