Toledo Union Journal

Labor Mobilizes Resources To Combat Unemployment

In a strenuous week of meetings, the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO devised plans to put the jobless back to work and to raise the living standards of those in the lowest income brackets. Above is one of the sessions showing the Council at work during its mid-winter session in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

AFL-CIO Tells Congress:

35-Hour Week Can Ease Jobless Plight

The AFL-CIO Executive Council has called on Congress to take 'immediate steps to amend the wage-hour act' to provide for a 35-hour week and a 7-hour day' to meet the serious and continuing unemployment problem.

Such legislation, said the council, is 'the most direct and practical way to facilitate the adoption of a universal reduction in the workweek.'

The statement called also for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress to keep the workweek problem under observation and make recommendations concerning 'further reduction' in light of the accelerated rate of technological and scientific progress.

The need for a short workweek, Meany told a press conference, has been driven home in the last year as the evidence has mounted of sharply increasing production with fewer workers.

AFL-CIO unions, he said, will continue their historic bargaining for shorter hours, noting that a less-than-40-hour week is prevalent in many organized industries. The council approach, he stressed, is a legislative approach insofar as the wage-hour law's provisions on hours has not been changed since its enactment 21 years ago.

Queried on the possible inflationary effects of a shorter workweek, Meany replied that 'our advice in that field is sounder than the Administration's,' and that the problem facing the nation is not inflation but growth.