School for Employers

Atop two white poles flanking the broad granite steps of the Baker Memorial Library in Boston, are two gold eagles, one facing east, the other north. Up the steps, between the eagles, into a lecture room of Harvard's Graduate School of Business Administration this week will march 300 or more industrialists. They will be going to take advice on their labor problems from an absent-minded professor who loses his overcoat regularly on the New Haven R. R. but who in 1933, three years before its arrival, forecast the coming of C. I. O.

When easy-going bushy-whiskered Lumberman George Henry Leatherbee left an $84,000 trust fund to Harvard on his death in 1911 for free lectures on finance, open to the public, it was not in anticipation of any need for education of businessmen on the labor union problem. Upon accretion of the fund to where it yielded the stipulated $3,000 income in 1920, the first lecture series was given on "Real Estate Fundamentals." It drew six students. By 1934, 376 capitalists flocked to hear Professor Oliver Mitchell Wentworth Sprague, fresh from the U. S. Treasury, lecture on inflation possibilities. Because the last year has exposed a gaping void in Capital's education--how to deal with labor organization--Harvard announced that it would devote this year's Leatherbee lectures to "Problems in Industrial Relations."

Chosen to give the lectures was Wisconsin-born Professor Sumner Huber Slichter, who at 45 commands respect from conservatives and liberals alike for his economic sagacity. In muddy shoes and a weather-stained suit, he lectures with his thick white pompadour and craggy nose bent over his desk, seems surprised when he looks up to find students present. Between classes he rushes back to his office to dictate one of the half-dozen reports, books or articles on which he works at once. Over the fireplace in his Morgan Hall office is a gaudy poster proclaiming: "Vote American Labor Party--Roosevelt-Lehman.''

When he was an undergraduate at Wisconsin and Chicago Dr. Slichter worked in farm machinery and plumbing supply factories to learn Labor's viewpoint. Today, a member of the staff of Brookings Institution, of the Social Science Research Council, of American Association for Labor Legislation, honorary vice president of the National Consumers League, the professor describes himself as "a Wisconsin liberal--a conservative liberal that does not go off half-cocked." In 1933 he predicted trade unionism would become entrenched throughout U. S. industry as the result of NRA, prophesied a split in Labor's ranks on the industrial organization issue. Now returned from six months' study of the labor situation in Europe, he warns that "the greatest problem of the 20th Century is keeping social conflict from becoming too intense."

Typical Slichter tips to employers:

P:Find new ways to keep the door open to promotion for employes.

P:Keep hands off workers' organizations.

P:Use no spies.

P:Promote no company unions, for they breed sitdown strikes.

P:Don't recognize one union as exclusive bargaining agent when there is a conflict but try to bring the unions together, because it is not to the employer's advantage to deal with competing agencies.

P:Avoid agreements with expiration dates, which precipitate crises.

Not ahead of the times but behind the times is Professor Slichter's school for employers, for Labor has already provided itself on a much larger scale with schools for employes including Labor colleges (Brookwood, in Katonah, N. Y., Commonwealth, in Mena, Ark.). Many a C.I.O. union has recently established an educational department, which not only teaches workers Labor history but trains them in collective bargaining strategy, psychology, public speaking, influencing public opinion. Largest and oldest of such programs is that of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, directed by astute, British-born Mark Starr, which has 20,000 workers enrolled in courses. New Labor courses have been started for auto, rubber, transport workers, and WPA Workers Education Project is explaining Labor's problems to 50,000 students in 20 States.

As employers prepared to sit down three times a week under Harvard's gold eagles, Professor Slichter warned them not to expect immediate results from "putting your house in order." Said he: "It takes from two to five years for the employes to gain confidence that conditions have really changed for the better."

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