When Rock Island railroadmen complained about their corncob-filled caboose mattresses half a century ago, they unknowingly baptized a working practice that is as old as man's labor and as fresh as this week's news. Chided the trainmaster: "What do you want—featherbeds?" Since then, featherbedding—the purposeful slowing down or spreading out of work to make jobs—has become one of the most emotion-packed points of dispute between U.S.
management and labor. Today the practice pads U.S. labor costs by more than $1 billion a year, plagues a broad spectrum of industries ranging from trucking to show business, printing to airlines. This year, as part of industry's tougher stand toward labor, management aims to pluck some of the featherbeds. A chief cause of the current steel strike is management's insistence on winning more control over local working practices, partly motivated by the desire to wipe out what Chief Steel Negotiator R. Conrad Cooper called "loafing, featherbedding and unjustifiable idle time." The railroad industry, worst feathered of the lot, has pledged an all-out assault against make-work when contract talks open this fall. In the oil industry, the American Oil Co. has taken a month-long strike to end featherbedding that costs, it says, more than $8,000,000 a year.
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Modern-day featherbedding got its grip on industry as labor's answer to oldtime management abuses such as the speedup, spread far and wide during World War II's crash production and cost-plus contracts. It is by no means an American phenomenon; featherbedding pervades many segments of labor in foreign countries, is often disguised behind the Iron Curtain to create the illusion of full employment.
Hard-pressed U.S. railroads figure their featherbedding bill at $500 million a year. In 1958, calculates the Interstate Commerce Commission, rail crews worked only 57% of the hours for which they were paid. Each diesel engine must carry a fireman as a holdover from the days of steam locomotives—though he does almost nothing. Each crewman draws a full day's pay for every 100 miles he covers (because that is the way it was done back in 1919); some collect up to 4½ days' pay for eight hours of travel time. Says the president of a major U.S. railway: "We could solve all our financial problems if we had no featherbedding." One big reason for the high cost of U.S. houses is that carpenters resist using prefabricated panels, painters resist automatic sprayers (sometimes by demanding double wages), and bricklayers and plasterers sometimes set minuscule production quotas. From the job-short 1930s to 1956, a University of Michigan study found, the efficiency of U.S. construction workers dropped 10% to 20%. Truck drivers often draw eight hours' pay for a 5½-hour trip, simply because the trip once took eight hours. Grace Line needs only ten men on a conveyor, but is forced by the International Longshoremen's Association to hire 21, four of whom do nothing but take turns pressing a button.