Mr. STACK. There is no initiation. It is just a dollar, and they sign an application giving us the right to represent them down here in both Houses of Congress.

Mr. HARRIS. Did I understand you to say that you refused to accept the annual contribution or dues of certain people?

Mr. STACK. That is right, because they can't afford it.

Mr. HARRIS. Do you make that determination as to whether or not they can afford it?

Mr. STACK. No. We have an executive staff of 21 leading railroad men-our executive committee-and they meet and those matters are discussed at those meetings. It was agreed at that time that some of these railroad men who could not afford the dollar that we would not take it. I sent a man from Washington a card who was back 2 years. I sent him back a check for $2 because he could not afford it. Mr. HARRIS. Then you give him a free subscription.

Mr. STACK. That is right.

Mr. HARRIS. A free membership to your organization.

Mr. STACK. That is right.

Mr. HARRIS. How many of those do you suppose you have on your rolls?

Mr. STACK. I don't know just how many. We had a lot last year.
Mr. HARRIS. Are there a few or a lot?
Mr. STACK. There are several hundred.
Mr. HARRIS. But less than a thousand.

Mr. STACK. That is right.

Mr. HARRIS. Do you put out a magazine or periodical or pamphlet? Mr. STACK. We put out the Rail Pension News.

Mr. HARRIS. Do you publish that yourself?

Mr. STACK. We have an editor on that. We have a publicity committee. We are broken down into committees. I could not handle all the work in connection with this job, and we have a finance committee, 5 of our men from 5 different roads, headed by 1 of our vice presidents, from the Pennsylvania Railroad. Our bills are submitted and expense accounts-my expense accounts-to that finance committee for approval before the secretary-treasurer will draw a check on it.

Mr. HARRIS. Is all of this operation financed out of your $117,000 in 1954?

Mr. STACK. That is right. Then we have other committees. We have a membership committee. There are five members on that. We have also a publicity committee that is headed by Sands, with five members on that. They are the boys that pass on what goes in the Pension News.

Mr. HARRIS. How many people are employed by your organization? Mr. STACK. We have a lot of part-time workers. Take, for example, this Pension News. We have 125,000 circulation. We have to hire extra help at that time. But ordinarily we have 2 girls and we have 1 boy, who is a high school boy, that works for us after school. I get paid myself, and they have offered me increases on several occasions, and I have turned them down.

Mr. HARRIS. You are a salaried man?

Mr. STACK. That is right.

Mr. HARRIS. All of your employees are salaried people?

Mr. STACK. I am talking about full-time employees. There are employees that we pay $1 an hour as part-time workers.

Mr. HARRIS. How many full-time employees do you have?

Mr. STACK. It all depends. When we are getting out the News, we may have eight. We may have 10.

Mr. HARRIS. They are not employed all the time.

Mr. STACK. That is right.

Mr. HARRIS. Whether they get the News out or not, they are not full-time employees.

Mr. STACK. That is right. They are generally the wives of railroadmen. We try to follow the railroad line as much as possible.

Mr. HARRIS. I would like to return again to Polecat McMillan, Mr. STACK. Yes, sir.

Mr. HARRIS. I gather the impression that your reference to his long years of faithful, and I am sure efficient, service, is contrary to what you propose here of a general principle of trying to get a person to retire at 60 years of age.

Mr. STACK. I just mentioned Mr. McMillan for the purpose of showing you that a railroadman will not retire unless he is not physically able to carry on, and that the idea of getting a reduction in retirement age is to protect a certain element of our people who have lost their jobs in shops and automation and dieselization of motive power and people who are sick.

Mr. HARRIS. I am glad you said that, because I have been trying to find out just what the principle is behind this move, and if it is a good move, I want to know about it. Do you mean to say, then, to over 1 million railroad employees in the industry, that you want to adopt a principle here of a retirement program that will guarantee them security in case they lose their jobs?

Mr. STACK. That is right.

Mr. HARRIS. And that is the purpose?

Mr. STACK. That is the purpose. It is an insurance they get. The younger employees are just as interested as the older ones.

