"Sock on the Nose"

INDUSTRY

"Sock on the Nose"

"I'm here to button this thing up," barked National Recovery Administrator Johnson one day last week as he hopped out of an Army plane at Detroit. Awaiting him at General Motors Building was a deadlocked board of directors of the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce. Two hours later General Johnson marched out of the board room, his pocket bulging with a trade code for the automobile industry which was expected to put 60,000 additional men to work. "That's what I came for and that's what I got." said he. "My one regret is that Henry Ford hasn't signed it."/-

Administrator Johnson flew back to Cleveland, stopped there for some lamb chops and beer. Asked a newshawk: "What will happen to objectors who won't go along with this new code?" Wiping suds from his lips. General Johnson snapped: "They'll get a sock right on the nose."

The automobile industry needed to be bullyragged into a code because its members had been tied up in knots for weeks on the labor question. As with Steel, their traditional "open shop" policy was threatened by the mandate for collective bargaining in the National Recovery Act. In Detroit General Johnson told them that they were free to bargain individually with their men but they could not legally refuse to bargain with any representatives their men chose to elect, even if their representatives happened to be A. F. of L. agents. Nor could they specifically close their plants to union workers. He assured them he was not out to organize either industry or labor but to give both sides a square deal. On this basis the motor manufacturers signed a code providing for a 35-hour week and a null per hour minimum wage depending on the size of the community.

General Johnson's ability to "sock" a balky industry "right on the nose" and get the kind of trade code he wants was demonstrated in Washington earlier in the week. For three days at NRA hearings, U. S. shipbuilders and their employes tussled and fought over a code. The employers would take nothing less than a 40-hour week; the men stood out for 30 hours. At stake was the Navy's vast building program for which first bids were opened last week. With no compromise in sight, General Johnson called in both sides, ordered them to agree on a 32-hour week and like it. Labor promptly accepted. The shipbuilders were not brought around until General Johnson had threatened to recommend that the entire Navy program be executed in government yards. Then was Presi dent Roosevelt able to sign and promulgate NRA's second code in six weeks, providing for a 32-hour week in shipyards doing government work, 36 hours in others, with a 35-c--to-45-c- minimum wage scale.

Most important trade code up for a NRA hearing last week was Steel's. Its provision for company unions as a means of collective bargaining between companies and their workers threatened a major deadlock. NRA looked forward fearfully to a knock-down-&-drag-out fight. General Johnson had bluntly hinted to steelmen that they could not qualify the law by such labor clauses. When the hearing opened President Robert Patterson Lament of the Iron & Steel Institute (since leaving Washington as President Hoover's Secretary of Commerce) announced amid great applause that the industry had agreed to knock the company union provision out of its code. "But," warned Mr. Lament, "this does not imply any change of attitude. The industry still believes in its method of employe representation and its members will do everything in their power to preserve the satisfactory relationship now existing."

With the tension considerably eased by this unexpected surrender, Madam Secretary of Labor Perkins mounted the witness stand to fire a volley of criticism into other provisions of Steel's code. She had forearmed herself for this attack by going, in a black dress that would not show soot, right into the mills and blast furnaces at Pittsburgh to talk with employes on work & wages. Now before NRA she was an emphatic objector to Steel's limited concessions to Labor. With all the prestige of the New Deal behind her, she pointed out that the proposed 40-hour week would not help to re-employ 150,000 jobless steel workers, that the proposed minimum wage null an hour) would not help to restore 1929 purchasing power. She called for an end to the seven-day week, the use of labor spies, discrimination against Negroes and the hourly basis for wage calculation. Said she: "It is disappointing that the industry did not rise to the opportunity of ruling out all unduly long working hours. . . . The country has given this industry some of the most able men and brains it has. The responsibility is now on it to use them for the common good of the nation."

Meanwhile throughout the land there was a great scraping of pens and scratching of heads over President Roosevelt's temporary blanket code. To 5,000,000 employers postmen delivered 5,000,000 blank copies of this man-to-man "partnership" code for upping wages, reducing working hours, increasing purchasing power faster than prices. Thousands of employers signed the agreement quickly, heedlessly, sprinted to the post office to collect their free allotment of "NRA Member--We Do Our Part" advertising material. To each employer was given one large Blue Eagle placard, two small ones, five large square stickers, ten small oval stickers. And thousands of employers anxiously pondered the code, wondering how they could pay their factory help 40-c- per hour for a 35-hour week or their office help $12 or more per week for a 40-hour week and still stay in business.

In his radio appeal fortnight ago President Roosevelt asked all those who were ready to sign up for his voluntary recovery program to communicate the fact to him at the White House. In the four days before he went off to finish his vacation at Hyde Park he and his Recovery Generalissimo, General Hugh S. Johnson, received about 20,000 responses. On that showing he pronounced his campaign already a success.

Because first comers in the White House mail room got press headlines, many a big company hastened to assure the President of its cooperation. The first week's sign-up included:

Wrigley Gum U. S. Rubber

Marshall Field Goodyear

E. R. Squibb Goodrich

Coca-Cola General Tire

American Bank Firestone

Note New York Life

Canada Dry Standard Brands

Gillette Safety General Foods

Razor Metropolitan Life

Procter & Gamble Loew's Certainteed Warner Bros.

Quaker Oats Columbia Pictures

International Schlitz

Harvester

From his 32nd story office in the world's tallest building Alfred Emanuel Smith dispatched one of his infrequent messages to President Roosevelt: "Empire State cheerfully signs code. . . . Please send our banner."

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