rating entitled him, even when he was obviously unfitted, had a demoralizing effect upon the service. In some cases two or three men would, in turn, insist upon their month's trial in a specific vacancy, and, as a result, the vacancy would not be permanently filled for three months or more. In the meantime a similar experience might be going on in the positions temporarily vacated by the men undergoing trial.

Impaired discipline and a general lowering of the morale of the service followed in the wake of the national agreements. At the very beginning of his employment a mechanic could ignore a request for information of vital importance to any prudent employer. The employer could not require the applicant to divulge anything concerning his past experience or his personal character, nor to show "service letters" or other evidence of fitness for the position. The applicant had only to state that he had had at least four years' experience as a mechanic. He was not required to offer any supporting evidence. Then, if employed and retained in the service for 30 days, he could rest easy. Rule 37 provided that after that length of service he could not be dismissed for incompetency. This and other rules of the same tenor required the railroads to retain men who were useless or worse than useless. As a natural result the regulations stripped the employing officer of the authority which legitimately was his and without which he could not satisfactorily discharge his responsibility for the maintenance of efficiency among the employees of his department,

and they diminished the respect with which he was viewed by the men.

It is true that many of the rules in the national agreements had been in force on individual railroads, particularly in the South and the Southwest where, because of the limited supply of mechanics, the unions could successfully insist upon concessions not recognized elsewhere. But no individual road had all of the rules. The national agreement was a collection of the most favorable rules on all roads, plus a few which were original. Many of the existing concessions were the result of bargaining in which a rule was granted as a substitute for higher pay or as a "trade" for something else. Very few of the unfair rules were in effect outside of the South and Southwest.

It is pertinent to note here that all of the national agreements were entered into on dates subsequent to May 20, 1919, when the President announced that the roads would be returned to their owners at the end of that year, and three out of the five agreements were executed by the Director General after it was known by the President's announcement of December 24, 1919, that federal control would terminate on March 1, 1920. The railroad executives, therefore, had ground for criticizing the Director General for assuming burdens which these agreements passed on to the railroads while he was unwilling at the same time to assume the responsibility for increasing freight and passenger rates so as to meet the additional expenses. The statement has been made privately that these agreements were made by Mr. Hines to

redeem a pledge given by Mr. McAdoo while the war was in progress and when extra inducements to keep the locomotive and car shops at their maximum output were justified. The writer cannot vouch for the accuracy of the statement, but, if true, it had an important bearing on the later action of Mr. Hines. The early negotiations looking toward the first agreement were begun during Mr. McAdoo's regime many months before the document was finally signed.

Prior to the events which led up to the passage of the Adamson Act late in 1916, the relations between the railroad managements and their employees on the typical railroad were reasonably harmonious. It is true that these intimate relations had begun to dissolve before the roads were taken by the Government. But during the 26 months of centralized power over practically everything that had to do with the pay envelop and with working conditions, the control of local officers over their employees was much weakened. While there had been some standardization of wages and working rules in certain classes of service, the policies of standardization in these matters were carried to an extreme degree during the life of the Railroad Administration. Rates of pay and conditions of employment in nearly all

*At Mr. McAdoo's request the shopmen worked overtime during the first 11 months of 1918 in order to increase the shop output. When the armistice was signed the hours of shopmen were restored to the agreed 8 hour basis. When working more than 8 hours during the war, they were of course paid overtime rates.

classes of service were made uniform in every part of the country. A car inspector in a small town in Florida received the same rate of pay as one who worked in Chicago or St. Paul. A station clerk in a small inland town worked under the same scale as one who had to assume the higher living costs of Boston. The colored women who cleaned cars in the South were awarded the same wages as white men or white women who did similar work in New York or Pittsburgh. If the standards adopted were reasonable for the lower living costs of the South, they could not be reasonable for the northern sections of the country, particularly in urban communities where rents, fuel, and other costs of living were much higher. If the standards were reasonably sufficient for northern cities they must have been unreasonably high for the southern states. Yet an inflexible uniformity in wage rates and in rules affecting hours of service or other terms of employment was prescribed for nearly every class of service regardless of differences in going rates, in rates or rules for similar employment in competing industries, in the severity of work, density of traffic, relative degree of experience, and the local purchasing power of the dollar.

In Chapter XI, which deals with labor policies during the year 1918, reference was made to the Boards of Adjustment which were created during the first year of federal control. These boards, three in number, supplemented the work of the Board of Railroad Wages and Working Conditions, and gave effect to understandings reached between the regional directors and the executives

of the unions, under which bipartisan boards were to be established to adjust controversies as to discipline, interpretation of rules, or other similar grievances. An unfortunate effect of the centralization of the machinery for determining wage rates and rules and for the adjustment of grievances was that of undermining the influence of the officers in authority locally on the individual roads, and thereby of impairing discipline. Throughout the entire period of federal control there was a growing tendency on the part of employees to disregard their immediate superiors and the federal managers also, and to go to Washington with all sorts of grievances, many of them trivial. Though a substantial portion of these complaints were decided against the employees, the net effect, particularly during the last 14 months of federal control, was to reduce the local officers to mere figureheads in the adjustment of labor differences. According to the rules of procedure each case had first to be presented to the local officers, but generally that was a mere formality incident to the final reference of the case to the centralized boards. The attitude of the employees grew to be that their real friends and the real power were in Washington. The local officers found themselves unable to adjust even minor differences unless the employees' position were conceded in full, and on the part of these officers there grew to be an inclination to let the central administration assume the responsibility which should go with the authority to settle controversies. Under such circumstances