Work for All the World

Last week, as for many a week before, proposals to palliate, if not cure, the Depression cropped up hopefully throughout a world in which 30,000,000 workers are workless.

At Geneva 34 nations (the U. S. most conspicuously absent) were represented at a Preparatory Unemployment Conference. Their goal : a 40-hr. work week treaty for all the world. Labor's delegates demanded a cut in working time without a proportionate decrease in wages. Capital's delegates stood firmly for a wage cut to offset increased production costs. Britain pooh-poohed "this phantom of a 40-hour convention" whereas Germany warned that the alternative was government doles for years without end. It was estimated that the world is already spending $120,000,000,000 per year to keep its jobless alive.

At Brussels a Professor Paul Otlet got on the world's news-cables by a plan to build a gigantic neutral World City on the River Scheldt opposite Antwerp. Creation of a New Jerusalem would, with U. S. aid and finance, end Depression.

At Rome Benito Mussolini said the U. S. needed an economic master mind.

In Manhattan Nicholas Murray Butler named a committee of 17, mostly college professors, to investigate the economic crisis, recommend solutions. Included were Walter Lippmann, George Soule, Edmund Day.

At Washington President Hoover sent a special message to Congress asking for a change in the Federal bankruptcy laws so as to give hard-pressed debtors another chance (see p. 11). With unwonted alacrity the Congress prepared to act.

In Philadelphia Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt suggested more "self-confidence," adding: "We must not be afraid of new conditions and necessary readjustments."

In Washington Charles A. Miller, R. F. C. president, in the course of Senate hearings on relief (see below), pointed to the Kent recovery plan as one coming nearest to solving present conditions. Fred I. Kent, vice president of New York's Bankers Trust Co., had proposed a socialization of private losses whereby banks would loan enough to industries to resume 1927 production and the R. F. C. would guarantee banks against loss.

In Manhattan National City Bank's Charles Edwin Mitchell could see nothing but the restoration of the gold standard abroad as a preliminary to better times.

General Motors' Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., after querying 150 U. S. leaders by wire, announced: "Research, invention, improvement of labor-saving devices are more important today than ever before. I hope that out of these new needs new commodities, new industries will be developed, stimulating industrial and economic effort and creating new and enlarged employment opportunities."

In Newark Dorothy Frooks, commander of the Women Veterans of the World War, proposed a civil mobilization of jobless ex-soldiery at government camps for government works.

In Manhattan Bancroft Gherardi, American Telephone & Telegraph's chief engineer, rejected "all kinds of extraordinary suggestions" to end the Depression, held that "time and such evolutionary changes as are constantly taking place will, as in the past, bring us out of our trouble."

Black Bill. Broadest and most concrete proposal before the country was a bill by Alabama's smart little Senator Hugo Black to establish throughout the U. S. a 30-hour work week. The Black bill would penalize those manufacturers doing an interstate business who worked their employes longer than six hours per day, five days per week. Its sponsors declared it represented the crystallization of the best economic thought of the times to limit the hours of labor to spread unemployment. Its genesis was blamed on the conservative backwardness of U. S. industry to revamp itself to meet new conditions.

Last week and the week before the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the Black bill. Among the first to appear in its support was William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor. Declared he:

"Industry has become so highly mechanized that it has been utterly and absolutely impossible to provide work at the old standard work week and work day. . . . We are prepared to support the plan either through legislative enactment or exercise of our economic force in compelling employes to accept it--by calling strikes and thus withholding the service of the employes until industry establishes the shorter week. I shrink to think it necessary to take such steps but industrial leaders refuse to take action."

Austin T. Levy is a Rhode Island worsted manufacturer who favors the bill. Said he: "It will never again be possible for all of the people of the U. S. who want work to be employed 48 hours a week."

When Labor representatives outdoing one another as 30-hour week advocates began to wrangle among themselves as to whether or not they were Communists, Senator Black threatened to call a sergeant-at-arms to keep peace in the turbulent committee room.

Constitution. The Black bill was fairly popping with large constitutional questions. Its first line of defense before the Supreme Court would be the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce; its second, the "general welfare" clause in the Constitution's preamble. Fourteen years ago the Supreme Court voided as unconstitutional a legislative attempt to abolish child labor by prohibitive taxes upon such manufactures in interstate commerce.

Suggestions that a 30-hour week law, to be effective, must contain a minimum wage scale to prevent proportionate pay cuts collided with this stubborn fact: once the District of Columbia had a minimum wage law which in 1923 the Supreme Court annulled on the ground that it violated a citizen's constitutional privilege to contract for his own services at his own price.

Remote though it is from the hurly-burly of day-to-day U. S. life, the Supreme Court is not unresponsive to the shifting economic thought of the nation. Its membership changes with tim and so does its concept of the law. New ideas, like cosmic rays, have a way of penetrating its ancient wall of detachment and starting little legal revolutions in its august consciousness. Many a sage observer believes that the Supreme Court today would reverse itself on child labor, would find a way to sustain minimum wage legislation.

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