situation between the farm cooperatives and the larger bulk of the industry.

Myrick D. Harding, representing the Illinois Manufacturers' Association, Meat Packing Industry (hearings, p. 136):

This testimony tends to show the impossibility of making the proposed 30-hour week law conform to the laws of nature affecting perishable products.

At page 136:

We are very much like the canneries. When vegetables are ripe, they must be canned; when fruit is ripe, it must be canned. It is much the same way with our products.

At page 137: The work is seasonal by seasons and seasonal by days of the week.

At page 138: A table is shown of receipts of livestock at seven principal markets in November 1934 proving the irregularity of receipts and fluctuations in the necessity of labor.

At page 139: The perishability of livestock and of fresh meat discussed.

The necessity of prompt marketing as well as prompt slaughtering, packing, manufacturing, and refrigerating.

At page 141: The injury repercusses upon the farmer because the meat-packing industry is really the marketing agent of the former.

* It has long been conceded that the selling price of meats determines the price which the farmer receives for his livestock. The time elapsing between the purchase of the live animal and the sale of the finished product is so short as to be reflected back in the current buying price. It follows, therefore, that whatever expense a short working day would entail on the packing industry (and it would cost the industry as a whole many millions of dollars) would to that extent depress the prices paid the farmers for their livestock.

At page 142: The bill would produce unfair competition and discrimination against the interstate packer and in favor of the intrastate packer.

Limiting the outlet of livestock producers by restricting the operations of or closing interstate packing plants affects grain and hay farmers.

At page 150:

* Beef and mutton and pork commence to deteriorate the minute the animal is slaughtered. Deterioration sets in right away, and it is just a question of time until it gets to the point where you cannot eat it.

At page 153:

*

* We must have a flexible week. We must have elasticity. We simply cannot function in any other way. If we are to be put on a rigid week, it would simply mean that when that number of hours is up, bingo! We have to stop work.

* * *For instance, in the manufacture of sausage, when a man starts on that job he must finish it. If a man starts to make a certain kind of sausage, he can't stop in the middle any more than a baker can stop making dough and let somebody else take his place.

*

*

* *They would not know how far the process had gone.

At page 154:

We have 36 weeks a year in which we cannot work more than 40 hours, 8 weeks in which we cannot work more than 48 hours, and 8 weeks in which we cannot work more than 53 hours. That was given us at that time for the same reasons that I am bringing up here, that we can't operate on a rigid week. You see, we are not dealing in ingots of steel or metal, or anything of that kind. Our product is all perishable. We have a very large number of different processes through which our products must pass.

S. Repts., 74-1, vol. 1-32

Henry Stude, American Bakers Association (hearings, p. 480): At page 482:

The rigidity of a 30-hour week would work a particular hardship on the baking industry. Baking is a domestic art. As such it is characterized by waiting time, by slow, careful handling of ingredients, by special skill-by a thousand and one baking peculiarities and delays. When the dough is once mixed it must go through its schedule of fermentation, proofing, baking, cooling. It cannot be stopped and started. It cannot be delayed or accelerated.

The baking industry deals in a perishable food.

*

The baking industry consists of approximately 32,000 units. Between 20,000 and 25,000 are small local retail enterprises employing two or three people. Upon the passage of this bill these enterprises would immediately discharge their two or three employees, convert their business into family affairs, doing their own work, thus immediately defeat the purpose of the bill.

AGRICULTURAL INJURY WOULD BE SUFFERED, ALSO, FROM THE RESTRICTIVE EFFECTS OF THE LAW UPON MILLERS BECAUSE MILLING COMPANIES DEPEND LARGELY UPON THE PURCHASE OF GRAIN FROM

THE FARMER

The farmer's hours are not and cannot be regulated. He brings in his wheat when convenient.

Carl F. Dietz, the wheat-flour milling industry (hearings, p. 313): At page 317:

* * * The movement is seasonal and usually for 2 to 3 months, or thereabouts, almost unlimited service is necessary. The rest of the year the elevator men, while on the job, have no really arduous tasks. It would be impossible to find men in these small communities with knowledge of wheat, grades, values, and binning for a few weeks' work in the year.

* * That immediately affects the prices and it affects the purchases related to those particular areas. It varies very widely and very uncertainly. * * * Any restriction as to running time in a case of that sort would, of course, be disastrous. If we had a 30-hour week and a 6-hour day a man would be permitted to operate 5 days. That mill is called upon to operate for 6 and 7 days. It would have no way of operating. It cannot carry a stand-by crew in order to have it jump in and operate the sixth day.

