White House Statement on Efforts to Settle a Railroad Labor Dispute.

The President today issued a Proclamation creating a board to be composed of three mediators and instructing them to investigate and report within thirty days regarding disputes between the Kansas City Southern Railway Company, the Texarkana and Fort Smith Railway Company, and the Arkansas Western Railway Company and certain of their employees. The employees will be represented by the Order of Railway Conductors, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen and the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen.

The Proclamation sets forth that these disputes "now threaten substantially to interrupt interstate commerce within the States of Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas, to a degree such as to deprive that section of the country of essential transportation service."

The Board of Mediation was created by virtue of authority given the President by the Railway Labor Act.

Members of the Board, under the Proclamation, shall be compensated in the sum of fifty dollars for every day actually employed with or upon account of travel and incident duties. Under the Economy Bill the fifty-dollar compensation will be subject to a reduction of 15 percent.

Compensation previously allowed members of such Mediation Boards has been at the rate of one hundred dollars a day and has not been subject to the 15 percent cut.