Series X: Minneapolis and St. Louis Railway. Local Agreements, Conferences, and Reports, 1926-1960

This series contains records of the local agreements the M&St.L had with various railroad labor organizations. Also included are reports of conferences between the local representatives of the labor organizations and the M&St.L representatives. These agreements are interesting because of their focus on smaller and more local concerns that are not always represented in the national agreements. Many of these records are about the M&St.L facility on Fort Dodge, Iowa. Of particular interest are the blue prints for a proposed office building, maps of the train yards, and an attempt by the M&St.L to rent space from the Illinois Central Railroad to defray the costs of maintaining their own facilities.

Also located in this series is a folder containing articles and essays on the issue of featherbedding. Featherbedding is the practice of hiring more workers than are needed to perform a given job. The term is often used by management to refer to labor union contracts which require them to keep a certain number of staff employed, even in instances in which they are no longer needed, such as with the rise of automated workflows that render certain positions obsolete. Certain local agreements are also filed with theses clippings, presumably because the M&St.L felt that these Agreements were example of the same.

Of particular interest is a file regarding the use of Edifone Equipment to record formal investigations. It is included in this series because it was a policy adopted by the M&St.L and agreed upon by the various locals. However, the introduction of this equipment is indicative of the effects automation began to have on the work, particularly with regard to the clerks and stenographers employed by the M&St.L.