At page 316:

A reduction to 30 hours maximum per week would make it utterly impossible in this industry for the operatives to actually get their 1,560 hours (in a year) and it would probably mean an average work week of 25 hours or less instead of 30.

At page 319:

We are trying to work to a 40-hour week, but the men are averaging more nearly 32 to 35 hours. The export business, as I have already indicated, is very much shrunken, and any further burden on the milling industry would just about seal its doom. There is no way we know of that we can possibly hope to compete with Canada and Australia if we have any further burdens put upon us.

*

*

*

The inevitable result of reduced consumption (from higher cost and prices) would increase the number and use of wheat substitutes with a further unhappy effect upon the wheat farmer and the piling up of greater surpluses.

The testimony of other millers to the probable deflection of consumption of food products to lower priced foods will be foundAt page 326: G. W. Partridge, secretary, Association of Operative Millers, Kansas City.

At page 327: Fred R. Rowe, the Michigan State Millers Association, Portland, Mich.

Charles Wesley Dunn, Associated Grocery Manufacturers of America, Inc. (hearings, p. 476): In addition to the direct injury to employees of manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers of groceries, the evidence tends to further show the injury reflected upon agriculture.

At page 477:

Moreover such wide-spread increases in prices will discourage buying by the general public and may, indeed, result in such general discontent with currently rising prices as to bring on a buyers' strike.

The food manufacturing industry and other industries engaged in the processing of agricultural products would suffer especially adverse effects if this bill were to become law. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration is bending every effort to bring about parity between the price the farmer receives for his product and the price he pays for the things he buys. The effect of the Black bill would be to offset in large measure the results thus far achieved, to necessitate higher processing taxes, and to increase the price the consumer must pay for food and clothing.

The fundamental vice in this bill is that it seeks to cure unemployment by reducing production rather than increasing it, in the mistaken belief that purchasing power can thus be increased. The exact contrary is true.

Mr. Wood (supra): As an incident of the depressive effect upon the retail business shown by the president of Sears, Roebuck & Co., the injury to farmers was illustrated as follows:

At page 310.

* We have seen numerous instances within the past 2 years where prices of an article have risen so fast as to run into a buyers' strike. This was true in cotton goods last year. It was true of automobiles in the early months of 1934, and it has been true with numerous other specific items of merchandise. In such cases, prices have had to be forced down, even to the no-profit level, before goods could again be moved in volume.

In our own case, selling largely to farmers, villagers, and workingmen, there would be no increase in income with which to buy these higher-priced goods. Farmers certainly would have no more money to spend because of the 30-hour law. On the contrary, the parity between agricultural prices and city prices, * * * would again be thrown out of balance and the interchange of goods disrupted. Villagers who depend mainly upon the farmer for their income would have less money to spend

Rivers Peterson on behalf of the Retailers National Council (200,000 retail stores located in every State in the Union with an annual volume in excess of $10,000,000,000) (hearings, p. 443):

The injury to the consumer was a special point of this testimony. (See table of probable increases in retail prices on p. 444.)

The difficulty, if not, indeed, impossibility of enforcement of such a law was pointed out at page 445, and the especial burden on the farmer is mentioned as follows:

At page 444:

*

* So they are necessarily going to pass this increased cost on to the consumer; and since a large part of that merchandise is purchased by the farming trade, we think perhaps it would fall especially heavy on them.

Fixing the money wages at present rates, while cutting the hours of work, will amount to the same thing as establishing new and minimum wage rates. One of the inevitable results of such statutory action will be to freeze all weekly incomes at this new arbitrary level. The minimum rates will become the maximum rates. Thus higher-grade employees will be penalized under this system.

At page 445:

* * * The retail codes have made provision for various work-weeks of from 40, 44, 48, to 56 hours and at the same time they have provided for a number of conditions and exemptions in which additional hours of certain classes of workers are needed in the retail trades. The Black bill provides no elasticity whatever. It drastically requires the adoption of a 30-hour-work week without regard to the wide differences in trading habits found throughout the country or to the wide differences necessary among the various trades and among stores differently situated among the various trades.

* * * An increase in the failure rate of retail establishments would obviously throw an increasing number of employees out of work. Such unemployment would probably counterbalance any increase in employment among concerns still able to continue under its provisions.

A. J. Hettinger, Jr., representing the Durable Goods Industries Committee (hearings, p. 423):

At page 427:

* * * This bill, if enacted, would ask the farmer, who finds it difficult to make a living on 60 hours of work a week, to support the industrial worker on 30 hours a week.

