No Cats

(see cover) "Our Father in Heaven ... we come to Thee with the feeling that perhaps we are menaced by something that is beyond our control, that has been imposed upon us by authorities that perhaps have not investigated as carefully as should have been investigated the elements that make up not only this lumber industry, but all industry throughout the whole United States. We ask, O Lord, therefore, that Thou wilt be sympathetic with us as we study our problems, and as we come to Thee for guidance, wilt Thou give it to us? In the name of Jesus Christ, Our Lord, we ask it. Amen."

Such was the prayer offered by the Rev. James Boyd when the Southern Pine Association met recently in New Orleans to consider the effects of the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Wage & Hour Administrator Elmer Frank Andrews, to whom businessmen pray for guidance every day, last week submitted to Franklin Roosevelt the first general report on the actual effects of the Act. Said Elmer Andrews: "Many of the earlier news reports considerably exaggerated the difficulties experienced because of the new Act. The number affected by plant layoffs is apparently not more than 30,000 to 50,000, or less than one half of 1% of the workers coming under the Act. . . . It is noteworthy that the layoffs have been concentrated in a very few industries in the South. . . . About 90% . . . were employed in pecan shelling, tobacco stemming, lumber and bagging."

Had General Hugh Johnson been in Elmer Andrews' shoes, however, hell would surely have popped and dead cats would have passed each other in midair. For far and wide, U. S. businessmen were unhappy. What most of them wanted last week was not relief from upped labor costs but relief from uncertainty. From a Detroit hotel which feared that elevator boys who serve traveling salesmen were engaged in interstate commerce, to a Texas turkey raiser who wanted to know whether employes who gathered his turkey eggs had to get 25-c- an hour, employers were in a dither to know whether the law applied to them.

Elmer Andrews and his staff issued tentative definitions (TIME, Oct. 31) and freely ladled out the hard-boiled advice: "When in doubt, comply." But the fact was that no one could give a final answer. A sizable segment of U. S. economic life is at the mercy of a law which only the courts can legally interpret.

The Law is as sloppy a statute as ever was slapped together by a closing Congress. Since the Fair Labor Standards Act went into effect on October 24, its botched provisions had turned out to be among those with the widest effects. U. S. business still gets along as well as it does principally because the law does not apply to some 33,000,000 of 44,000,000 gainfully employed people in the U. S., and because it alters the wages or hours of no more than 3,000,000 of those to whom it does apply.

Specifically exempt from the provisions of the Act are those engaged in such occupations as agriculture, fishing, local service and retail trades. The law applies to most others if they are engaged in interstate commerce or in the production of goods for interstate commerce. Of 11,000,000 workers and 250,000 employers so engaged, the majority are in manufacturing and mining industries. But no occupational rule-of-thumb can settle who is who.*

Many an employer otherwise excluded from or complying with the Act is certain to become unpleasantly aware of Section 15: ". . . It shall be unlawful for any person [excepting railways, and other common carriers] to transport, offer for transportation, ship, deliver or sell in commerce, or to ship, deliver or sell with knowledge that shipment or delivery or sale thereof in commerce is intended, any goods in the production of which any employe was employed in violation of Section 6 [wages] or Section 7 [hours]. . . ."

For absolute safety from this stingaree, every buyer of goods for resale would have to maintain his own national inspection staff. Of course the Wage and Hour Administration intends to jab Section 15 only into suspected conspirators. Nevertheless, Section 15 may well become as famous as NRA's 73.

This beautiful bayonet may help enforcement, but unfortunately it is not clear in many cases what constitutes a violation of the Act. The law says: "No provision of this Act shall justify any employer in reducing a wage paid by him which is in excess of the applicable minimum wage under this Act. . . ." If an employer who previously paid $20 or 40-c- an hour for a 50-hour week cuts his nominal hourly rate to 38-c-, and pays $20.14 for 50 hours (including the six overtime hours at 1 1/2 times 38-c-) he may violate the law.

