LABOR'S BLACK DEATH

While the Statesmen parleys and inflation temporarily occupy the stage front in the Washington political setting, Miss Secretary of Labor Perkins is doing her best to push her pet labor project through its last barrier, the House. This bill, known as the Black bill, makes a compulsory thirty-hour week for industry. In the process of its legal fruition it has fortunately struck a snag and there is every reason to believe sweeping changes must and will be effected in it, for as it is now constituted, this opus of Mr. Black is of serious portent to both labor and any economic renaissance.

Any arbitrary control of the conditions of employment with the nation already economically sick will definitely result in a postponement of recovery. Such a control will strike at the producer as well as labor. The manufacturer must choose between one of two alternatives: he must either reorganize his system on a part-time-shift basis which will be costly, or he can restrict his total business using the present personnel on the thirty-hour basis. Both represent a handicap. As for the effect on labor, the present legislation will force a shortening of hours in many industries, and there will result a decrease in the total wages paid to labor. Certainly there can be no grand genesis of re-employment as forecasted, and to the small extent it does put men to work, it will do so only at the greater expense of those already employed.

Furthermore the bill as instituted is definitely of a deflationary character, and precisely reactionary to the new legislative scheme of the Administration in its process of whipping the depression. For a thirty-hour week at the same hourly wage rate will see the income of the laborer sliced and a further stagnation of business channels. It would be much the wiser and discreet policy for Miss Perkins to fall in line and promote controlled inflation as the proper stimulus for the regeneration of employment.