More Than "More"?

Few words glower more darkly out of the memory of the Depression than unemployment (24.9% of the working force at the 1933 depth). Yet when the Air Force canceled its $500 million Navaho missile project last month, and Los Angeles' North American Aviation Inc. direly proclaimed that it would have to lay off 15,600 men, this is what happened:

> North American reconsidered its needs, said it would let go not 15,600 men but 7,300, with perhaps another 4,700 to be laid off by the end of the year.

> Twenty private employers--mostly North American's competitors--set up recruiting stations at the North American plant (see cut), bid high for hard-to-get technical and engineering help, took on no fewer than 3,000 men.

> California's Department of Employment kept its Los Angeles offices open nights, interviewed 3,100 former North American employees, soon sent 2,126 out on firm job opportunities in an area where unemployment has been down at a rock-bottom 3% for years.

In detail, the Los Angeles situation was perhaps rosier than other U.S. industrial areas (Detroit, in fact, was hurting as auto plants got ready to shut down for changeovers to 1958 models). But it underscored an important element of the continuing wage-price rise: a nationwide shortage of labor, from engineers to drive-in dishwashers. Despite automation and efficient new machines, the demand for labor is greater than ever, e.g., to build the plant for expanding industry, to provide added services--haircuts, repairs, domestic help--for a rank and file with more take-home pay. At the same time the pool of labor is being fed only from the small baby crop of the Depression years. The labor shortage allows and encourages unions to press wage demands that add to inflation, forces industries to go along with demands, lest through a drawn-out strike they lose markets to competitors and, eventually, their skilled labor too.

One way to meet the problem is to ease up on the demand for labor by postponing the building of some new plant, and this essentially is what the Federal Reserve Board was attempting to do last week by raising the discount rate from 3% to 31%. highest in 24 years (see BUSINESS). Another way is to cut Government spending, which would mean a cut in Government-financed demand for labor. But perhaps the most important way is for organized labor and big-business management to find a temporary new definition of progress beyond Samuel Gompers' historic American Federation of Labor cry for "More!"

For if the U.S. is to continue to enjoy the blessings of an economy in which unemployment has all but lost its old meaning, the best definition of "more" might well be "enough," as long as inflation continues. A "more" born of inflation is an illusion and--for the moment at least--an "enough" could be regarded as more than enough if it contributed to a sound and steady dollar and normal, healthy economic development.

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