General Counsel John C. Gall of the potent National Association of Manufacturers says not. Administrator Andrews says that in such a case an employer should pay $17.60 for 44 hours at the old rate, or $21.20 for 50 hours (including overtime at 1 1/2 times 40-c-).

Mr. Andrews is able to favor industry with such advisory opinions only by straining the Act. Nowhere does it authorize him to issue general regulations and interim interpretations to serve until the U. S. Supreme Court has spoken. This defect in the Act may be corrected by amendment when Congress convenes in January.

Between 1939 and 1945, when over-all standards become fixed at 40-c- an hour, 40 hours per week, industry committees appointed by the administrators may suggest and he may fix wage rates at anywhere above 25-c- up to 40-c-. In so doing he must consider as "relevant factors" differences in living, production and transportation costs--the elements of the South's cherished wage differentials. Having done so, he may not establish any differential "solely on a regional basis." He will be damned if he does, damned if he doesn't by high-wage Northern or low-wage Southern Congressmen.

Any employer or employe who objects to the wages fixed by Mr. Andrews may kick directly to the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals in his area, thence to the U. S.

Supreme Court. Moreover, any worker or union may sue in "courts of competent jurisdiction" (presumably meaning either State or U. S. district courts) for: 1) the difference between wages paid and wages required by the Act; 2) an equal amount in liquidated damages; 3) costs of the litigation. Each one of a firm's employes may sue separately, running up fantastic legal costs for employers. This undoubtedly will serve as a potent incentive to compliance and a rich field for shysters.

To make matters more expensive for employers, if Wage & Hour attorneys (working with the Department of Justice) succeed in convicting them of violating the Act, they may be fined up to $10,000, im prisoned (for second offenses) up to six months.

Andrews' Alley. That such a law should have caused no more flurry than appeared throughout the industrial U. S. last week was no small credit to Elmer Andrews' administration. He is now 48. was brought up by middle-class parents in Manhattan, schooled to be a civil engineer, and trained for his present job during four years under Frances Perkins when she was New York State Industrial Commissioner, and five more years in the job she left when she became Secretary of Labor.

For all his modest appearance and his fondness for quiet evenings at home with his wife and two daughters (his son William is at the Wharton School of Business & Finance), he enjoys his new prominence. Last week he was invited to an after noon party at the Soviet Embassy, pro fessed considerable distaste for such a waste of time, was advised by his staff that a Soviet invitation was a great honor in Washington, went, and had fun.

He seems to be the mildest of men. Businessmen who first meet him wonder whether he is a sissy. Usually dressed in quiet browns or greys, his slightly protuberant brown eyes staring gently at his callers, he listens passively to all they have to say. But when fractious callers depart. Elmer Andrews is capable of rage. A pencil or a desk pad may fly across the room, followed by a round damn. Then Mr. Andrews subsides, tries to figure a way out of the problem his visitors left behind.

Sometime ago. Elmer Andrews cannily decided to wait and see whether the Wage & Hour law's stringent civil and criminal penalties would not do for him much of what NRA's Hugh Johnson tried to do with crackdown bluster. When an inter viewer last week suggested that the extent of "voluntary" cooperation was astounding, Elmer Andrews' full lips pouted in a smile.

"I wouldn't call it voluntary," he mur mured. "After all, there are those fines and that jail sentence."

Elmer Andrews would have no qualms about slapping fines and imprisonment upon a willful violator. ''There are always last ditchers in every industry," he says, and the "last ditch" of U. S. industry is now right down his alley.

When he first arrived in Washington last August, he had no staff and only $400,000 to hire one. He and his first recruits worked 16 and 18 hours a day, a curious commentary on how little the old American doctrine of hard work has yet been slowed down by the new doctrine of short hours. During that period Mr. Andrews did considerable roadwork, notably in Birmingham where he laid himself open to all sorts of queries from assembled Southern employers. He took on all comers in 15-minute relays, solemnly discussed the lumber industry's woes while he was stripping for bed that night in the Tutwiler Hotel.

