Scandinavian American

"Greater Industrial Efficiency Must Be Of General Benefit"

STOCKHOLM-(By airmail)--Workers and consumers must derive benefit from improvements in production, as well as the private owners of industrial establishments, said Dr. Karin Kock, the Swedish economist and financial expert who is the first woman member of the country's cabinet, when she spoke on August 19 before the annual congress here of the Swedish garment makers union. She had just returned from Paris where she had been one of Sweden's official representatives in the conference on the Marshall Plan.

"Our aim is to raise the general standard in an economic as well as a social and cultural sense," she said. "To make that possible we are striving for greater popular influence over the management of both industrial and business activities. The question of economic democracy is closely affiliated with that of greater efficiency in production.

There are probably people who believe that such demands for improvements in production can be met only by greater pressure on the workers, that it means greater exploitation of labor power. This is wrong. Our demand is aimed at such improvements in industrial efficiency that with the same amount of labor, or even less, we can produce more.

"It would not be satisfactory, however, if all the benefits from such improvements were to land in the pockets of the private owners and managers of the capital and equipment employed. It must benefit everybody in the form of higher wages and lower prices.

The great social welfare reforms now under way can be partly financed, to be sure, by means of transfers of income through taxes, especially from large fortunes, but there is a distinct limit to what can be accomplished that way. We must therefore improve our efficiency in production."

Dr. Kock then explained the post-war program of the Swedish Labor movement for investigating certain industries with a view to finding ways of making them more productive. High wages and low prices, rather than high private profits are the goal of this program. As chairman of a committee to check up on the electrical industry, she had just secured, she announced, Professor Ingvar Svennilson, one of the youngest and ablest Swedish economists, who has just made a study tour of the United States. He was formerly head of the privately financed Swedish Institute of Industrial Research.