Women in Pennsylvania textile mills, who earned an average of $18.20 per week in 1928, were reduced to a wage of $11.94 per week in 1932 and were obliged to work longer hours despite the lower wage. The men's wages in silk textiles dropped 37 percent between 1928 and 1932 while women's wages dropped 34 percent. In silk, hosiery, and knit goods the number of women earning less than $10 per week of 54 hours increased from 7 percent in 1928 to 24 percent in 1932. The number of men in Pennsylvania textile mills earning less than $10 a week in those industries increased elevenfold between 1928 and 1932. This wholesale collapse of wage standards was as dangerous to the economy of Pennsylvania as it was to the economy of the United States.

The rapid and quite general improvement which took place in the textile industries of Pennsylvania after the N. R. A. was enacted should be all the proof that is needed to establish the soundness of legislation setting up nationally uniform minimum standards for a basic industry such as textiles. In the hosiery industry for instance, although wage payments increased, the employment also increased and sales volume also expanded. The N. R. A. did pull the textile industry as a whole out of a disastrous economic tail spin and placed it back on the road to universal recovery.

After the N. R. A. was declared unconstitutional an effort was made to have the employers voluntarily adhere to the minimum wage and maximum hours provisions of the codes. It was soon apparent that the small minority of employers who would not conform nullified the efforts of those who did.

During the code period industry had "settled down" for a time. The migration of textile mills had been halted, as a result of the fact that a substantial equalization in competitive conditions had been temporarily achieved.

Today Pennsylvania textile manufacturers are again threatening to move out of the State to the South or other sections where local chambers of commerce offer a variety of inducements, which are in effect, opportunities for "chiseling" in one form or another. I am informed that in Philadelphia, between 1929 and 1933, 32 full-fashioned hosiery mills employing about 4,000 people left Pennsylvania for Southern States.

Can the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania or the city of Philadelphia offer inducements that will be sufficient to have factories remain within the State? Most certainly we will not offer to cooperate with manufacturers to cut wages nor will we connive with private detective agencies, with local authorities or the courts, to enable employers in labor to avoid their obligation to bargain collectively with their employees. The day has gone by when the Government of Pennsylvania will act as the willing instrument of feudal employing interests.

Pennsylvania seeks to increase the employment opportunities of its citizens but not at the expense of our civic integrity or by depreciating the living standards of our wage earners.

Under my administration the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania will join with other progressive States in an effort to promote effective and equitable Federal legislation which will afford protection to each State

Mr. SCHNEIDER. You have heard a lot of testimony of the workers where it was testified there was a lot of stretch-out effected, whereby the workers were required to do more after the codes went out than they did before, and there were looms added, and so on.

Now, do those workers work on piecework?

Mr. MUNROE. To the extent that that would be true as a general thing, they would be workers on piece work.

Mr. SCHNEIDER. As to those who are stretched out, would their hourly rate increase; let us take, for instance, one who went from 4 looms to 6, or from 10 looms to 16. Would his hourly rate be increased?

Mr. MUNROE. Let me answer it in this way. Where mills have organized their work assignments and that is a sort of thing which is referred to here as the stretch-out, because of the abuse in some cases. Where that sort of thing has been done reasonably and equitably the worker is given more machines to tend; but all except the skilled duties are taken away from him and helpers are provided who do the unskilled portion of the work. And in setting up a regime of that sort it has been my practical experience that almost without exception the skilled workers' average rate is advanced somewhat so that he shares, to a certain extent, in the saving that the mill makes. That is the fair, the equitable way of doing it. And I believe that is the way the majority of the mills undertaking to establish an economical system in their mills have undertaken that sort of procedure. And I think it is a misnomer and an exaggeration to call that sort of thing a stretch-out unless it is poorly and unscientifically done. There are plenty of situations where it is done ignorantly, where it is done without preparation and without much foresight. The management just does not look before they leap and the help gets a load which is excessive. But I think they are greatly in the minority. Mr. SCHNEIDER. Whenever the stretch-out is applied the employer gets more work from the worker, at lower cost; that is always scientific, isn't it?

Mr. MUNROE. That is not the point.

Mr. SCHNEIDER. That is an important point in connection with this argument.