Mr. HARRIS. That is a very interesting thing to me because I wondered what was behind it. Now you have made it very clear. If that is your position, and the position of those who are supporting that viewpoint I certainly would not question it, though I would not agree with it. Retirement programs and insurance programs are not necessarily those to guarantee security on the basis of whether a man has a job or not. It is for the purpose of taking care of him in his days of retirement, and after he reaches a certain age where he is not able to work any more.

Mr. STACK. The man that is in ill health and can't qualify for any benefits and finds himself over age 60 is certainly in a very precarious position relative to security.

Mr. HARRIS. Let us make it 50.

Mr. STACK. You have to have a starting point some place.

Mr. HARRIS. I know it. Why not make it 50. You said in your statement that a man 46 years of age, if he has lost his job, is going to have a difficult time finding employment. I will give you 4 years. Let us make it 50 on that principle.

Mr. STACK. If you made it 50, then the man would have to start at 20 in order to have 30 years of service.

Mr. HARRIS. I appreciate that. What I was trying to do is to develop for the consideration of this committee and certainly to clarify in my own mind the principle behind these various bills. You very frankly and I want to compliment you for it-tell us now that the purpose behind this is to take care of certain ones who find themselves out of employment.

Mr. STACK. At a certain age.

Mr. HARRIS. Then you changed the entire principle or purpose of railroad retirement when you do that. At the same time, is it not true that the Railroad Unemployment Insurance Act was adopted by the Congress as a matter of principle to take care of the men that you are trying to put in under the Railroad Retirement System?

Mr. STACK. Your colleague, Hon. James Van Zandt, is trying to extend that over the 6 months' period. The unemployment insurance is not paid for the rest of your life until you qualify for benefits. It is paid for only 26 weeks.

Mr. HARRIS. That is right.

Mr. STACK. At the end of 26 weeks what are you going to do-go to the poor house? That is your question.

Mr. HARRIS. I can't agree with that altogether, either. If a man doesn't have any initiative, and doesn't want to try to get anything, maybe he has to make some other arrangement.

Mr. STACK. Take a place like Altoona, Pa., where you have all the men out between the ages of 60 and 65. That is a railroad town that is dependent entirely on railroad payrolls. You cannot get a job in that town. You could not buy a job. Those men have lost their homes. In Oelwein, Iowa, they have done the same thing. There were 91 between the ages of 60 and 65. There are only 2 of those men today who are working, and that is 3 years ago. Those men are going down to Waterloo, Iowa, commuting every weekend to home. That is only 2 out of 91. The Great Western went in there and bought their homes so they had a little money to eat on. They sold the homes of the general offices employees and moved them.

Mr. HARRIS. Nobody is more sympathetic to anyone out of employment than I am. That applies not only to railroad people; that applies to unemployed people. It doesn't make any difference where they are. Under the same principle that you talked about a moment ago wouldn't we be called upon to reduce whatever the age might be, as a starting point, to take care of all people who worked for the Government if they lost a job before they reached the age of 60 or 65, social security people who are covered by Social Security, if they happen to lose their jobs, and take care of all of those out of the old age annuity and retirement program. That certainly would be quite an innovation in retirement programs in this country.

I do observe that there is a difference of opinion among some of the groups that have been before us. We have all heard a great deal recently about lobbying activities. In your statement a moment ago, you had something to say about the activities of some other organizations. I believe you called them outfits. I think they would disagree with that characterization probably, but nevertheless in view of that, I wanted to ask you a little about your organization.

Did you ever see one of these mimeographed letters that are addressed to me and to Mr. Priest, the chairman of this committee?

Mr. STACK. I have quite a few here. I have some from Little Rock, Ark. I didn't see this particular one. Someone must have made a stencil of it. I had quite a few from Little Rock.

Mr. HARRIS. I can bring my files down here and show you thousands of them from not only Little Rock, but other places in my State, and all over the United States.

Mr. STACK. I had nothing to do with this at all. This is an individual proposition by the employees.

Mr. HARRIS. How do you account for the fact that we have the same language in the letters, regardless of whether they come from Little Rock, Ark., Jacksonville, Fla., Minnesota, California, or wherever it may be in the United States-word for word?

Mr. STACK. Some of our group leaders must have had a meeting and got together and drafted that.

Mr. HARRIS. Then it did come from your organization, didn't it? Mr. STACK. It came from someone in connection with our organization, yes.

