Poles & Pensions

About 3,000,000 of the telephone poles now standing are products of Joslyn Manufacturing & Supply Co. of Chicago. This is less than one-twentieth the number that U. S. travelers see flicking past them on the highways of the land, but it is enough to make Joslyn the biggest independent U. S. telephone pole supplier.* From Idaho it gets trimmed poles of western red cedar, 25 to 35 ft. tall, creosotes them at its Chicago plant and sells them for $5 to $7. The company also manufactures a complete line of cross-arms, insulators, brackets, pins and other power line equipment which happens to be very much in demand by public utilities, now loosening up after years of pinching on maintenance. So last week Joslyn reported something notable: on sales almost doubled since 1936, six months earnings amounted to $573,025, an increase of 250% in one year.

President Marcellus Lindsey Joslyn tried to explain this away as a product of the company's pension system started in 1919. If his pension system did not deserve all the credit, yet it still remains after 18 years quite as notable as this year's increase in profits. The company neither advertises nor seeks publicity, so the Joslyn plan never made much stir until last winter when the company prepared to sell $1,350,000 worth of common stock. Financial writers then discovered Marcellus Joslyn's old labor policy, adopted during the post-War period of strikes and labor migrations, and Father Coughlin presented him with an oratorical laurel wreath. Scholarly President Joslyn--who is 64, and often mistaken for a doctor because of his black goatee and spectacles, and who still goes to the office every day except Wednesday, when he stays home to read to his wife while she knits--enjoys a great deal of pride in all this. And his company has enjoyed 18 years of labor peace. The plan:

After three years with the company, each Joslyn officer and employe, must begin to pay from 2.5% to 5% of his salary into a trust fund to which the company gives not less than 10% of its annual earnings and not more than four times the total contribution from employes. On retiring because of disability or age, Joslyn workers receive the fruits of their savings and the company's profits in a lump sum which often not only provides for them but makes them comparatively rich. The fund now totals $742,600 and payments totaling $266,000 have already been made. One recent pension was a check for $35,000. A Joslyn worker who has contributed to the fund since 1919 now has a retirement credit nearly half of all his wages during the period. If he retires or is discharged before he is 60 he gets all he put in but only half what the company put in for him, plus compound interest.

*Western Union and American Telephone & Telegraph Co. supply their own poles.

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