Noises Like a Corporation

Seldom had a top-rank businessman given business such a rawhiding. When Charles Luckman, 37-year-old president of Lever Bros. (Lux, Spry, Pepsodent), rose up in Chicago's Stevens Hotel last week to address the Super Market Institute, nearly every word cut.

U.S. business, said soft-voiced, hard-minded Chuck Luckman, deserved its reputation for being opposed to "everything that spells greater security, wellbeing, or peace of mind for the little guy." Why? "Well, we declared war on collective bargaining . . . battled child-labor legislation . . . yipped and yowled against minimum-wage laws . . . and currently we are kicking the hell out of proposals to provide universal sickness and accident insurance."

Both Big Business and Big Labor must call a halt to "socially destructive selfishness." The abuses of big labor should be rectified. But, said Luckman, the reformation of business must precede the reformation of labor. To reform itself, business must "stop making noises like a corporation." It must work to restore a sense of "togetherness" between management and labor. It must show that management and labor have the same interests by backing 1) decent minimum-wage legislation, 2) higher educational appropriations, 3) annual wage plans, 4) pension programs. It should do this, if for no other reason, because it paid off in dollars and cents.

With such a reformation, Chuck Luckman foresaw a rosy future. He told the super-marketeers: "Your business ... can and should double during the next generation if the leadership of American business is willing to establish as its objective for 1970 a standard of living for the American wage-earners which is at least 100% higher than the level of today."

Last week's Republican landslide, said he, should give business "a favorable Government climate to conduct its stewardship." But there was danger in it, too--the danger that "complacency may lead us in business to slide back, and to revert to past attitudes of indifference and unconcern for the people." Warned Chuck Luckman: "That attitude was repudiated once before. ... It can be repudiated again."

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