we believe, in understanding how this dispute reached the stage where it fell to the Congress to deal with it and what is specifically wrong with the resolution that is before you as we view it and what we propose is a better way for you, an alternative to this proposal for compulsory arbitration.

To understand how the dispute got this far, one must go back to the very beginning, because there was a stage which provided the basis for whatever else happened.

The carriers' original notices-which are still labeled as "fair and equitable" by Carrier Witness Wolfe, and which are still threatened as promulgations of the carriers to this very day-constituted a body blow to the effective bargaining relationship between the parties.

First of all, the carriers demanded a wage cut-I repeat a wage cut of 33% percent for some road employees and a cut of 371⁄2 percent for other road employees.

Many of the men running the trains of this country were being asked to take cuts of that magnitude.

Now, it is obvious that this demand could not result in collective bargaining. We are living not in the medieval ages. We are living in a relatively advanced period of labor relations. I believe this is an unheard of proposal.

It was a demand that mocked the bargaining relationship of the parties. Wage cuts en masse and sizable reductions of the general wage level are unthinkable in our times, and I believe you will find support for that statement in the manner in which Emergency Board No. 154 reported on that question.

Secondly, the carriers in their demands asked the organizations to give up virtually every working condition that had been negotiated to the date of their notices.

Now, this was not a request to modify rules, to eliminate some, to replace some. This was the demand for the cancellation of virtually every rule covering the working conditions of the operating employees in the entire industry.

It was also demanded that the organizations agree to the demise of collective bargaining over these rules. Not only were the rules to be abrogated but there was to be no further bargaining concerning these rules.

And these rules in more general parlance are known in other industries as the working conditions of the employees.

Management demanded for itself exclusively the right to make, keep, revise, discontinue rules as it alone might determine, whenever they might choose or not choose to do so, all without collective bargaining.

Now, what does this mean? It means that this was not the usual evolution of collective bargaining where one party says to the other, "There are some changes we ought to consider. Will you discuss them with us?" This was revolutionary, not evolutionary.

At one stroke it was sought to eliminate from collective bargaining virtually the entire field of working conditions.

Now, this is obviously repugnant to the entire history and development of collective bargaining in this industry and to the express requirements, obligations of the Railway Labor Act.

This was antithetical to the recognized rights of employees through their bargaining agents to promote their self-interest in safety, efficiency of operations, the incentives that the employees achieved through that efficiency, the burden of their work, the location of their employment, the security of their jobs.

All this was sought to be eliminated from the area of collective bargaining.

What was the effect of this? The effect was to invite the unions to simply abdicate their functions in the interest and in the protection of their members.

Now, the necessary conclusion is that the original demands were not designed as a vehicle for serious bargaining but rather as a vehicle for deadlock and the end of a bargaining relationship.

Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, you are now being asked to confirm and reward this course of action by awarding the carriers their long-term goal of compulsory arbitration in their favorite agency, the ICC. That is what it boils down to.

Now the carriers' revolutionary wage-cutting, antibargaining demands were accompanied by a revolutionary change in bargaining technique the replacement of labor relations by public relations. Bargaining with employees became perfunctory and unyielding.

Public relations was moved from an auxiliary role to the main role in achieving carrier goals. The myth of railroad poverty was created and heavily promoted. Defamation of the industry's workers-holding the record for growth of productivity among all workers in the United States-was prodigiously promoted. The defamation was prodigiously promoted by the employers of their own workers.

The public-relations people employed in this enterprise have openly stated their pride in making the term "featherbedding" a household expression of contempt. In technical public-relations terms, the industry accomplished the symbolic anathemazation of its own employees and of their organizations.

We have tested the public's understanding, not scientifically-we do not purport to have a poll-but we have talked to many people. Some trains are pulled by one unit of power, one locomotive. Some are pulled by six. Some are pulled by two. We asked them how many engineers are there and how many firemen-helpers are there on a train that is pulled by six units of power and how many do they think there ought to be.

This is what we found:

Most people think that there are six engineers and six firemen in the six cabs, that wherever there is a cab there is an engineer and there is a fireman. That is what most people think.

They think generally that two or three engineers and two or three firemen-helpers would be enough.

Actually there is today under dieselization what there was not formerly under steam. Formerly under steam there was one engineer in each cab. Today, if you have six units of power, you have a single engineer for all of the units, and you have a single firemanhelper for all of the units.

And the public's understanding has been so distorted as to produce the result which I indicated.

Senator PASTORE. At that point I would just like to interrupt.

Do you mean to tell me that if you have six engines pulling one train of freight cars there is only one engineer on and one fireman on?

Dr. DAVIDSON. That is correct.

Senator PASTORE. There are only two people on that train, in the operating elements of that train?

Mr. DAVIDSON. Two enginemen. One engineer, Mr. Chairman, and one fireman.

Senator PASTORE. And who else?

Mr. DAVIDSON. Sometimes there is a brakeman riding in one of the units.

Senator PASTORE. But not always?

Mr. DAVIDSON. Not always.

Senator PASTORE. Well, now, let's assume that you have only got one there and he suffers a heart attack. Who stops the train? Mr. DAVIDSON. If you only have one, Mr. Chairman?

Senator PASTORE. You say you have got two at the most, and the only way you can cut down two is to come back to one. You cannot have one and a half. You have got to have one.

Mr. DAVIDSON. That is right. Well, they have-pardon me.
Senator PASTORE. Go ahead.

Mr. DAVIDSON. They have what they call in road service a deadman control which you must keep your foot on. It requires quite a bit of pressure. But that is not a surefire thing, Mr. Senator.

There have been cases where an engineer dropped dead at the controls and his weight was thrown on this.