Mr. HARRIS. Then what you did is to send out to each member on your rolls this letter, and told them to send it in to us?

Mr. STACK. We never mailed that out. The only thing we put out is the Rail Pension News.

Mr. HARRIS. And you or someone in your organization prepared the letter and that is how we get the thousands and thousands of lettersidentical letters- that we have been receiving from all over the United States?

Mr. STACK. Mr. Chairman, what I have been getting is petitions. I have a petition out of Pittsburgh with 342 names. That was sent to the Hon. Percy Priest. I have 96 employees of the Missouri Pacific office of Little Rock, Ark., that was sent to Mr. Priest. I have some sent to you.

Mr. HARRIS. I believe it would be more correct to say that actually what happened is that through your Rail Pension News you encourage each member to write to the Members of this committee, and suggest the kind of letter that should be written?

Mr. STACK. Somebody else got this. I have never seen one of these. I could swear on that. I have not seen one of these as yet. It is just a letter. It is stencilled. We tell them in the Pension News that stencilled letters are no good for Congress. We tell them that in the News.

good for Congress?

Mr. HARRIS. What do you tell them that is Mr. STACK. We tell them to write a letter. We never tell them what so say. We tell them to express their views.

Mr. HARRIS. I want you to thoroughly understand, Mr. Stack, I am not complaining about it. In view of what has been said, I am just trying to develop for the record-and appropriately so-that a lot of people are interested in their viewpoint.

Mr. STACK. That is right.

Mr. HARRIS. They try to express that viewpoint. But I think it puts someone in a bad light to criticize somebody else for doing the same thing I am doing.

Mr. STACK. That is right.

Mr. HARRIS. That is the purpose. I wanted to get a little idea why I got 150 letters in 1 day from 1 community.

Mr. STACK. I got over 1,100 in 1 day. That is the usual mail.
Mr. HARRIS. I yield to Mr. Dollinger.

Mr. DOLLINGER. Did you mention a board of 21 people?

Mr. STACK. Yes. They are all railroad employees. I am the only one that has left the railroad business.

Mr. DOLLINGER. Are those people presently employed with the railroads?

Mr. STACK. They are all presently employed on the railroad.
Mr. DOLLINGER. I mean those 21.

Mr. STACK. That is right. As soon as they get into an executive position, we drop them from our advisory staff.

Mr. DOLLINGER. These people are presently employed by the railroads?

Mr. STACK. Yes.

Mr. DOLLINGER. Are they compensated for their activities?

Mr. STACK. Not in connection with our group. We have a dinner or something like that that we might treat them to.

Mr. DOLLINGER. But the work they do is not compensated?

Mr. STACK. No. They are broken up into subleaders. They have different leaders in their offices and places that collect the membership. Mr. DOLLINGER. How do you select those people?

Mr. STACK. They generally come in by recommendations of railroad employees. Somebody on the Santa Fe will say that the Santa Fe is not represented on your advisory board, we would like to suggest so and so to go on your executive board. Then we investigate those people very thoroughly. We had a man here in the East some time ago and he was recommended by some people there, and we found out that he was not just right, and we would not put him on there. Under our bylaws the executive committee has to vote the man in before he appears as a member of our advisory board, or an officer in our organization.

Mr. DOLLINGER. How many people does your organization have on the fixed payroll?

Mr. STACK. As I explained to Mr. Harris, that is very hard to say. There are 2 stenographers, and 1 that is working part time, and I work full time. The others are all extra help.

Mr. DOLLINGER. From what you said apparently a lot of money comes into your organization, about $100,000 a year.

Mr. STACK. We are not trying to make any money. We do have a substantial balance in the bank, but we are not trying to make any money. We are trying to give them service for the dollar that we are getting from them.

Mr. DOLLINGER. Would it be possible for you to tell this committee, if it is not going to be embarrassing, what the maximum salary is that is paid by your organization?

Mr. STACK. I get $600 a month.

Mr. DOLLINGER. That is the top salary?

Mr. STACK. That is the top salary. I have been offered more than that. As a matter of fact, I got almost that when I worked for the railroad.

Mr. DOLLINGER. On that basis there must be a substantial balance every year from the membership dues that are collected.

Mr. STACK. That Pension News costs around $1,400 every time we put it out.