The American Railway: Its Construction, Development, Management, and AppliancesClarke, Thomas Curtis
History
The American Railway: Its Construction, Development, Management, and Appliances
Clarke, Thomas Curtis
Railroads -- United States
The model railroad service, therefore, is now to be considered.
Of what would it consist? At present, there is practically no
difference between individuals in the employ of a great railroad
corporation. All the wage-earners in its pay stand in like position
toward it. There should be a difference among them; and a marked
difference, due to circumstances which should receive recognition.
Take again the case of the Union Pacific. The Union Pacific, it has
already been mentioned, numbers 14,000 employees in its operating
department as a maximum, and 12,000 as a minimum. They vary with
the season of the year, increasing in summer and diminishing
in winter. Consequently there is a large body of men who are
permanently in its employ; and there is a smaller body, although
a very considerable portion of the whole, who are in its employ
only temporarily. Here is a fact, and facts should be recognized.
If this particular fact is recognized, the service of the company
should be organized accordingly, and each of the several divisions
of the operating department would have on its rolls two classes of
men: First, those who have been admitted into the permanent service
of the company; and, second, those who for any cause are only
temporarily in that service. And no man should be admitted into
the permanent service until after he has served an apprenticeship
in the temporary service. In other words, admission into the
permanent service would be in the nature of a promotion from an
apprenticeship in the temporary service.
Those in the temporary service need not, therefore, be at present
considered. They hold to the companies only the ordinary relation
of employee to employer. They may be looked upon as candidates for
admission into the permanent service--they are on probation. So
long as they are on probation they may be engaged and discharged at
pleasure. The permanent service alone is now referred to.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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