Mr. MCNAMARA. Personally I would. I have no authority at this time, Senator, to speak for the men that I am representing on that; but personally, and from my practical experience with the 16-hour law, even before it went into effect, I know the condition that my frame was in after I worked 28 and 50 hours on the railroad, on the deck of the locomotive. It is not safe for you or your family to have me on the engine that is hauling the train that you are on, or to have a man on a locomotive that is meeting me, running in the opposite direction, for any great period of time. Senator POMERENE. You do not need to argue that question with me. I concede that point very fully. But here is a limitation of 16 hours under the Federal statute now, and the query has been in my mind, why should that limit be so high? And now you have suggested here that you would not have any limit at all. Mr. MCNAMARA. Oh, no; I am not arguing that point. I am arguing the point below that limit. Senator POMERENE. I mean the limit in point of law. Senator TOWNSEND. He did not understand; he wants it less than 16. He does not want to remove that limit. Senator POINDEXTER. He said he did. Senator POMERENE. I am glad to have that cleared up, because I could not think that you would want to remove that limitation. Mr. MCNAMARA. Oh, no. Senator POMERENE. That is, you would make it lower, if possible? Mr. MCNAMARA. I am trying to make it clear. You know an Irishman has always got two chances, and I am going to try the second chance. [Laughter.] I say that where it is or could be put into effect, the men do want the eight-hour day, such as in yard service, transfer service, etc. They want to work no more than the eight hours. Where they can get over the road of a 150-mile division in eight hours they will be satisfied with it; they will accept it. Where I they can not get over the road of a division of 150 miles in eight hours they will accept-and that is what they are asking for the minimum of 12 miles per hour speed basis. Senator POMERENE. Mr. McNamara, this is a point that I want your view upon specifically. As a general proposition you favor the eight-hour law. I think we all realize that it would be wholly impracticable to have a hard and fast eight-hour limit in the railway service. Mr. MCNAMARA. In road service. Senator POMERENE. That is what I mean, in road service. Senator POMERENE. That is, I mean in the way of a criminal penalty. Now, what limit would you advise placing upon the number of hours which the trainmen could be compelled to work? Mr. MCNAMARA. I have just made a statement, Senator, that there are very few freight divisions in the railroads of this country that exceed 150 miles. The men are willing to go on the 12-mile speed basis. Therefore, in accepting that, they are willing to work 12 hours to get over that division of 150 miles. If the division is 125 miles, they say that the limit should be 10 hours. They are not asking for overtime, but where it gets into overtime, on account of the overloading, and such as that, then they did ask for a penalization of time and a half for anything exceeding the 12-mile speed basis. Senator POMERENE. I understand that fully. Now, I can put the question in another form, to which, I think, you can give me a specific answer. Would you advise making that limit of 16 hours, 14, 12, or 10, or decrease that 10-hour limit in any respect, so far as the criminal statute is concerned? Mr. MCNAMARA. Personally speaking, Senator, I would. Mr. MCNAMARA. Not to exceed 12 hours, personally. Senator POMERENE. That answers the question I had in mind. I wanted your view about it. Mr. MCNAMARA. But I have no authority to speak for the organizations that I am representing at this time on that question. You gentlemen were so charitable that, when that question was up here, you extended your charity to such an extent that you said that the railroad men must work 16 hours, and to-day they are working them 15 hours and 59 minutes. That is never reported to the Interstate Commerce Commission at all. The records and reports on the hours of service show you the many thousands of violations of that charity that was extended to the railroad men at that time of 16 hours, but there is no record of the hundreds of thousands of the 15 hours and 50 minutes and up to 15 hours and 59 minutes-no record what soever. Now, gentlemen, I have tried to at least explain a part of what the railroad men want in so far as hours of service are concerned; and they have proven, they have tired to demonstrate to you, that they did not want those long hours by attempting to place a penalization on the railroad corporations for running them to exceed a certain number of hours. They found, as I have previously stated, that it was impracticable to cut off in the middle of a division; and, therefore, they did not ask for eight hours on road service, but they did ask for eight hours where it could be made applicable in yard service, transfer service, and such service as that. I have listened to some of the gentlemen, who have spoken here, in connection with strikes that they found after their return to this country from abroad, and I have listened to them branding the men in engine and train service as murderers. Gentlemen, many of youall of you, I believe-have personal acquaintance with the railroad men of this country, and I hope that there is no member of this committee that