Working on the Railroad: Workers and the Evolution of the Pennsylvania Railroad's Pension Plan

Abstract

In 1900 the Pennsylvania Railroad Company implemented a pioneering pension plan that became a model for American business in the twentieth century. Although scholars have described the two-stage creation as management’s effort to achieve corporate efficiency and control over its labor force, this paper demonstrates a more complicated, untidy evolution. Employees played a vital, active role in the quarter-century development of the pension scheme, repeatedly shaping the process and its results directly and indirectly, consciously and unconsciously. Furthermore, the plan’s evolution was a messy, often decentralized, and incremental process considerably at odds with the firm’s reputation for systematic, analytical management.