Wages & Hours

Sparks began to fly last week when President Roosevelt let it be known that his Black-Connery wages & hours bill, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1937, which has been publicly mulled by the Senate and House Labor Committees the past fortnight, was to pass substantially as written. Sidetracked thus was Senator Borah's proposed amendment to bar monopoly-made goods from interstate commerce. But as C. I. O.'s John L. Lewis and A. F. of L.'s William Green agreed with each other and with Capital that the wages & hours fixing powers of the Act were too great, Administration supporters took a new, more critical look at the bill.

Its three objectives are: 1) minimum hourly wages; 2) maximum weekly hours of work; 3) prohibition of strikebreaking, labor espionage, child labor. To achieve these objectives the Act creates a five-man Labor Standards Board named by the President with Senate confirmation. Future Board members are to be paid $10,000 a year, serve five-year terms and will have power to fix and vary minimum wages and maximum hours of U. S. labor (except farm labor) subject only to top limits of 80-c- per hour and $1,200 per year per worker. To disobey the Act or rulings of the Board is a misdemeanor punishable by a $500 fine or six months' imprisonment or both. Goods made contrary to the Board's rulings may not be trafficked interstate. The Board can require every employer to maintain special personnel and wages & hours records, has access to his business and records at any time, can subpoena witnesses and records anywhere in the U. S. The Board can require that goods or containers be specially labeled. All contracts made contrary to the Act or the Board's ruling are void.

To Washington stormed white-thatched James A. Emery, general counselor for the National Association of Manufacturers. Fist clenched, he damned the bill as unconstitutional, cumbersome and certain to hoist consumer prices. "The vast and ambiguous . . . ocean of authority . . . granted to a board of five . . . will obliterate the last vestige of local self-government." What the country really needed from Congress, he said, was legislation to fasten some responsibility upon labor unions.

President Claudius T. Murchison of the Cotton Textile Institute called the bill "administratively impossible to the point of grotesqueness." Managing Director Roy A. Cheney of the Underwear Institute said the Board members ought to be paid $20,000 a year, given lifetime jobs, if Congress was determined to give any men such powers. He filed 28 typed pages of suggested changes in the bill. Sears, Roebuck's President Robert E. Wood felt that instead of permitting the Board at its option to employ advisers in fixing wages & hours for a particular industry, they should be compelled to appoint advisory wage committees.

When John L. Lewis urged a minimum 40-c- wage and a five-day, 35-hour week, West Virginia's boyish Senator Rush Dew Holt (he turned 32 this week) asked: "If the Federal Government proceeds from this bill to legislation to regulate all wages and hours, what will happen to industrial democracy?" Grabbing the cigar from his mouth, Boss Lewis exploded, "Is the Senator trying to be humorous?"

To a national radio audience Michigan's 1940 Republican Presidential hope, Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, gave warning that Federal wage-fixing, once initiated, may lead to Federal price-fixing. They "together will lead ... to the centralized, authoritarian State with its tyranny of Government-blessed monopolies." Alabama's Senator Hugo Black, co-author of the bill, jumped to the microphone to defend it: "At least 6,000,000 people are now working more than 40 hours a week . . . 3,000,000 are now getting less than 40-c- an hour . . . even a 40-hour week would result in the re-employment of 1,500,000. . . ."

New Hampshire's Senator Bridges, who blew his horn on behalf of the U. S. mails, blew again with the suggestion that the child labor provisions be removed from the Act and submitted to Congress separately on their own merits. Columnist Hugh S. Johnson, former NRA boss, asked belligerently: "Why did both Mr. Lewis and Mr. Green seek modifications? . . . Because it threatens the very existence of unionism. Because it is utterly Fascistic."

At week's end the Act was denounced from within the committee itself. Indiana's Democratic Representative Glenn Griswold criticized the wage-fixing provisions as "far more riotous than the NIRA." Nor would friends of Secretary of State Hull's reciprocal trade treaties add peace to the scene at the bland suggestion of the Act's coauthor, Representative William Patrick ("Billy") Connery Jr. of Massachusetts. He suggested that the Labor Standards Board would be given permissive authority to increase import duties if increased U. S. labor costs led to threat of destructive foreign competition.

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