Mr. MUNROE. It does not mean, by any means, that when you increase the number of looms you assign to a weaver that you are going to put any heavy burden on him, for the reason that I explained, that when that sort of thing is done properly he is given sufficient help in the laborious, tedious, unskilled tasks, so that it may well be that tending 50 more machines with the selected scientific duties that he is then performing, he has less of a work load than he had before with only two-thirds as many machines. And it is the same thing as with the automobile people. They put on a man to do one particular thing and they take a skilled man to do it, and then they pay him a higher rate, and they give him helpers to do the unskilled part of it. Mr. SCHNEIDER. When they speed up the machine he does not have to go any faster? His helper does that? Is that it? Are you trying to tell us if a man is operating a certain machine and it is making a certain speed and he has to be there every minute of the day and be alert and work faster and under that strain that goes with it, that if that machine is speeded up, that he does not have any more responsibility and strain, that somebody else assumes that?

That is

Mr. MUNROE. No; I am not trying to tell you that. assuming I am trying to tell you something that I am not trying to tell you. A good manufacturer, a well-managed mill, an efficiently managed mill, does not overload the help. It is only the poor folks who don't know how to run a mill properly who do that.

Mr. SCHNEIDER. I presume all of the manufacturers are efficient? Mr. MUNROE. No, sir.

Mr. SCHNEIDER. They are all very expert, aren't they?

Mr. MUNROE. No, sir.

Mr. SCHNEIDER. They all claim to be. I never met a manufacturer any place at any time who did not claim that he was the best in the industry and that he treated his help just a little better than anybody else treated their help.

Mr. MUNROE. Doesn't that apply to all of us? think that we are pretty good?

Don't all of us

Mr. SCHNEIDER. You are trying to tell us here now about the inefficient fellow. And the manufacturers do not admit that there is anybody like that in the industry. They are all speeding up, exacting more from the workers and reducing labor costs.

Mr. MUNROE. I do not say that getting all the work you can out of a man is scientific. And I do not believe that any enlightened manufacturer does that.

Mr. SCHNEIDER. How many of these highly skilled workers are there in the industry who tend looms and also perform menial, unskilled labor.

Mr. MUNROE. That depends upon the mill. Now, let me explain about the loom, if you want to take the time. I think I can tell you what I mean. And I think you have a misunderstanding of it now.

Your loom has to have a warp put in it, which consists of a good many threads of yarn wound on a roll. That warp may contain as few as 800 threads and in some cases it may contain 5,000 threads, depending upon the fabric you are weaving. Those threads are drawn through the loom automatically, and, as they are, a shuttle passes through with what they call filling yarn. As the filling yarn is passed through, it is then beaten into place. That forms an interlacing which up to that point, has made cloth. That cloth is gradually wound up on a roll at the front of the loom.

In the old days, back before 1900, let us say, or perhaps even further back than that, it was a weaver's job to do every single detail of duty about that loom. He swept the floor around it; he cleaned it off; he repaired it if it got out of order; he put the warp on at the back; and he put the warp in place; and he filled the shuttles by hand with bobbins of filling; and he had to suck the thread in that bobbin through a little hole in the shuttle. I used to have to do it myself, 25 years ago. Mr. SCHNEIDER. Tell us just what he is doing today. I know what he used to do.

Mr. MUNROE. I have not finished all of the duties he had then. Mr. SCHNEIDER. I know what they were. It is not important. Mr. MUNROE. He had to take the cloth off. A large part of what he had to do was putting the bobbins in those shuttles. The bobbins would run out in 3 minutes, or, on some classes of goods, in about a minute and a half.

About 1900 an automatic loom was invented which put the bobbins in the machine automatically without the loom missing a thread. But

May I first point out that this industry is well over 100 years old in this country; that its plants, almost exclusively, are in our Eastern seaboard section, where they have been well established for years in most of their present localities; that this industry has manufactured and sold its products for several generations to the American public with very few economic or employment difficulties, and that it has at times employed upward of over 30,000 workers, who have lived in the same localities and worked in the same plants for periods of years. On account of the nature of manufacture, it takes very substantial resources to establish the physical necessities for operation of this industry, and the industry employs a very high percentage of expert workers to accomplish the manufacture of its fabrics. This adds to its stability and lends to the encouragement of satisfactory relations with workers. There has been practically no deflection of quantities of our product from one State to another, or from one mill to another, but each concern has made approximately in the past few years its relative proportion of carpets and rugs manufactured.

