Price Fixing (Contd.)

Robert Paxton, former president of General Electric Co., swore before Senator Estes Kefauver's Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee last week that he had just not been aware of how much illegal price fixing had been going on all around him. How come? Replied Scots-born Robert Paxton, a most emphatic witness: "I was damn dumb."

Reminded that two former G.E. officials testified a fortnight ago that he had given instructions for them to meet with competitors to fix prices, Paxton heatedly denied the charge. But he admitted that as he took over new divisions during his rise up the G.E. ladder, he never asked his subordinates if they had previously violated antitrust laws. "I contented myself with telling them I was unalterably opposed to this monkey business," he said. "I considered it womanish to ask a man what he had done in the past."

Paxton conceded that before becoming G.E. president he had known that executives in some divisions were up to hanky-panky. Once, he said, he had raised the question point-blank with William S. Ginn, former head of General Electric's turbine division (since fired by G.E. after doing 25 days in jail and paying a $12,500 fine). Ginn, said Paxton, admitted that he had "compromised himself." But Paxton did not report Ginn or any of the other transgressors to his superiors because "it has not been my policy to go around gossiping in the General Electric Company about operations outside my sphere."

When Kefauver had finished with Paxton, he turned to a clutch of Westinghouse executives including Landon Fuller, assistant manager of the Westinghouse East Pittsburgh Division. Fuller, still employed by Westinghouse despite a price-fixing conviction, swore that his intentions had been only the best. Said Fuller: "We thought we were doing a job for employees and customers. We wanted to keep people employed in the plant when volume was low. And we felt we needed a higher profit for research and development activities."

"A higher profit than you could get from free competition?" asked Kefauver, dryly.

"Yes, sir," said Fuller.

In the midst of this embarrassing hour for the electrical companies, the Interior Department last week irately rejected bids from 15 companies on $1,250,000 worth of electrical equipment because the item-by-item prices offered were identical. The department did not charge collusion. Company spokesmen maintained that the equipment consisted of standard items, and they had simply cited their list prices--which, by force of competition only, were identical.

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