The Masses (periodical)/Volume 1/Number 1/Our Benevolent Express Companies

Our Benevolent Express Companies

 

Within the short space of three years two of the big express companies have presented their grateful stockholders with "melons" worth forty-eight million dollars. This pleasant return was upon an original investment of practically nothing. Whatever assets the companies now possess were accumulated out of surplus profits. The goose that lays their golden eggs consists simply of exclusive contracts with the railroads, by which they are licensed to overcharge the long-suffering public for carrying its parcels.

These private gold mines, called express companies, employ considerable labor. Some five thousand of their drivers, transfer men, schedule men and helpers in New York and Jersey City went on strike this fall. Those holding the most responsible positions, the route drivers and transfer men, received, it appears, sixty-five to seventy-five dollars a month for a day's work that began at seven A. M. and ended as soon after six P. M. as the last load on the platforms was hauled to its destination.

This arrangement of a workday with a "regular hour for starting, but none for stopping" often means, in practice, fifteen hours' labor out of the twenty-four, with Sunday and holiday work, for which no extra pay is given. For helpers, it seems, the companies thriftily prefer boys, whom they can hire at eighteen to twenty dollars a month.

The men demanded an advance of five dollars a month in wages, with fifty dollars a month minimum for helpers and a workday of eleven hours. As the three-hundred-per-cent. express companies felt unable to grant the men's demands, express business in New York and Jersey City was thrown into utter confusion. For years the public had paid the companies three-hundred-per-cent. rates for carrying its parcels; but, rather than deal liberally with its employees in a pinch, the companies calmly permitted the public's parcels to lie undelivered. At one time, it is said, three hundred and fifty thousand packages, generally requiring haste and care, were piled up in the various offices waiting for the strike to end.

The grand bulwark of this precious business consists in the failure of Congress to pass a parcels-post act.—Saturday Evening Post.

 

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The prospect that the consumer will shortly be able to consume something is about the rosiest outlook upon the national horizon.—St. Louis Post-Dispatch.