The Forty-Percenters

The Senate's Small Business Committee, a restive watchdog, last week barked at big business. Charged the committee: ten large manufacturing companies * have received 40% of the $22 billion worth of defense contracts awarded since Korea. By hogging defense contracts, said the committee, big corporations have choked off supplies of critical materials to small companies, which can neither carry on civilian production nor get defense work.

If the committee had looked more closely at arms production it might have held its scolding tongue. Big companies get the bulk of prime contracts because they alone have the facilities to turn out such big items as bombers, ship generators and half-tracks. But they subcontract their orders to thousands of small businessmen. Examples: Lockheed Aircraft Corp. has signed up 4,000 firms, of which 2,835 are small businesses (fewer than 500 workers) ; General Motors Corp.'s normal list of 12,500 suppliers will soon be swelled to 19,000 by subcontracting.

Even in prime contract work, small businessmen were doing pretty well. As the Defense Department tapered off on letting contracts for heavy "hardware" and started ordering many less complicated items, the small business share of prime contracts has jumped from 21% to 28%.

* The committee's top ten as of June 1: General Motors Corp., $3.5 billion in defense contracts; Ford Motor Co., $1 billion; Boeing Airplane Co., $960 million; Curtiss-Wright Corp., $840 million; Lockheed Aircraft Corp., $674 million; Republic Aviation Corp., $549 million; General Electric Co., $500 million; United Aircraft Corp., $490 million; North American Aviation, $481 million; Bendix Aviation Corp., $475 million.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.