U.S. PROSPERITY

Taranaki Daily News, 20 November 1926, Page 10

U.S. PROSPERITY

HIGH OUTPUT. WORKERS ENORMOUS INCREASE. Sir Percival Phillips writes to the London Daily Mail from Washington, U.S.A.Valuable data concerning the organisation iind maintenance of “Company Unions,” America’s latest form of industrial relationship between employers and workers, are being assembled by some of the largest manufacturing concerns in the country for the British Government Industrial Mission which has begun its inquiry into the secret of high wages, the high productivity, and the general contentment of American workers.

Employers, even those fiercely opposed to labour unions, agree that some kind of framework is necessary to hold their men together in harmony, and many have erected a self-contain-ed organisation exactly like that of the larger official unions but confined to tne workers on their own pay rolls. Other employers, who do not believe in any such grouping but realise the importance of making employment attractive, seek to hold their men by profit-sharing schemes. WOO IN FIRM’S UNION. The British Mission’s survey will include visits to mills, factories, and other organisations in each category. Among these will be the Bethlehem Steel Company’s plant in Eastern Pennsylvania, where 9000 employees are working under a company union; the plant of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Comany, East, Pittsburgh, where the Daily Mail Trades Union Mission last spring examined in detail the profit-sharing system open to the 15,000 workers; and the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, Denver, where the company union system of negotiation has been in successful operation for twelve years.

The wholesale e’nthing house of Hart, Schaffner, and Marx, Chicago is a “union” house which deals with outside Labour organisations in the British way, and it has been put on the itinerary of the Mission by American industrial advisers as a shining example of the harmony and good will which may be obtained through the conventional methods of trade unionism.

SECRECY. The American Federation of Labour has promised the Mission that it will see various unions in operation and be given full data concerning the benefits enjoyed by the workers under orthodox trade unionism. "I hope the British Government’s inquiry will yield results beneficial to the industry of Britain,” said an official of tile Department of Labour to me to-day. He declared; “The marked desire for secrecy shown by the delegates is apparently based, at least in part, on the fear that the publication in advance of their movements will tend to hinder their investigations. Such a fear is wholly unfounded. The delegates will find manufacturers and* labour unions alike ready to give them every facility to study the causes of America’s present unparalleled prosperity. ‘One of the secrets of this prosperity is the faet that working people generally are spending their money, and as they get high wages the home markets are soaring.” SELLING BETTER THAN EVER.” “Manufacturers are selling more goods to-day than ever before, and if they continue to make just what they can sell and not be tempted to break down hours schedules and overstock there is no reason why the present prosperity should not continue indefinitely.

The increase of individual productivity in the various branches of industry which are to be examined by the Mission is in some instance almost starling. According to the latest statistics compiled by the Department of Labour and given to me to-day, each worker in the motor-car industry is to-day producing more than three times as much as he did before the war. In the paper and pulp industry productivity has increased 34 per cent, in the last nine years, largely owing to new and improved machinery. In the iron and steel industry the increase is more than 25 per cent. There has been an increase of individual productivity in almost every other industry. It reaches 34 per cent, in the leather trade, which experts of the Department of Labour consider surprising in view of the declining output. “All over the country people are producing more,” said the official of the Department of Labour who gave me these statistics. “Yet in many instances they are working fewer hours daily. Machinery lias helped, but much is to be said for the spirit of do-operation upon which our industries are based to-day,”