High Styles in Wages

By last week, labor's dictators of fashions in wage increases had pretty well established the motif for 1947's high style. The 1947 model for most basic industries will make 1946's flouncy 18 1/2-c- an hour look skimpy. The new creation is a dramatic, billowing $2 a day (25-c- an hour).

Some C.I.O. couturiers were already making advance showings. The oil workers, first to display last year's trend, were out with the 25-c--an-hour pattern. The rubber workers liked the design, but added a penny's worth of peplum and made it 26-c-. The autoworkers were busy with several patterns, ranging from 20-c- to 35-c-, but they were all based on the same theme: wage increases must follow the increase in living costs. The C.I.O. thinks that by Dec. 1 living costs will have risen about 25% over last year's.

Unlike the makers of women's fashions (see Women), labor's wage designers were sticking mostly to standard models but adding material and frills here & there. Somewhat apprehensively, they watched the master of haute couture, John L. Lewis, get to work. As John L.'s underlings sat down with Interior Secretary ''Cap" Krug's underlings to haggle over a new coal contract, it was apparent that John L. had a little number of his own in mind. John L. was putting the wage style accent on a reduction of hours. He was wangling to get the miners as much take-home pay for 45 hours as they now get for 54 hours. John L. was after a contract in which the miner would be paid as much for five days of work as he is now for six days.

Those who know John L.'s strategy best credited him with another smart play. The old contract had a clause providing that once wage discussions were begun, the contract could be voided after 15 days of negotiations. Thus John L. could legally strike and, in effect, eventually get a new contract.

By getting his wage increase the easier way--in reduction of hours--Lewis would be sidestepping the issue of an escalator clause which many an industry will insist upon in contracts for cost-of-living increases. If 1947 should bring a reduction in living costs, many a labor leader would be reminded that escalators can run down as well as up; industry could insist on cutting wages in relation to reduced prices. But John L. would not be caught in any such reversal. His miners' hourly rate would not be tied to living costs.

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