Elmer Andrews has been able to do a better job with Wage & Hour regulations than Congress did with the Wage & Hour law largely because he picked an able staff. Among the people in Mr. Andrews' office with whom businessmen will soon have to become familiar:

Paul Sifton, 40, sandyhaired, who was his Man Friday during his years in New York, is his closest aide. Mr. Sifton's title is Deputy Administrator. Eugenia Pope, a rarely goodlooking professional researcher who went over from John D. Biggers' Unemployment Census to be Mr. Andrews' secretary, soon will be as well known to businessmen as was Hugh Johnson's "Robbie." She and Paul Sifton serve as buffers against importunate callers, coordinate the various sectors of Wages & Hours. An ex-radical and a chronic dramatist (three of his plays appeared on Broadway), Assistant Sifton is working between times on a new play.

General Counsel Calvert Magruder, is Real No. 2 man in Wages & Hours. Tommy Corcoran drafted him on a year's leave from Harvard Law School, where he is assistant dean.

Forty-four-year-old, Maryland-born Mr. Magruder works in a half-furnished office across the way from Mr. Andrews', flicks cigaret ashes on the floor, shares his superior's casual approach to a difficult task.

"I'm not a quotable fellow," he tells interviewers, "just a quiet guy." The quiet guy's big job is to get Fair Standards safely started through the courts by selecting a series of sound, definitive cases for immediate test. His chief source of worry on this score is the possibility of ill-chosen cases filed by employes.

Major Arthur L. Fletcher, a North Carolina National Guardsman, has the job of Wage & Hour enforcement. He looks like Author Clarence Budington Kelland's country-store keeper, Scattergood Baines, has a round, pink face, a vast capacity for calm, an equally vast distaste for employers who pay starvation wages. Of the hundreds of letters received by him up to last week, 104 were specific enough to be classed as complaints. Of these, 14 have been referred to the 24 field inspectors (one per State) already assigned to the field. As a Southerner who administered North Carolina's industrial welfare code, Major Fletcher believes in local enforcement by local men.

"Mississippi folks are going to apply this law in Mississippi, New York folks in New York," he says. Eventually every factory and business house subject to the law will be inspected once a year, either by Major Fletcher's staff or by cooperative State Labor Departments.

Just now Major Fletcher's "staff" consists chiefly of the workers who come under the Act. A. F. of L. and C. I. O. have set up offices in Washington to clear complaints, take utmost advantage of the fact that organized employes are in a better position than unorganized workers to make their employers toe the line.*

The U. S. Children's Bureau (of the Department of Labor) is charged with the enforcement of the Act's child labor provisions. Pleasant, fortyish Beatrice McConnell, who used to administer Pennsylvania's child labor law, has the job of seeing that some 30,000 children under 16 are no longer employed in manufacturing or mining, that those between 16 and 18 shall not be employed in hazardous occupations.

She and the other ladies of the Bureau were recruited chiefly for research work.

Now for the first time since the Federal Child Labor Act was invalidated 20 years ago the bureau has an administrative job on its hands.

This week Elmer Andrews takes to the White House a deficiency budget. It calls for about $800,000 to finance his division from mid-January to June 30, 1939, indicates that he will have to have about 1,500 employes and $4,000,000 a year for the enforcement of his law.

*Last week Dr. William Leiserson, acting as special arbitrator, ruled that Western Union and Postal Telegraph must up pay of 15,000 em-loyes to 250 per hour.

*This sort of service for employes is of course a talking point of which organized labor is making the most. In dealing with employers the law also gives organized labor another advantage by providing that employers having contracts with unions certified by NLRB may ignore the 44-hour week maximum so long as total hours worked under the agreements do not exceed 1,000 in 26 weeks.

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