Trainman News

Labor Blasts 45-Hr. Week Plan

WASHINGTON Organized labor has turned thumbs down on the 45-hour work week proposed by General Motors President C. E. Wilson.

Labor is willing and ready to contribute to the defense effort, but industry can afford to pay overtime for the longer work schedule, labor leaders point out.

Wilson's suggestion that overtime pay start at 45 hours during the current emergency, instead of the 40 hours now provided by federal law, was offered as one way of solving the manpower shortage.

The average work week for the nation's 12,900,000 production workers has been running well over 41 hours since midsummer.

Union spokesmen pointed out that labor costs drop as the workweek lengthens, and pointed to World War II records as proof that even with heavy overtime there is no increase in production costs.

An AFL representative recalled that the recent AFL convention in Houston pigeonholed a resolution for the 30-hour week, as a concession to defense needs.

United Auto Workers-CIO voiced immediate opposition to the proposal, "There is nothing in the federal wage and hour act or in UAW-CIO contracts to prevent industries from working more than a 40-hour week in order to meet civilian and defense requirements," said Secretary-Treasurer Emil Mazey.

"What General Motors President Wilson proposes is simply that workers should work five hours more each week without being paid for the overtime as required by law and contract.

"The UAW has pointed out twice this month that auto and auto parts manufacturers' profits have reached scandalous proportions. If sustained overtime becomes necessary, certainly those profits are more than enough to meet the bill without any price increase either to the government or to individual car buyers."

Mazey expressed the opinion that credit restrictions, which have cut car sales steel and other material shortages; and lack of defense orders, "all point to layoffs and unemployment, and not to a manpower shortage--for at least a considerable time yet."

The next day, UAW Local 600 reported that Ford Motor Co. planned an "immediate" layoff of 15 per cent of its 65,000 Rouge plant workers.

In telegrams to President Truman, NSRB Chairman W. Stuart Symington, Henry Ford II, and UAW President Walter Reuther, the local's president, Carl Stellate, declared "We are faced with immediate layoffs of our members because of announced cutbacks in production schedules of automobiles."