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Thrust into Southern Pacific management ranks as an Assistant Trainmaster working for Mike Mohan at City of Industry in 1974, I was quickly “baptized by fire” learning how road switcher crews worked, where they hid to sleep, how they slowed their work down to claim 12 hours every time they worked, and how, in some cases they worked 7.5 hours and claimed 12 hours on their time slips. What? Crews stealing time claiming they worked but really didn’t??? I wondered what I had gotten myself into! This was never more apparent than when I was assigned to Tweedy Yard, the SP yard that supported the General Motors South Gate, California production facility. There were seven to nine jobs officially assigned as going on and off duty at 92nd Street, about 1/2 mile west of the Tweedy Yard Office, but no one every officially showed up at 92nd Street and always came to work at the Tweedy Yard office. A couple of the road switcher jobs were “haulers” taking cars to City of Industry or Los Angeles and bringing back loaded auto parts cars for the GM plant. The remainder of the jobs were assigned to switch the GM plant at various times of the day. With a two shift operation, the plant always needed to have its 6 tracks pulled and spotted at least twice a day, and always prior to the time the next shift came to work. The most critical pull and spot was early in the morning and had to be complete no later than 600am. If it was, then the assembly line would be delayed until the switching process was complete. Every job that worked at Tweedy claimed 12 hours even if they only worked 5 or 6. The practice was called a “Quit.” The GM plant was always spotted on time and everyone was happy! And, this was an acceptable practice until one day Superintendent Bob Thruston decided he had had enough. Costs on the Los Angeles Division had risen and the pressure was on from San Francisco to cut costs so Bob proclaimed the “Quit” was dead. I remember pushing back and telling Mike Irvine, who had replaced Mike Mohan as Trainmaster at City of Industry, that we’re going to be in trouble with GM when the plant doesn’t spotted on time in the morning. He agreed, but said I had to tell the crews that if they were going to claim 12 hours, then they would work 12 hours! I put the word out and all the crew members just shook their head at me and said I didn’t know what I was doing. I told them the Superintendent had issued the edict, it was out of my hands. Well, guess what? The crews all slowed down their work, the GM plant was spotted very late the first morning and the GM Traffic Manager, Vic Briscoe, called Bob Thruston the Superintendent. Bob attempted to explain what was going on but Vic would have none of it. Bob convinced him it would be straightened out the following day. It wasn’t, and the plant was spotted about 3 hours late. This time Vic Briscoe really let Bob have it and told him a San Francisco call was next. It wasn’t long after that call that Mike Irvine called me and said go back to the former way of working at Tweedy and get the plant spotted on time. I told the crews and they were happy. They did agree with me to claim 11.5, 11.75 or some total time below 12 hours each day instead of the maximum each day, so the whole painful time did result in a small change of what was called the “Quit”.
Pete:
The SP had a very sophisticated costing system. It was used to identify where we were making money or losing it. Across the whole SP system, we had a high cost railroad. One of the components was the situation you described where management was unable to manage. Gradually traffic migrated to other forms and the guys spotting the plants saw the plants close or the business shift to trucks. On a macro level, when inflation was rampant during the late 1970s, we kept asking for across the board rate increases from the ICC to cover increased labor, fuel and declining productivity costs. It could not last and the SP slowly lost the ability to attract enough business to stay in business on its own.
On another note, I knew Bob Thurston after he became head of sales in Houston. He was great to work with. He ran interference for me one day when we were about to have a contract negotiation with Kimberly Clark. I got word that VP Sales Bob Wynkoop was thinking of joining us without knowing anything about the situation. I called Thurston and asked for his help to divert Wynkoop away from the negotiations. He said, no problem, I’ll schedule a golf match. Problem solved.
Gene
When I first went to work for SP (in engine service), I was assigned to a yard job and was astonished that we had an hour for “coffee”, and hour for “beans”, and stopped work at least one hour before the normal off-duty time. Coming from a regular 9 to 5 job, I was astonished. Subsequently I learned from a higher level Market St. officer that management felt they were doing good if they got 4 1/2 hours of actual work out of a yard crew.
RDF
Hi Bob! Yes, astonished is an excellent word to describe my feelings as well when I discovered this practice as a very green and naive manager on the SP! It sounds like you worked 4-4.5 hours on a yard job and were paid for 8 hours. In road switcher territory where I was managing, the crews were working 4-6 hours and getting paid for 12 hours! Then, if you added in the fact that most of the road switcher locomotive engineers were working in “merged territory” (former Pacific Electric) and off assignment, they were making 24 hours of pay for only working 4-6 hours! The merged territory agreement was another “bank account” for the former Pacific Electric crews. They had it down to a science, one would lay off a regular job and then all the others would end up working off assignment. They were making over $100,000 in 1975!
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