The story of the switchtender.

‘The Switchtender and His Job’ from Industrial Pioneer. Vol. 1 No. 10. February, 1924.

By A CIVIL ENGINEER

HIS name does not matter because there are many like him in all the large railroad yards of the country. On the company’s payroll, he was put down as a switchtender and, as he walked by with his slow, regular gait, his tools carelessly resting on his shoulder, on his daily rounds from one switchstand to another, the first impression which a casual glance conveyed to the onlooker was a guess that he was a crank and pretty hard to get along with.

Upon closer acquaintance, the impression proved correct. He was exceedingly officious. Even the roadmaster and the superintendent, whose favor he was always courting, made fun of his good intentions and excused him on account of his age or the length of his service.

He had know better days. Once he had been rated a shop mechanic and he still kept that individualistic psychology which sticks to many former craftsmen, even after some mechanical invention has reduced them to the ranks of the industrial proletariat. During his heyday, he belonged to the machinists’ union. Like many AFL-ites, it was not a sense of duty that made him join but merely a desire to defend his job against outsiders. The meaning of solidarity he could or would not grasp. At one time he excelled as a gear and diemaker and, in that capacity, he had practically sacrificed his life to the company. Some general superintendent once had written him an official letter of commendation and he had it framed and hung up in the sitting room of the clumsy little wooden box that he was trying to buy on the installment plan and never ceased to boast of as his home.

Big Heartedness!

Of course, his hard and delicate work had prematurely impaired his eyesight and thus his skill had vanished. Then the big-hearted company had handed him a job as switchtender, cleaning lamps, lighting them at dusk, sweeping the snow away from between the switchpoints. Day in and day out, he paced from the east to the west end of the yard carrying with him at all times his bundle of tools and his everlasting grouch.

His pet aversion was the hobo. Voluntarily, he acted as a stoolpigeon for the yard bull and occasionally he would get into a chewing match with a gang of box-car travelers and jobhunters waiting for an outbound freight at either end of the yard.

It was great fun to hear him glibly repeat the old capitalistic catchwords of individuality and loyalty and pride of craft and when someone reminded him of the new economic conditions brought about by the onward sweep of the machine process in industry, he would flare up and proudly walk off with the blatant retort:

“No machine process can ever hurt a good man.”

There are hundreds of thousands of switchlights on the railroads of this country and there was a time when all were oil lanterns, cleaned, filled, lighted and extinguished by switchtenders. Any one tender had so many lights under his care that he was compelled to light some after dark and see that some others did not get extinguished until long after sunrise. There was waste and waste cuts into dividends and, besides, not all switchtenders were conscientious or reliable. So, in this little narrow domain of the switchlights, the great force, economic necessity made its appearance.

When some power plant could be found nearby, electric light bulbs took the place of oil lamps and all could be lit up at the same time by throwing a switch at the power house. But switchlights are scattered and thousands of them could not be thus connected and therefore economic necessity took the shape of an engineering problem.

Edison offered a solution by inventing a primary battery to take the place of oil. However a man had to be employed to switch the light on and his wages ate up the profit of the batteries. If the man was dropped and the lights allowed to burn day and night, the wear and tear of the batteries was more expensive than the cost of oil lamps with the switchtender’s wages thrown in.

Introducing Dalen

Now, let me introduce a Swede, Nils Gustaf Dalen by name. A professional hundred-per-center who had been smart enough to pick the US as his birthplace, would, of course, call him an ignorant foreigner. He is a spare, shy man, whose eyes are hidden behind dark smoked glasses. And yet, that man is one of the most pathetic heroes of our epoch. That man has systematized the lighting of all the ocean highways and is himself today blind, as the result of an accident which overcame him in the course of his experimental work.

Dalen has indirectly written the next chapter in the evolution of railroad lights. He uses acetylene gas and, besides, his lamps begin to burn when the sun goes down. They switch themselves on and off automatically. This result was brought about by the invention of the Dalen sun-valve. The apparatus is composed of four metal rods enclosed in a strong plate-glass cylinder. Three of the rods are burnished and, for that reason, absorb little light but the fourth is of a large diameter and coated with lamp-black and absorbs so much light that it expands by daylight and the expansion lengthens the rod and closes a valve which controls the flow of acetylene gas. Heat does not affect the valve because the hottest fire will expand all the rods equally, while light only lengthens the black one.

The lights burn on the principle of the Welsbach gas mantle and Dalen even invented an automatic mantle-exchanger, so that lamps can be left to themselves and burn for a whole year without any care whatever.

The Dalen sun-valve was originally invented for beacons and coast lights but there has been placed on the market a smaller and cheaper type for use on railroad switchlights which requires about one inspection every three months.

In tracing the course of technical progress, as regards switchlights, we have met three different stages in a progressive series:

First stage: Oil lamp — hand labor.

Second stage: Electric lamp — machine labor, hand controlled.

Third stage: Dalen sun-valve — Automatic machine labor.

Machine Process Unfolding

This instance presents to us the unfolding of the machine process at a glance. Each and every invention brings us nearer to automatism, a technical condition where the machine does the larger part of the work and the thinking and the machine-tender only appears in a secondary way to offer those minor functions which technology has not for the present been able to shift to the machine.

When the railroad type of Dalen’s sun-valve comes into general use, and that will be very shortly, our switchtender — good man as he thinks himself — is going to lose his job and the machine process will be the cause.

What is he, what are we, going to do about it? Pick up pebble stones from the roadbed and shy them at the valves or act as intelligent men?

I am afraid that our individualistic switchtender and all those who share with him the frame of mind of the craftsman are going to throw a few rocks.

When our switchtender was let out of the shop, he refused to join the maintenance of way workers’ union. Did he not have a company pull and how could anyone imagine an ex-member of the machinists’ union, a craftsman and skilled mechanic, joining a union of snipes and gandy-dancers?

I suppose other switchtenders will have more sense and less hollow pride and that they already belong to the maintenance of way laborers’ outfit, but what good does it do them? That outfit is neither fish nor flesh, nor good red herring. It isolates section men and shop laborers away from the rest of the railway workers in a kind of organizational chop-suey made up out of the remnants of all that the brotherhoods and the shop-crafts did not want.

Such a union could not protect the switchtender’s job if it wanted to. It is unable to cope with any kind of a technical improvement and its economic effects. Even a full-grown, narrowly specialized, jobtrusting craft union could not do it.

To handle a new invention, means from the workers’ point of view, to take such a general social and economic stand that every invention is made to yield more leisure to labor and less dividends to the capitalists.

Only an efficient and scientific form of organization, like the IWW, can handle a new invention by the proper method. When it comes to face such a situation, craft unionism is powerless.

The Industrial Pioneer was published monthly by Industrial Workers of the World’s General Executive Board in Chicago from 1921 to 1926 taking over from One Big Union Monthly when its editor, John Sandgren, was replaced for his anti-Communism, alienating the non-Communist majority of IWW. The Industrial Pioneer declined after the 1924 split in the IWW, in part over centralization and adherence to the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU) and ceased in 1926.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/industrial-pioneer/Industrial%20Pioneer%20(February%201924).pdf