Atlanta Daily World

Calls
Industry
Council
Key To Industrial Democracy
Y

UNION CITY, N. J. - The way to industrial democracy in this country is through wider and more profound use of the Industry Council Plan recommended and stressed by Popes Pius XI and XII.

That's the opinion John Quincy Adams, president of the Manhattan Refrigerating Company of New York, gives in a copyrighted interview in the July issue of The Sign, national Catholic magazine published here.

"Where labor-management relations are concerned," Adams asserts "great strides have been made in recent years. There are profit-sharing schemes in some 20,000 American companies. In hundreds of companies employer and employees are consistently solving their difficulties, not on the picket line but at the council table."

Ray Neville who interviewed Adams for the magazine notes that "we do not have real industry-wide councils" in the sense of the Papal pronouncements "which envisage a society organized along industry lines, with all members of each industry, trade or profession-employers and employees alike together in support of mutual aims."

"More commonly," he explains, "we have labor-management councils in individual plants."

"Even these," Neville quotes Adams as saying "have three advantages of prime importance."

They "take the steam out of contract negotiations, making a strike unlikely;" they "keep open the lines of communication between management and labor" and they "can lead to full fledged industry councils and thus serve as a deterrent to statism."