Breathing Spell

Up rose Majority Leader Barkley in the midst of the 40-hour-week hullabaloo in Congress. He told his colleagues their hysteria was needless. The critical mail pouring into Washington had been inspired by old enemies of the New Deal. The motive: to destroy New Deal labor laws. The "grass roots" uprising in the South was an organized campaign. Congressmen bellowing about the 40-hour week had better go home, talk to the voters.

Lip. Galluses snapped, furious fingers waved, but the Senate did finally agree to a truce. Labor legislation was shelved until April 20. First bill then: fire-breathing Texas Tom Connally's seize-freeze bill to freeze existing labor contracts, to provide for Government seizure of wartime plants if they had a labor ruckus.

To counter this measure, the Senate's friends of labor, La Follette of Wisconsin and Thomas of Utah, slipped into the hopper a bill to impose on management that violated labor laws criminal penalties up to $10,000 in fines, six months in prison. Any anti-labor law would thus come smack up against the La Follette-Thomas bill, would have to fight with it for Senatorial consideration.

Lap. In this wise, President Roosevelt had won a fortnight's breathing spell. Possibly he could sit back and deliberate calmly about the political labor problem.

There was no working-labor problem. The vast majority of U.S. workmen were working hard, harder than many had ever worked before. Their pay was better, their morale higher, more of them were at work than ever before. Strikes were negligible; and most U.S. workers worked longer than 40 hours a week, many as much as 55.

With strikes out, the argument had centered around the 40-hour week: should labor continue to get time-and-a-half rates for hours worked over 40? Labor thought it should. Mr. Roosevelt thought so too.

He did not want labor to take a pay cut, which was what suspension of the 40-hour law would have meant. One of his reasons: the cost of living was rising at about the rate of 1 1/2% a month, which will steadily nibble away the good wages. He hoped that OPA could hold the rise to a mere one-half of 1%, but he admitted this would take much work, much luck. A cut in labor's earnings now would provoke an outburst of wage disputes--at the very moment when labor & management were gingerly negotiating new contracts.

In a few months, the labor supply would probably run short of the wartime demand, and the problem would then become: How long can a man work effectively? The Industrial Health Research Board in Britain reported, on the basis of its two-and-a-half-year studies of work hours, that "weekly hours of work over an extended period should not exceed 60-65 for men and 55-60 for women." On that basis, U.S. labor was still working below capacity.

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