Too Many Suits

Sidney Hillman, able little Lithuanian-born leader of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (membership: 225,000), last week emerged from WPA headquarters. He had just been discussing a new, shiny and portentous proposition with WTAdministrator Harry Hopkins. Said he emerging: "It will be some time before the proposal goes through--if it ever does." But he made no secret of the details of his scheme.

In the clothing business, as in the wheat business, the cotton business, and many another business, a surplus of products has piled up. In New York, for example, there are 200,000 unsold men's garments on the manufacturers' shelves. Until these surpluses are sold, explained Mr. Hillman, his Amalgamated Clothing Workers will not get much work.

If the Government can spend tens of millions taking surplus cotton, corn, hogs, tobacco, turpentine, etc., etc., off the market, why cannot it take off surplus garments? Especially when perhaps 17.000,000 citizens on Relief need clothes? Why shouldn't WPA buy $10,000,000 worth of men's and boys' cheap suits, distribute them to the needy and get Amalgamated Clothing Workers back to work, 30,000 or 40,000 of them in New York City alone?

An obvious difference between clothing and farm products is that for the latter, more or less open national markets exist. Men's and boys' suits, made under widely varying conditions in different parts of the country, have no easily determined market price. If the Government undertook to stabilize the clothing industry, it would have on its hands a production-&-price control problem beside which reducing next year's wheat acreage would be child's play. Moreover, if the Government should subsidize one manufacturing business, where then could it stop, at automobiles or animal crackers, at zeppelins or zithers? Last month, in ordering 60,000,000 yards of cotton textiles for its sewing projects (an increase of 45,000,000 yards over previous orders), WPA explained that one reason for expanding the order was to make work for the textile mills. But so far. Franklin Roosevelt has resisted every pressure for subsidizing labor through industry.

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