Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/153

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS.

The Increase of Railroad Disasters. The railroads of America, with the ablest men that money can buy making up the personnel of their management, men who are giving their time and brains to solving the great problems of transportation, have, after years of study, experience, and theories applied to facts, put in operation a code of laws or rules governing the handling of their train service that is as near perfect as anything that comes from the hand of man.

They have expended millions in safety appliances and improvements, such as equipping freight engines and cars with automatic brakes, putting in interlocking switches and signals, and block systems, and making improvements in road bed, track, and bridges, and putting in passing tracks, etc. They have selected the best material that could be got, both physical and mental, to make up the personnel of their service the law of the survival of the fittest governing. This great army of men who have become specialists in their different spheres are unequaled by any other class of laborers in sobriety, intelligence, and physical endurance ; and yet, after all of these precautions have been taken, the destruction of property by accident and the congestion of the business of the roads is steadily increasing. There must be a reason for this that, like all of the other problems that have been met and solved, can be remedied.

A criticism, to be worth anything, must be just ; therefore we will concede that the volume of business has enormously increased, taxing the facilities of the roads to their utmost capacity; but there is something else wrong, and the men at the top are responsible. Each general manager who takes charge of a railroad is confronted with the figures of the gross and net earnings of the property under the management of his predecessor, and is expected to show an increase over those figures, while the operating expenses decrease. He finds that every field of economy has been exploited by the man he succeeded. There are only two avenues open to him one to neglect the physical condition of the property under his management, the other to make the employees produce more for the money they get. He chooses what he considers the less of the two evils that of making the employees produce more. This has resulted in a continual increase in the tonnage, in the use of larger engines with higher steam pressure, longer hours of service, and a congestion of the business.

Every railroad man understands the significance of the figures which follow, and are taken from the Bulletin of the United States Department of Labor for November. The figures for 1893 show, for freight service, the movement of 107,129 ton miles of traffic per employee, while those of 1900 show 139,143 ton miles per employee.

This means that the burden of exhausting labor was more than one-fifth heavier in 1900 than it was seven years before for this class of the world's workers. These men work by the mile or trip, and the continual increase in the amount of work per- formed in one trip has reduced their earning capacity about 30 per cent, while the cost of living has advanced about 35 per cent.; and while they are doing more work, they are getting less money than they did ten years ago. This, in a great many cases, causes them to try to work longer than they should.

The old proverb, " The harder the storm, the sooner it is over," is reversed on the railroad and means, " The harder the storm, the longer it lasts ; " as the tonnage increases, the work becomes more intense, the hours of service longer and more exhausting; and the end is not yet. It is true the capacity of the machinery used is strained in a like or greater proportion.

But machinery can be replaced, and its shorter life is more than compensated by the greater results accomplished ; but the man, even counting him as a part of the machinery, cannot be so easily replaced. He is being crowded to a point where tired nature will not be restored, and at a pace which, like that of the engine he drives, will

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