Word: brotherhood
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...terms of most railroad employment still include the man-and-dollar-wasting practices known as featherbedding. These intricate Railroad Brotherhood rules, devised when railroad traffic was shrinking, are aimed at making work and keeping a maximum number of men on the payrolls. Though obsolete and wasteful now, featherbed rules are a sacred cow in labor politics. Few railroad presidents dare monkey with them...
Enter McNear. One of the few is big, brash George Plummer McNear Jr., 50, president of the Toledo, Peoria & Western R.R. An individualist to the last ounce of his 200 lb., Railroader McNear has fought the Brotherhood rules for 15 years. But he finally ran into the U.S. Government. After a bloody three-month strike last winter, the U.S. Government kicked him out of office, seized...
...McNear one of the worst union rules is that denning a 100-mile run as a day's work, which it has not been for years. He also hates the Brotherhood-built barriers between road and yard work. Present rules say that if a road crew does ten minutes' yard work, all can claim a full day's yardman's pay besides their road pay. Worse still, the regular yardmen can claim a day's pay on the grounds that they were gypped...
...Proposition. To the Brotherhoods' demands for wage boosts, McNear counter-proposed "a day's work for a day's pay." In cash per envelope, this meant more pay, not less. Engineers would get $13.44 a day v. $11.57 under Brotherhood rules, firemen $10.41 v. $9.46, etc. But because idle "standby" workers would be eliminated, it meant fewer jobs. McNear ran his road with 55 crewmen a day at the very time the Brotherhoods were insisting it took...
Last December, 105 engineers and train-men struck. Amid riots, shootings, burnings, loss of business, McNear tried to break the strike, ran a big help-wanted ad, got 1,000 applicants within a few days. He even got an injunction. Three Brotherhood men were convicted of conspiring to blow up one of T. P. & W.'s biggest bridges. When Government agencies told McNear to arbitrate, he refused, on the ground that the mediation boards were grossly prolabor...