will pay any attention to such statements as that. For there is no more loyal lot of men-loyal to themselves, loyal to the Government, and loyal to their families-than the men in the engine and train service. Now, in so far as passing legislation to the effect that they will have to be drafted in time of war, I am not going to dwell upon that, further than to say that in so far as the members of our organizations are concerned there is no necessity for such a law for there is not one of them, nor one of their families, even though they are not in the railroad service, that will not flock to this flag that we are living under. But they may not want to go beyond the border. Their loyalty has been proven, and when statements have been made here and placed in the record that they are to be classed as murder ers, and as disloyal to any form of government, I want to go on record that such is not the case. Gentlemen, it has been stated here that many cases have been settled through mediation and arbitration. Many cases have been settled without appealing for mediation or arbitration; and we are unalterably opposed to any compulsory investigation-leaving out the compulsory arbitration end of it. When you take away from the workingman that right of collective bargaining, you take away from him the only thing that he has left; and it is through that collective bargaining and the manner in which it is conducted, that there has been a great deal of peace in the industrial world in this country. We are not men who come in to-day and say that such and such ought to be the case. We sit down and discuss those matters with the officials of those railroads. Last November, after the adjournment of Congress, I was on two railroads taking up cases that had been in controversy since 1912. Are we radical? I have handled cases last year, in trying to put in the application of the award that had been granted in 1912. Were there strikes? No. We do not want that collective bargaining to be interfered with. We do not want the right to strike taken away from us when all other fruit fails, for it is the only weapon that we have got. There is no use in denying-I a mnot trying to deny that strikes or threatened strikes are sometimes forced upon us. In 1913 I handled the Bangor & Aroostook matter. The president of that road would not deal with me other than to listen to what I wanted to take up, and then declined to discuss the matter with me. I appealed for mediation. The mediators came there, and he declined to mediate. I appealed for arbitration, and the president of that railroad declined to arbitrate. This was joined with the engineers. Mr. Griffing, assistant grand chief of the engineers, was in there. Knowing the working conditions that were in existence on that road, the men said, "We are not going to work under such conditions." We advised with the men, and said to them, "It is folly for you to strike on this property; don't do it. We advise you not to do it." They said. "We are better off without those jobs, and unless you permit a strike vote to go out here we will resign or strike ourselves." We feel, gentlemen, that it is much better for men to be controlled than uncontrolled, and after we had taken the matter up with Grand Chief Stone and President Carter, and outlined to them the conditions of the men and the feeling that was existing among the men, they agreed to have the strike ballot put out. We embodied in that strike ballot, as we do in every other strike ballot, every letter that was written, the replies to same, the attempts to meet the officials, and our success or failure. The local chairmen went out, and they got a 100 per cent strike vote. We then again, which we always do, tried to get a meeting with the officers of that road, without avail. The men were granted, or allowed, to go on strike. During the time that all this was going on Mr. Green, from one of the Pinkerton detective agencies in Boston, had flooded that road with strike breakers, or what we commonly call "scabs," and he had men in there that never ran a locomotive, never ran a train, never saw a railroad any more than a tramp, except to ride over it between the bumpers, many of them, and to-day you can see the conditions of that road. Why should you try to take away from us the right that we have got for collective bargaining and place our destiny in the hands of any appointed commission and compel us to live up to that law when others are not compelled to live up to the laws that are made to govern them? Gentlemen, I trust that such will not be the case. The workingmen of this country are good, law-abiding citizens. Those who are members of labor organizations are taught to be good, law-abiding citizens, and there is no member of those organizations who is going to commit any deeds of violence. It is those who are not members or who are hired by others to do so. It is a very rare thing to find a member of those organizations who does unlawful acts. The members of our brotherhoods-and it is a part of our law that in case a strike is permitted to be called on any railroad that they are duty bound to leave that property and not return anywhere within the bounds of the railroad property until there is a settlement made. As a rule, they do it; but, like the Pittsburgh district down here, in 1911, the men wont out, not our men, not the trainmen, but other men went out on a strike. There were men