Raise for Textiles

Among Southern textilemen President Charles A. Cannon of North Carolina's Cannon Mills Co., the nation's third largest textile company (towels and sheets), has long had the reputation for going it alone both as a businessman and as an employer. Last week Cannon added to his reputation. He raised the minimum wage at Cannon Mills (effective Feb. 13) to $1.25 an hour, up from the company's present starting pay of $1.12. Those of his 24,000 employees now earning above the old minimum get 10-c- an hour more. Scores of mills ranging from West Point (Ga.) Manufacturing Co. to Avondale Mills in Alabama announced that they too were raising wages. By week's end pay raises had been promised to 100,000 textile workers, and textilemen predicted increases would sweep the entire industry by summer.

The Cannon move was adroitly timed to yank a rug from beneath the A.F.L.C.I.O. Textile Workers Union of America, which opens its convention in Charlotte, N.C. this week. The T.W.U.A. has never made much progress in organizing Cannon Mills. At Kannapolis, N.C., the company headquarters, where Cannon contributes heavily toward police, churches, golf course, etc., the union has lately been distributing leaflets pointing out that Southern textile wages, averaging $1.43 an hour, are substantially below the $2.17 average for all U.S. manufacturing. Nationally, the textile industry pays the lowest wages of any basic industry.

Cannon also surprised fellow textilemen. For months Southern mill owners have been discussing the need to raise pay to attract and hold good employees in the rapidly urbanizing and industrializing South. There are 552,000 textile workers in the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. Recently, President J. Spencer Love of the nation's largest textile firm, Burlington Industries Inc. (52,000 employees), suggested that Congress raise the national minimum wage, now $1, to $1.25 an hour, so all mill operators would have to go up and none could chisel on wages to undercut his competitors on prices.

In jumping the gun on wage increases, Cannon not only avoided having the textile industry ordered about either by the union or the Government. He also got in first with a 6% to 7% wage increase, lower than some competitors had been discussing, and well within the ability of his company and the industry to pay in the light of textiles' growing recovery from its long postwar slump (TIME, Dec. 8). Since the last pay raise in 1956, textile productivity has risen 18%.

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