THE LARGEST POOL OF UNEMPLOYMENT IS IN THE DURABLE-GOODS INDUSTRIES

The evidence tends to show that the great depression in these industries would be frozen at the present levels if it were not made worse by the proposed 30-hour law.

A. J. Hettinger, Jr., executive secretary of the Durable Goods Industries Committee (created at the express request of the United States Government) (hearings, p. 423):

At page 424:

This depression, now entering its sixth year, has become a durable-goods depression. The production of consumers' goods is 11 percent below that of 1929; but the output of durable goods, in spite of the outpouring of Public Works Administration expenditures by the billion, remains 472 percent below the predepression totals.

Put back to work those men who have produced the durable goods of this Nation and you have done more than reemploy the 4,874,000 jobless men who constitute the largest group of the idle. You have started to restore the ravages of the depression and to rebuild America.

At page 427:

The real indictment of this 30-hour bill is equally strong, whether based on social or economic consequences. * * *

Written throughout the bill, though never specifically stated, is the blunt, tacit assumption that labor is a tangible, inanimate commodity, interchangeable as spare parts in a bank of machines, and capable of being shipped at commodity rates from one part of the country to another. This is a cruel and unreal assumption. Unless this bill, by some process of alchemy not yet known to man, can transform the idle freight-car builder from New York State into a skilled operative in a rayon plant in Tennessee, the worker in a cast-iron pipe factory in Birmingham into a machinist in Cincinnati, or a sawmill operative into a chemical worker on the Atlantic seaboard, it fails in even the vital phase of the mere mechanics of reemployment.

At page 428:

The remedy to unemployment is not the Black 30-hour bill, which would merely add a new series of dislocations. Reemployment must be created where unemployment exists-and that is chiefly in the durable-goods industries. Durable goods are long-term commitments, involving heavy initial capital expendi

tures which can be recouped only by income derived through a period of years. The essence of such commitments is confidence extending beyond the immediate future. Without such confidence, stagnation in these industries is inevitable. The Black 30-hour bill would intensify the stagnation that exists today. It would vitiate such gains in durable-goods employment and production as will restore industrial equilibrium. Restored industrial equilibrium is vital to widened markets for agricultural products, and the achievement of equilibrium between agriculture and industry. Thus runs the sequence of reemployment and recovery. At page 430:

Present costs which have failed to move goods and to create employment must be reduced to levels that will move goods and provide employment. To that end industry is devoting its every effort. The 30-hour week simply will not provide labor in these industries with a decent living wage, and permit costs and prices at which buyers will purchase their products-it is the one sure way to achieve continued depression.

At page 431: The conclusions of the report of the Committee to the President under date of May 14, 1934, are set forth at pages 431 and 432.

The Black 30-hour bill meets none of what we believe to be the essentials of reemployment and sound recovery.

J. F. Kolb, director of industrial relations, National Metal Trades Association (hearings, p. 324):

At page 325:

* * The average American workman does not want a shorter working week; in fact, most of them are eager to work more hours than employers could supply, so their weekly pay checks would be adequate for family needs. On the contrary, we should emphasize that this country needs more production at lower prices instead of less at higher prices, which would be the certain result of a sharp reduction of hours without reduced earnings. * * * Effects upon various economic classes (of the N. R. A. codes) indicate the workers' real wages would be appreciably reduced by the rise in commodity prices which would compel adoption of a lower standard of living.

If the 30-hour bill was applied indiscriminately to employees working 43 hours and others working 23 hours it would obviously be unfair to either or both so far as application of wage rates was involved.

Employment in industry is possible only as their products can be sold. Goods can be sold only on the basis of prices that create demand. The prices of products are based on costs, both direct and indirect, represented by labor in materials and supplies used in manufacture, because every manufacturer is a buyer, fabricator, and seller. The manufacturer must indemnify himself for these higher costs by charging higher prices. Present costs which have prevented sales and increased unemployment must be reduced so our products and prices will induce buying.

The results of a 30-hour week with no increase or decrease in production of manufacturing industries probably would produce the following results:

For the unemployed workers: Restoration to employment of some of their number, perhaps 20 to 30 percent.

For the employed workers: Reduced hours, increased hourly earnings. Stationary money income per week. Increased cost of living. Reduced real wage.

For the manufacturers: Smaller output per man-hour. Increased labor cost per man-hour. Larger increase in labor cost per unit of product. Reduced sales.

It goes without saying that it is the duty of the Nation to prevent want among the unemployed. But to seek this end by a compulsory reduction of the hours of work, which would freeze the possible volume of production below the level required to give all the people the abundance they desire, is as short-sighted as it is lacking in understanding.