The factual data, as to our wages, I am now anxious to furnish you, is based on the regular reports of the United States Department of Labor covering hourly earnings and weekly earnings. The average of our wages paid during the 7 months since the National Industrial Recovery Act was declared unconstitutional has been 56.4 cents per hour. The average paid during the 21 months when we were operating under the provisions of the code was 53 cents per hour, showing not only a steady wage rate, but an improvement in such rates since the N. R. A. codes were discontinued. Our wage rate for September 1935, the latest report received from the Department of Labor, was 57.4 cents per hour, which was higher than the average of all industry as a whole, and considerably higher than the average of all of the other nondurable goods industries, in which class we are, and which in total averaged 52.9 cents per hour. It might be added that we are a home furnishing industry, and that the largest home furnishing unit is the furniture industry. Furniture and carpets and rugs are sold together and share together in competition with other industries for the consumer dollar. It is important to make a serious comment here. We understand it was indicated by Congressman Ellenbogen, the proposer of this bill, in a discussion at this hearing as to whether linoleum or hard surface floor coverings would be included under the designation in the bill entitled "rugs, carpets, or other floor coverings", that Mr. Ellenbogen expressed a willingness to withdraw from the bill the expression "other floor coverings", thereby eliminating linoleum and other hard surface floor coverings from the bill. In behalf of this industry we, of course, do not wish to question the soundness of this proposal, or its justice. However, our fabrics are to quite a degree competitive with hard surface floor coverings, and if one group of floor coverings is thus alone subjected to the provisions of a bill of this nature, it is highly important from a competitive standpoint that the manufacturers of wool floor coverings should be eliminated also; otherwise we would be subjected by the Government to difficult and unfair competitive conditions by what would seem an arbitrary discrimination.

As the bill deals with a minimum wage, the wages in our industry are high enough so that even the minimum wage appearing in the bill would not have any substantial influence on our wage scales. We

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sents the industry as a whole, both piece workers and hourly workers, reduced to the rate per hour.

The facts are that in the 2 or 3 months preceding the adoption of the N. R. A. Cotton Textile Code in July 1933, wage increases were wellnigh universal in the industry, hourly wage rates increased by a huge percentage the day the code took effect, their advance continued at a minor rate under the N. R. A. regime and that since the invalidation of the N. R. A. the code wages have been substantially maintained by an overwhelming majority of the mills.

I refer you to Mr. Heinrich's testimony of last week, when he said his figures indicated very few situations of depression from code wages. In October 1934, the Bureau of Labor Statistics undertook, by Executive order, a study of wages, hours, and earnings in the cotton textile industry. The Bureau's report, submitted to the President by the Secretary of Labor on January 17, 1935, served effectively to refute typical charges concerning the industry similar to those which the Congress is now urged by the proponents of this bill to find as facts by legislative determination. Major facts developed in the Bureau's study were:

1. That there had been an "overwhelming compliance" with the wage provisions of the Cotton Textile Code for all occupations of work.

2. That employment during the first year under the code was in excess of 1929.

3. That the minimum wage had not become the maximum.

4. That, as required by the code, differentials in occupations above the minimum had evidently been maintained.

5. That higher proportionate increases, as contemplated by the code, had been made in lower-paid occupations below the minimum. 6. That "the tendency has been for hourly wages to so continue to advance from August 1933 to August 1934, both in the North and South".

7. That average hourly earnings had been raised more under the Cotton Textile Code than in any other major industry.

8. That in August 1934, the workers in northern cotton textile mills were receiving average hourly wage rates at the level that prevailed in 1926 to 1928, and the workers in southern mills were receiving hourly wage rates substantially higher than at any time during the decade 1922 to 1932.

9. That between July 1933, and July 1934, average hourly earnings increased 64.5 percent.

In the Bureau's report a table of average hourly earnings by occupations in northern cotton mills shows that the increase between July 1933 (before the code), and August 1934, in the hourly rates paid for the different occupations ranged from 36 percent for foremen to as much as 110 percent. Similar increase shown in the table covering southern mills ranged from 51 to 124 percent.

Following the invalidation of N. R. A. codes by the Supreme Court on May 27, 1935, leading organizations in the industry recommended to all cotton mills that no change be made in the conduct of the business. Since that time the Cotton-Textile Institute, with the cooperation of other associations in the industry and the encouragement and help of mill executives generally, has undertaken, through its field staff and other facilities, to observe the extent to which the minimum