N. Y. v. G. E.

One of the stock arguments of the advocates of a big U. S. navy is the damage that would be done to U. S. industry if a hostile fleet should reduce the Manhattan skyline to a horizontal position. Statistics indicating somewhat the size of this damage were last week released by the Manhattan Merchants' Association, Quoting from the 1927 Federal Census of Manufacturers, the Merchants' Association stated that in 1927 factories in New York City produced 9% of the total U. S. 1927 output. New York factories turned out nearly six billion dollars' worth of merchandise. Production of the entire country was valued at about 63 billion dollars.

For its nearly six billions of production, New York paid less than one billion dollars in wages.* Thus New York workers made about $6.10 worth of merchandise for every dollar they received in salary. Inasmuch as the ratio of production to salary in such an extra-New York organization as General Electric Co. was 2.6 to 1 (TIME, April 22), compared to 6.1 to 1 for New York, it might appear that New York pays relatively low--even sweat shop--wages. But no doubt the fairer explanation is the generosity of General Electric to its workers, whose statistics were eloquent evidence of the Owen D. Young theory that a corporation's responsibility is about equally divided between capital, labor, public. The public's share includes, of course, great sums of money spent on research which is not currently productive. No such sums are spent, for example, in New York's cloak and suit hagglery.

* The $904,646,427 was collected by 552,507 wage earners in 27,062 establishments, making the average weekly wage slightly less than $32.