Letters from an old railway official/Letter 19
LETTER XIX.
THE RACK OF THE COMPARATIVE STATEMENT.
My Dear Boy:—You ask what I mean by the rack of the comparative statement. I mean that, figuratively speaking, we are all pretty securely fastened to the corresponding month of last year. What was originally intended as a tavernkeeper’s tab, as a rough check on operation, has become a balanced ledger, a rigid standard of efficiency. Time, even a short period, brings a sacredness to all things. If we make a so-called better showing on paper than a twelvemonth previous, we shake hands with ourselves and forget how rotten we were considered just one short year ago. The ball team that wins the championship and takes the big gate receipts is the one whose members play for the side rather than for high individual averages. The tendency is for our owners to expect us to make base hits rather than send in runs which win games.
If in April and May we have a lot of ties on hand, we may not be allowed to put them in the track because they will be charged out before June 30, and make too heavy a showing of expenditure for the fiscal year. So, with labor comparatively plentiful and the weather comfortable, we wait until the new fiscal year comes in, until the sun shines hottest on the track. Then, with farmers paying harvest wages we have to offer more money. If we get the extra men the heat lessens their efficiency. It is true we have probably had to pay the producer for the ties, but if we fail to charge them to the final account, we have a childlike confidence that they have not yet cost us anything. The little matters of failure to utilize the full life of the tie, of interest on the money invested, we dismiss with the thought that trifling losses must be expected in the conduct of large affairs.
Maintenance of equipment as well as maintenance of way suffers from too much comparative statement. Some new official pulls our power to pieces to show us how they used to build up train-mile records on the Far Eastern. The crowded rip tracks reflect the tractive power of the big engines. Bad orders, the bane of a yardmaster’s life, the teasers of the traffic man’s tracers, block our terminals. Our shopmen and our car repairers, despairing of full time, move away. Yet withal we are serene, for are not we operating just as cheaply as they did at this time last year?
When I am in doubt, when I become mixed with the complexities of our profession, I go back to my boyhood on the farm. From that gateway as a basing point I can think out a rate sheet with fewer differentials. The same common sense housekeeping which my mother practiced will fit any railroad, however diversified its territory. The same well-balanced management which enabled my father to pay off the mortgage and extend his acres is suited to any railroad, however complicated its financial obligations. The bigger the proposition, the greater the need for sticking to homely basic principles. We learned on the farm to expect about so much rainfall every year. Whether the heaviest would come in one month or in another, the good Lord never found time to tell us. We did the things that came to hand, sometimes similarly, sometimes differently, from the corresponding month of the previous year. If our crops were short we did not starve our work horses. We sometimes found it paid, even with a poor crop in sight, to go to the bank and borrow rather than neglect the ditching in a wet field. If we made some surplus money we did not blow it all in for tools and improvements. We knew that the inevitable lean years preclude throwing the fat in the fire. If we ran behind some year, we did some retrenching, to be sure, but we did not lose our nerve, did not lose our faith in the future.
Some kinds of fertilizers on the farm are said to make rich fathers and poor sons. The way some railroads have been run for a record you would imagine that race suicide had reached a point where no further generations were expected. One of the gravest of our mistakes has been the application of the comparative statement, regardless of its effect upon our men. The farmer finds it wise and economical to arrange work for several monthly men in order to minimize the number of day hands for his rush seasons. In the winter he may lay them off, but this is for a period sufficiently long and sufficiently definite to enable the farm hand to become something else, say a wood chopper or a lumberman. Can we expect our car repairers, our sectionmen, to be loyal and faithful if we lay them off with necessary work in sight, simply to make our books look better? They know that later on we shall, at the last minute, at the scratch of an indefinite somebody’s pen, put on a big force and with a hurrah, boys, rush it through. Is this fair? Is it not better to keep twenty men steadily employed than to have forty on half time? The unquestioned deterioration in the quality of our labor, in the morale of our forces, can- not all be laid on the union’s doorstep. There is a responsibility here which we cannot shirk.
Cutting down expenses has been done in an unintelligent, cold-blooded sort of a way. We go home at night feeling good at having cut down our payrolls. We should be feeling sorry at the necessity for taking from men the wherewithal to pay the unceasing rent and grocery bills. Our methods give some room for the populists’ plea to put the man above the dollar. No, I do not expect ever to see an entire correction of these conditions. In the play of economic forces the weak have to suffer. I believe, though, that through minimizing such suffering we can improve the service and earn bigger dividends for our stockholders. Each of us can do a little; all of us together can do a great deal toward making the problems easier. As the French say, noblesse oblige—rank imposes obligation—every time. It is up to us, the educated, powerful class, to take the lead and to do the most. We cannot expect the poor, unlettered man to work out his own salvation unaided. We cannot turn him loose to face an unequal struggle. If he fails, if he has too much time for brooding, society at large has an anarchist and we are the losers. Do not understand me as advocating the employment or retention of unnecessary men. What I am kicking for is a better balanced system. When we lay off our extra sectionman in the fall, do we give him a pass and ask him to come to town and work when we put on more unskilled winter labor in the shops and roundhouses? No, he is in a different department. An official or a foreman might be put to the inconvenience of waiting a few days, of breaking in a new man. Next spring there might have to be a readjustment when the work trains go on. Some big, strong railroad men are coming to the front who will improve these conditions by working from a broader viewpoint. We need more brainy men with nerve enough to stand up and insist upon a consideration of the welfare of our properties ten, twenty or fifty years hence. Because we need them they will be developed.
Now do not hand me the old song and dance about business being cold-blooded and devoid of sentiment. We spend money directly and indirectly for advertising with a view to fostering public sentiment in favor of our line. Business comes from an increase in population, from development of resources, from the growing sentiments of the human race. Life owes its origin to love, which originates in sentiment. The family, directly traceable to sentiment, is the unit of civilization. The way to have our heads rule our hearts is not to forget that we have hearts.
Business is so attractive because it is chock full of sentiment which can be made an asset.