The daily Nome industrial worker., 1916-08-08

IoHipSIS lueL IO WUTh TOT " ndt llc.I can get, not what they should gct to live decently.
 Against this condition, then, the workers can only offer this united organization and without a labor or ganization they are helpless in the extreme.
 The managers of the railroads have two paramount duties to per form and two only. One is to keep the railroad skillfully operated ana without any hitch in the moving of traffic, and the other is to pay divic- ends. It is upon this that the con- pany will judge them. They are ex- pected to pay dividends in propor- tion to the amount of traffic hauled; and if a man can like the Great Northren railroad, pay higher di vidends with less traffic, so much the better is the management re- garded.
 
 prevailing when the costs of opera tion are reduced to an irreducible minimum. Crews are denuded to the very barest quota necessary to move trains overtime is insisted. upon so that the elimination ot ex- tra full days thereby will become q standing conditions; consumption of coal and oil and waste, of steel and ties and stationery, are reduced to the finest limits of actual efficiency. I.;. bor is only used where labor can not be dispensed with without ser ious results, and wages accordingly are reduced to a standard beneath which it is impossible to descend, To do this railroads have experi- mented with all grades and quail ties of labor, with all nations and races, and the days work was stand ardized on engine foot plate, in pull man car, on the track and in the shops, long before any expert thought of such a thing as efficiency or speeding up.
 All that was not done for the purpose of expressing labor. All that was done to pay dividends, and it is not an irregular thing to suppose no one regretted having to reduce the wages or to increase the length of the working day more than the railroad officials them selves. It is wrongful notion that such things are done to antagonize labor, but it is a equally wrongful to suppose that such things are done without antagonizing labor.
 But they are done, anyway, in order that dividends may be earned and that is the be-all and end-all of a railroads existence.
 Only flattering reformers who talk of social utilities and have public ownership bugs in their bon net, suppose that the railroad func- tions for social service or for the community welfare. Men dinn't put their money in railroad bonds or stocks to help out the citizens of Kalamazoo or Wahkiakum. They invested their good money in order to get it back thousand fold. And it is in relation to getting that money back that the bondholder re- gards railroading and as nothing else.
 But this has to be pointed out that the railroad worker did not any more adopt that kind of labor for the sake earning dividends for the employers. He labored to get the means to live upon, and hence it is the company as represented by the bond or stock holders and the company as represented by the workers has two distinct viewpoints. And these two viewpoints cannot coalesce at any point. The more wages are paid the less will be the profits. Any increase in the costs of operation must be followed by a decrease in the net return avail able as interest or dividends and there is no getting over this. Medi- ators and arbitrators may work against this condition until they are tired, but they cannot mix the oil and the water of these two div erse positions into and sort of per manent emulsion.
 What is done, instead, is done