Learning

Saltwater taffy, hot dogs, lobsters, wheelchair rides and boardwalk auctions beguiled the 36th annual convention of the National Association of Retail Grocers, which claims it represents 100,000 independent U. S. food merchants, in Atlantic City last week. For four days the round of continual pleasure was interrupted only by occasional speeches, by the election of Hans Petersen of East Chicago, Ind. as president for next year. Mr. Petersen, who owns three small stores and has three grown children, was as surprised as anyone else when during the meeting's final minutes a group of steerers produced, like a rabbit from a hat, a code of fair competition for the grocers to submit to the National Recovery Administration. The code provided for $16 and $12 minimum weekly wages for senior and junior male help, with a maximum week of 54 hours, maximum day of ten hours. Women workers were to get $11 and $9 a week, would work a 48-hour week with a maximum nine-hour day. In the South the pay scale would be reduced $1. Rebates, prizes, coupons, gifts accompanying sales were branded unfair practice as well as selling cheap group combinations of articles not separately priced. Special favors from wholesalers were also frowned upon. Those of the grocers who were not packing or who had not already gone home began to let out amazed bellows of protest at the code's provisions and the manner in which it had been popped. "I spent $200 to come up here," cried an injured Tennesseean, "and learn something about the code. I heard it mentioned all through the convention and never did hear anything about details. Not even the draft submitted to us said anything about wages-- just hours. I move we stay and fight it out right now." President Petersen, employer of eleven people, was one of a faction which considered the 54-hour week patently absurd. The program was voted, however, on the theory that "we want to have something to bargain about with the Government." and the grocers, still arguing in little confused groups, started home. More Codes. What had taken place at the grocers' convention was happening, with generally better results, all over the nation last week. Also in Atlantic City, representatives of the lime industry agreed to a 48-hour week, minimum wages of 251 an hour below the Mason-Dixon line, 351 above. In Manhattan codes were being worked over by the Hat Institute, Thread Institute, National Tobacco Council (retailers & jobbers), Institute of Scrap Iron & Steel, American Clay Association. The Drug Institute drew up a preliminary proscription against price-cutting. The National Council of Coat & Suit Manufacturers agreed on a code. Most advanced program to date was announced by the Retail Manufacturing Furriers, whose employes follow the dynamic leadership of Communist Ben Gold. The furriers agreed on a 35-hour week, on $38-to-$50 weekly pay for skilled workers. In Washington, where sooner or later Administrator Hugh Samuel Johnson's staff expected to arbitrate 7,000 industrial codes, code-of-the-week was the one submitted to the I. R. A. by the cotton textile business. "Goldfish bowl" hearings on it had begun at the Department of Commerce Building. For the industry: President George A. Sloan of the Cotton Textile Institute. For Labor: chiefly Leo Wolman and A. F. of L.'s President Green. I. R. A. labor councilmen. For consumers: a new committee headed by alert active Mary Harriman Rumsey, daughter ot the late great Railroader Edward Henry Harriman, who left $100.000.000. Thirty-two years ago Mary Harriman got 79 other Manhattan debutantes together to do settlement work, thus started the Junior League.* But routine charity could not long hold this brown-eyed girl with intelligence to match her money. She left the Junior League in other hands, passed on to larger civic fields. Meanwhile she married Poloist-Sculptor Charles Cary Rumsey. bore him two sons and a daughter. When he died, she kept his Manhattan studio just as he had walked out of it. She has a summer home at Sand's Point where last year she intro- duced her daughter to Long Island society at a barn dance; also a 500-acre farm in the Middleburg district of Virginia where she hunts, rides, raises bees and blooded livestock. Irish Poet George Russell (AE), her good friend, profoundly affected her economic thinking, started her in search of the co-operative commonwealth amid the chaotic welter of competition. She helped start the American Farm Foundation to promote agricultural cooperation. An able talker, she believes producers and consumers can get together, run any industry to their mutual benefit. Last week she sat on the Washington stage during the cotton textile hearings as the representative of 130,000,000 U. S. consumers, threw her influence on the side of Labor's demand for higher wages. Kick-off was the industry's agreement to a 40-hour week, minimum pay of $1 i in the North, $10 in the South. Labor's Green then rose and in a soft voice promised no "fight," but pointed out: "The average wage being paid in the cotton goods industry today is $10.40 a week. We have weekly pay envelopes for as low as $4.54 for 624 hours. This average of $10.40 is lower than that of any other of the 104 industries reported by the Labor Department for May 1931. save only one--shirts & collars. . . . The average wage being paid in all manufacturing industries in May 1933 was $17.40."Mr. Sloan's team feinted with the dramatic but costless concession of agreeing not to employ children in cotton mills during the emergency period (see below). Aware that the industrial cause had been strengthened in the public imagination by its position on child labor, nevertheless the employes' representatives asked outright for a 30-or 32-hour week, minimum pay of between $14 and $16, recognition of skilled and unskilled classifications in fixing wages. Secretary John Preston Davis of the Negro Industrial League, Bates and Harvard Law School graduate, protested that some 14,000 Negro cleaners and other non-skilled mill help had been excluded from the code's minimum wage class. Amoskeag Manufacturing Co. of Manchester. N. H., which is the world's largest mill and where 7.500 employes have been striking over working conditions and low wages, had bitterly protested the 40-hour week. But even Amoskeag did not dissent when the Textile Institute conceded a $2 increase in pay. Over the week-end General Johnson flew to Manhattan to talk with steel men, who, with manufacturers of textiles, oil products, automobiles and coal, compose the Big Five which employ 70% of U. S. labor and which General Johnson wants to get codified quickly. Ecstatically said he of the textile hearings: "There were no harangues. Epithets gave place to arguments. We were learning something all the time. ... It is the atmosphere of the New Deal. It rises from the philosophy and leadership of the President. It is the willing response to a common faith in a great purpose. ... It is a great day for progress and recovery."

--Today there are 26,000 members of 131 Junior Leagues throughout the land.

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