Let 'Em Eat Cake

Reporting gloomy economic news last week, federal agencies reached back nearly a decade for unpleasant comparisons. Unemployment, the Labor Department announced, hit 3,188,000 last month, highest November total since the recession year of 1949. Housing starts across the U.S. in 1957, said the Bureau of Labor Statistics, will fall short of the milliona-year rate for the first time since 1948.

Cheerful voices pointed out that the heavy sag in employment from October to November--1,132,000--was largely the result of unusually wet, wintry weather that cut more than seasonally deep into farm employment. But with the steel industry operating at 69% of capacity, down from 102% a year ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Economic Research Director Emerson P. Schmidt predicted that 1958 would very likely see a recession "at least as severe as 1949 and 1954."

Against this grey background, the United Automobile Workers' President Walter Reuther vowed in a speech at the A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention in Atlantic City that labor would enter the coming year's collective bargaining "mindful of our broad economic and social responsibilities." Did this declaration mean that Reuther would urge his fellow labor leaders to refrain from pushing wages up during an economic lull, so as to avoid increasing business costs and consumer prices? Did it mean that, since labor's overall output per man-hour has increased very little over the past two years, labor would concentrate on upping productivity rather than wages in the year ahead?

Far from it. What Reuther and his fellow A.F.L.-C.I.O. leaders called for as labor's 1958 platform was 1) higher wages, plus 2) "increased leisure" through shorter work weeks with no pay reduction, plus 3) bigger health, welfare and unemployment-benefit programs. In short: more pay, less work. When the economy was booming, Reuther had called for wage boosts to catch up with higher prices. Now, with the economy slumping, he called for wage boosts as the cure for a recession caused--in the official A.F.L.C.I.O. view--by a lack of purchasing power.

In booting out tainted unions--the Teamsters, Bakery and Confectionery Workers and Laundry Workers--the A.F.L.-C.I.O. chiefs at Atlantic City did indeed show a sober sense of responsibility. But when it came to "broad economic and social responsibilities" in collective bargaining, it looked as if labor's leaders in 1957 had not pushed very far beyond A.F.L. Founder Samuel Gompers (1850-1924), who once summed up labor's economic philosophy for his day in a single word: "More."

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