THE DEMANDS OF RAILWAY EMPLOYEES

[Address delivered at a joint session of the two Houses of Congress, August 29, 1916.]

GENTLEMEN OF THE CONGRESS: 

I have come to you to seek your assistance in dealing with a very grave situation which has arisen out of the demand of the employees of the railroads engaged in freight train service that they be granted an eight-hour working day, safeguarded by payment for an hour and a half of service for every hour of work beyond the eight.

The matter has been agitated for more than a year.  The public has been made familiar with the demands of the men and the arguments urged in favor of them, and even more familiar with the objections of the railroads and their counter demand that certain privileges now enjoyed by their men and certain bases of payment worked out through many years of contest be reconsidered, especially in their relation to the adoption of an eight-hour day.  The matter came some three weeks ago to a final issue and resulted in a complete deadlock between the parties.  The means provided by law for the mediation of the controversy failed and the means of arbitration for which the law provides were rejected.  The representatives of the railway executives proposed that the demands of the men be submitted in their entirety to arbitration, along with certain questions of readjustment as to pay and conditions of employment which seemed to them to be either closely associated with the demands or to call for reconsideration on their own merits; the men absolutely declined arbitration, especially if any of their established privileges were by that means to be drawn again in question.  The law in the matter put no compulsion upon them.  The four hundred thousand men from whom the demands proceeded had voted to strike if their demands were refused; the strike was imminent; it has since been set for the fourth of September next.  It affects the men who man the freight trains on practically every railway in the country.  The freight service throughout the United States must stand still until their places are filled, if, indeed, it should prove possible to fill them at all.  Cities will be cut off from their food supplies, the whole commerce of the nation will be paralyzed, men of every sort and occupation will be thrown out of employment, countless thousands will in all likelihood be brought, it may be, to the very point of starvation, and a tragical national calamity brought on, to be added to the other distresses of the time, because no basis of accommodation or settlement has been found.