And in your question I do not know who would stop it then if you only had one.

Senator PASTORE. All right. Proceed. I am sorry for the interruption.

Mr. MALIN. Now, what is the result of this, this campaign of wage cutting, ending of collective bargaining over working conditions, this campaign of public relations that are intended to supplant labor relations?

The intended result obviously is not to bargain but to wipe out collective bargaining.

I should add this: That the public relations campaign had several associated objectives in addition to the objective of softening up railroad labor. The railroads adopted in the middle 1950's a so-called freedom campaign. And this is quite closely related to the work rules case with which we are dealing.

The railroads asked for exemption from the obligations of continuing service through abandonments.

Exemption from taxation.

Exemption from intraindustry competition through mergers. Exemption from interindustry competition through diversification. Exemption from rate regulation.

Now, who was this program of public relations aimed at? This program has been called the railroad industry's greatest technological development-its program of public relations.

It was aimed particularly at the academic world and the arbitrators who come from there and Government personnel.

The dean of American railroad labor, George Harrison, cites this as the basis reason for railway labor's great current difficulty in finding fair and objective public representatives to deal with their problems.

Now, one would hardly guess on the basis of what has been said to date and what appears in the public press that this is a dispute in which labor has its own demands.

Labor has demanded true modernization and rationalization of the working conditions in this industry, but that demand has been overwhelmed and buried in the turmoil created by the carriers.

How many people know that engineers and other operating employees can still be worked up to 16 hours a day, can be worked 7 days a week, can be worked every week of the year? They do not necessarily receive overtime pay for working long hours.

They can work as long as 16 hours a day every day of the week and not receive overtime pay. And they do not have a weekly threshold for overtime.

These employees have no night shift differentials. They do not receive allowances for expenses for layovers at away-from-home terminals. They have no paid holidays. And their pattern of compensation is quite incomplete in other respects based on modern standards of compensation.

Yet all through the various steps of this dispute the public has been mesmerized by the carriers' insistence that this is simply a manning case, a featherbedding case, a fireless firemen's case.

Every public representative dealing with this matter has without question immediately acceded to the carriers' ultimatum that if the so-called fireman issue is not discussed and settled first there will be no negotiation and settlement of any other issue.

Hardly anyone knows of the carriers' proposed unheard of wage cuts or that the employees are seeking the normal benefits of overtime, night shift differentials, layover expenses, paid holidays, a 5-day workweek, and the like.

Now, if I might at this point turn over some of the succeeding portion of this statement to Mr. Zimmerman, who was a member of the Presidential Railroad Commission.

Senator PASTORE. All right, sir. Any way you like.

Mr. ZIMMERMAN. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, I want to say at the outset that I take no pride at having been a member of that committee. Insofar as any happy results that I may have contributed to that body, I have considered myself a colossal failure.

The Presidential Railroad Commission from the very outset committed what I shall always regard as fatal errors in the handling of the case. The agreement which we struggled to obtain to set up a commission which we hoped would function in a manner enabling it to achieve a constructive result provided, among other things, the authority for the members of that Commission to function as mediators.

I hope not to wear that word out. I have had faith all of my working life in the effects of constructive mediation when people are otherwise unable to reconcile their views. We expected, we hoped, we urged that the Presidential Railroad Commission meet formally long enough to ascertain the respective positions of the parties.

As to the railroads' notice, which is still in front of us in the form of their present promulgation, and the demands that we made likewise under the Railway Labor Act, we had hoped, we had expected, we had urged that, once those positions had been stated for the record, the Commission would engage itself in a determination of what actual facts were necessary to enable an intelligent approach to the resolution of the obvious disputes.

Unfortunately, that did not occur.

We launched, almost immediately, into adversary proceedings, a setting not unlike the one that I face at this moment--complete with reporters, with transcripts, with lawyers, with witnesses, with evidence.

The net result was a record which, if firmly compressed on 81⁄2 by 11 sheets, measures 16 feet 8 inches in length.

I suggest there is not a human being on the face of this earth that knows everything that is in it.

And I
It has

Our expectations for the development of facts under the atmosphere I have suggested that we hoped for were frustrated. The hearings themselves were conducted some 96 days. am sure you are bored to death with hearing that figure. been carried I think in every newspaper in this country at least a dozen times. I am sure you have heard it here.

I suggest that if weight of paper were of some value, we would have had a resounding success coeffective with the day that the report was filed. We have had nothing but resounding difficulties.

I say again that I think the most important shortcoming of that Commission was its failure to mediate on the basis of facts which Government staff developed for that Commission.

Under the adversary proceeding there was no way out of it but to put on, following management's presentation, a similar party line, crystallized, unyielding case, again replete with lawyers and witnesses and testimony and exhibits.

The net result of this was a hardening of positions which posed serious problems for all of us until quite recently.

A good bit of the time of the Commission has been implied to have been devoted to executive sessions. And I think one is entitled to assume that executive sessions since there is no reporter, no transcript, no lawyers, no witnesses-might be devoted toward seeking constructive solutions.

I dislike reporting that this by and large was not so, but it was

not so.

We spent time in housekeeping matters, very late in the game in the delegation of authority, followup concerning the nature of studies to be conducted by the Commission's staff.

Incidentally, the final results of those efforts were received by me up in Cleveland last June, some 4 or 5 months after the Commission had issued its report.

We were confronted with a number of deadlines and sufficient preoccupations to keep the executive sessions occupied with almost everything else except the mediatory efforts that we had anticipated.

There was not only no meaningful mediation, there was no mediation of any substance, of any duration, and there was absolutely no negotiation conducted under the auspices of that Presidential Railroad Commission.