Word: freight
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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First to be warmed was the railroad industry. Freight-car loadings jumped 14% for the week to 638,408 cars, the largest traffic since the 697,633 cars loaded in the last week of June. Even the steel industry's biggest and hardest-hit customer, the auto industry, began to thaw. General Motors, which had shut down its plants, began to call workers back to resume making parts. Ford put its operation on five days, and scheduled overtime on the Falcon, Thunderbird and Lincoln. (But Chrysler laid off more workers, stopped production of its Valiant.) With American Motors...
...railroads' chief case is against their 40,000 firemen, who have little or nothing to do in modern diesels. The roads argue that taking some 23,000 firemen off freight runs and yards alone would save them $200 million a year. They also want to change the mileage pay rates set 40 years ago when trains traveled at turtle speed. Under the obsolete rules, a train crew gets a full day's pay for every 100 miles traveled, and conductors and trainmen on passenger trains for every 150 miles-even though the actual traveling time sometimes takes less...
RAILROAD operators say they have had enough. "The necessity of employing firemen on freight and yard diesels costs the New Haven over $3,500,000 a year," says George Alpert, president of the New Haven Railroad. "This is absolutely unessential." Says E. F. Bidez, vice president of the Central of Georgia Railroad: "In 1958 we paid firemen on freight and switch engines $1,005,000. Considering the fact that we could get along without most of them, that's a good bit of money. It's 50% of the net earned last year." The Great Northern Railroad reports...
...eventual settlement of the strike may come through compulsory arbitration by the government, according to Professor Charles R. Cherington, who often acts as a consultant in railroad disputes. Although railways carry only 50 per cent of the nation's freight now, this is a significant half which must move to keep the national economy from halting completely. Cherington does deem the management demand for complete overhaul of work rules "extreme," and proposes instead a renegotiation of individual jobs...
Union leaders challenge the railroads' charge that featherbedding costs $500 million a year, making it impossible for the rails to compete with taxfree, government-built highways, airports and waterways. They also contend that the number of rail workers has declined by 500,000 in the past decade, despite freight traffic increases...