forced in there or brought in there, and it is an actual fact, gentlemen, that the men who were brought in there to break the strike of the shopmen went among the men in the engine and train service and tried to persuade them to go out on a sympathetic strike and violate not only the train laws but possibly violate the laws of the State and the Nation. And when the men declined to do it, through the advice of the grand lodge officers who went in there, those "bulls," as we call them, and who are in the constant employment of the Pennsylvania Railroad at all times, went over and tried to shut up that yard until the men raised a protest and said to us, "Unless this thing is stopped and no more shots fired in this yard, we will have to protect ourselves by resigning." Those are the conditions, gentlemen, that possibly do not get to you very often, if at all. We have laws, and our men live strictly up to those laws. Leave us now with that power, if you please. We have no complaint, but take it away from the working men of this country, and I fear that they will not be as good, law-abiding citizens in the future as they have been in the past. It was stated here yesterday by Mr. Doak that there would be nothing, not very much, to this last controversy, if it was not the manner in which the public was fooled by the press of this country. Some years ago I have heard it stated that such men as Vanderbilt and Gould made a statement in connection with the public. They found that it did not fit very well. They made up their minds that they would get into the P. T. Barnum & Bailey tactics, and they have started an advertising department, and if reports are true, which I believe, and many believe with me, there was any where from one million to five million dollars spent on that campaign of advertising. The public got worked up over the misstatements that had been made, and one of the misstatements that was made in particular was that the officers of those organizations refused arbitration. Why, they never agreed on what to arbitrate, never agreed on what to arbitrate. If they did, I doubt whether the officers who were handling this would arbitrate. But the public got worked up on misstatements that had been made, and they were wondering whether it was a white elephant or a woolly horse, and they did sure play the Barnum & Bailey game. They fooled the public, and they got the public to believe that is, some of the public, not all, for there are several hundred thousand men and women that compose the public of this great Nation that never believed many of the things or any of the things that were published in connection with that movement. Therefore, gentlemen, I trust and believe that there are many of you here who did not believe the statements, and those of you who have made a study of the practical end of railroading, the manner in which things have been conducted in the past, did not believe the statements that were made in the press of this country and paid for. We know. We tried to get into the press, to lay our case before the public. We did not have enough money. Oh, no. We got into a few papers, and we had to pay pretty dear for an advertisement to put in there, pretty dear, and taking what we had to pay and the little space that we got in those few papers and comparing it with the printed matter that has been in the papers of this country, and the magazines and the editorials that they had, we figure that it cost anywhere from a million to four million dolars to fool the public of this country. Senator TOWNSEND. Mr. McNamara, before you quit, may I ask if you would be satisfied with the law that was passed in August, without any further legislation? Mr. MCNAMARA. I do not know what the law means. Senator TOWNSEND. Well, that is what I am asking you-if you would be satisfied with it as it is or do you want Congress to enact some other legislation? Mr. MCNAMARA. Senator, we do not want Congress to enact any legislation in connection with our rights of pay or working conditions. We want the right of collective bargaining, and we do not want that freedom taken away from us. Senator TOWNSEND. Well, does the law, as passed in August, satisfy you and the men? Mr. MCNAMARA. Evidently all the executives, through and by instructions of the 600 chairmen, directly representing the men in the engine and train service in this country, agreed to set aside for the time being the request that was made for punitive overtime, or time and a half, until such time as an investigation would be conducted by an appointed commission, which I understand has been appointed, but with no chance to go to work, and that the eight-hour day and the 123-mile speed basis would be put in effect on January 1, 1917, and remain in effect for a period of eight or nine months, until the investigation and report of such investigation could be made. The men have agreed to that. What later came after that I do not know. But here we are to-day with one commission investigating one thing, the railroads declining to comply with what you gentlemen have said and done, and they have taken it into the Supreme Court to decide certain questions, and it is liable to remain in the Supreme Court for years to come. There is a question of placing the rates of pay and working conditions in the hands of a commission. I know by the press, if it is correct, that a question has been asked by the Supreme Court if |
