The views of Judge Anderson, former member of the Interstate Commerce Commission and of the Massachusetts Public Service Commission, and a figure broadly sympathetic to the railroad companies, are typical of those who argued against nominal (and upward) wage standardization from a business perspective. Anderson complained that the railroad union’s concept of wage standardization was an “utterly unsound and unjust standardization,” denouncing as “absurd” the “scheme of paying the same wages all over the country, regardless of living conditions and of the work required.” He condemned the “artificial standardization of wages on a mere money basis, that is, regardless of money purchasing power in various sections and of the quality and quantity of service,” noting, furthermore, the diference between the workload of an employee toiling in a busy city station and one working in a quiet rural station. Anderson ended his comments on the matter by urging “in the interest of the workingmen themselves” the abandonment of the standardization of wages.84
In the public relations battle, the railroads repeatedly suggested that the union’s version of standardized wages would threaten the economic wellbeing of railroad companies.85 Having ceded some ground on the issue of wage standardization to the unions before the First World War, the railroad companies launched a counterattack in the postwar period, arguing that standardized wages put the whole industry in peril.86 This point echoed an analysis of the initial wave of strikes, of 1909, by economist William J. Cunningham. Following the first big push by unions for standardized wages, Cunningham published an article, in 1910, in which he argued that standardization, far from ending inequalities, permitted them to remain, and even led to their accentuation. On the political right, some commentators, pursuing an antilabor agenda, came up with a harsh, probusiness version of standardized wages, a rhetorical counter to the union version. R. A. Gill-Smith, writing in the Wall Street Journal, suggested that wage rates be standardized around a “maximum rate . . . fixed by law.” “This,” he said “would not only put a stop sometime to increasing costs of living, but would go far to regulate most labor troubles. This would prove a boon to labor itself, as it would put in operation there the law of the survival of the fittest, whereby good and bad workmen would each receive their due reward.”87 The state eventually intervened in the 1909 dispute, to impose what it took to be a balanced approach to standardized wages. The Erdman Act of 1898 had given the federal government powers to take an active role in the arbitration of interstate industrial disputes involving the railroads. In the 1909 dispute between railroad workers and their employers, the Federal Railway Labor Board initially enforced the standardization of wages at the behest of unions, on terms they found agreeable.
Standardization of Consumption, Work, and Wages
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