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While the railroads were prospering, management put up with the extra costs imposed by work rules. But by 1956, beset by shrinking profits, the railroads told the unions that the time had come to start revising the rules. After strenuous negotiations, the two sides agreed to shelve the issue for three years. When the three years expired in 1959, the railroads set out to alter the work rules. Featherbedding, said Daniel P. Loomis, president of the Association of American Railroads, is "a handmaiden of the ruinous inflationary spiral. For the good of all America, something drastic must be done about this destructive growth. And 1959 is the year of decision."
"Harsh, Inhumane." Of course it was not the year of decision. That was still four years away.
Negotiations began in November 1959, bogged down in a year of bickering and mutual charges of failure to bargain in good faith. Toward the end of 1960, both parties asked President Eisenhower to appoint a commission to study the dispute. Ike created the Rifkind Commission, headed by onetime Federal Judge Simon Rifkind. After 14 months of hearings and on-the-rails investigations, the commission issued a report recommending extensive revisions in work rules and wage-base formulas.
Management accepted the Rifkind report; the unions rejected it. Ed Gilbert called it "harsh, inhumane and retrogressive." From April to July 1962, the two parties banged heads through 32 bargaining sessions, a dozen of them under the auspices of the National Mediation Board. When the railroads an nounced that they would proceed to put the Rifkind recommendations into effect, the unions brought suit in Federal District Court in Chicago. The judge refused a permanent injunction against the rules changes, but the union carried its case to the Federal Court of Appeals and then on to the Supreme Court. Last March the court handed down a unanimous opinion rejecting the union claim that new work rules would violate the Railway Labor Act.
After that decision, the railroads set an April deadline date for putting the new rules into effect. To head off a strike, President Kennedy set up an emergency board, headed by ex-Judge Samuel Rosenman, an old New Dealer. The Rosenman panel in effect backed the Rifkind recommendations. Again the railroads generally endorsed the panel's findings, and again the unions rejected them.
Two weeks ago, with a strike threatened on July 11, President Kennedy won another delay, this one for 19 days, by persuading the management negotiators to postpone the implementation of the rules revisions while a new six-man presidential panel put out still another report. Last week the panel submitted a factual, 15-page review of the issues in the dispute, offered no recommendations for settlement.