Mr. MOSHER. I think it will take care of itself.

Senator KILGORE. The Navy also says the wage differential in the surrounding community as compared to the wage in the yard has something to do with it, due to the fact of the wage flexibility and they can't pay any bonus. They just drifted away. And besides that the civil service that they have which holds up upgrading.

Mr. MOSHER. You take the ordinary incentive systems as the personnel boys call them. The general rule in my New England War Labor Board was that we could put in an incentive system but we had to show we were going to get 25 percent more production and the incentive system went in in a big way.

And 25 percent isn't too high a factor-it is a pretty good average. Senator REVERCOMB. What is the incentive system?

Mr. MOSHER. Piece work. Piece work is not a good term in many quarters, but it is pay for what a man does.

Senator KILGORE. The man gets the pay for a shift for doing so nuch work, and gets paid for overtime?

Senator MAYBANK. Task work. That is what we call it at home. He quits when he gets through.

Mr. MOSHER. If he has 300 pieces to do today he quits.

Senator MAYBANK. If you didn't have that the work would not be done in some cases.

Senator HAWKES. But he may do 500 pieces.

Senator MAYBANK. I meant in some places the task work does work.

Senator O'MAHONEY. As I understand your testimony it is diametrically opposed to a suggestion made by another witness who expressed great doubt whether it would be possible to select individual skills for individual jobs and it would tend, as he put it, to push the mass out.

Mr. MOSHER. Please don't do that. We don't want that. Senator O'MAHONEY. What yon want is the power to have referred to you the particluar type of workman that you want?

Mr. MOSHER. Well, let's come back to my country plant, a tiny plant, 165 employees. There can't be anything smaller in the National Association of Manufacturers. We need 50 men. If you take 50 men off the street they will spoil our plant. You put a worker on a production line who doesn't know anything about it and he will slow the whole tempo up.

Senator O'MAHONEY. That is precisely the condition that causes the criticism of hoarding in plants.

Mr. MOSHER. And then, of course, here is another situation a friend of mine told me about. He has 9,000 people on his pay roll and never has but 7,500 working in the plant.

Senator O'MAHONEY. What are they doing with the other 1,500? Mr. MOSHER. Mother stays home to do the wash and people who don't choose to work steady stay home. I won't say they work when they feel like it because that is not a fact, but it has always been the practice.

It is a

Senator O'MAHONEY. Do they have training? Mr. MOSHER. Yes. These people are all skilled, I assume. series of textile plants. But he points out there isn't anything he can do to make the 1,500 people come in-and it isn't the same 1,500, they change every day.

That is an absentee factor and I don't know of any law of the land that will change that. It is going to take the toughest kind of work on the part of both management and labor, and I am sure labor knows as much about the proposition as any manager does.

Take the English situation. I am told the absenteeism in England goes as high as 26 percent in any 1 day. I guess that was exaggerated; that was probably just 1 day. It is not general; it was just 1 day. Take the Canadian situation. In the one plant I know about in Canada the law didn't get us anything. The men sulked on the job and every time you get a frozen issue you get a disgruntled man.

Here is a typical case. It is not widespread because most Americans are not built this way, but some are. A man wants to change jobs and we won't agree to give him a referral and U. S. E. S. won't give him a referral. All he has to do is sulk and it doesn't take much until we have to fire him.

Senator KILGORE. You do have some experiences like that?
Mr. MOSHER. Not many.

Senator KILGORE. And those people just slow up your entire plant? Mr. MOSHER. If Bill wants to go across the street to work you had better let him go. If you can't convince him he has a better job where he is, and it is his duty to stay where he is, you had better get rid of him.

Senator KILGORE. And even under the best conditions you have an inescapable amount of absenteeism due to illness, deaths, and sickness in families?

Mr. MOSHER. You are bound to have some of that sort of thing. Senator KILGORE. Does that run 2 or 3 percent?

Mr. MOSHER. Nearer 5 percent.

Senator KILGORE. The inescapable absenteeism that no law can get around?

Mr. MOSHER. Inescapable, my impression is, is only 2 percent. Of course, today in my town mothers, daughters, sons, fathers are all working. Someone in the family has to spend half a day shopping and you can't stop it.

Senator KILGORE. Have you checked the records of Beachcraft? Mr. MOSHER. I don't know that.

Senator KILGORE. Their records are very remarkable because their absentee rate is only 3 percent over an annual period. They have a small incentive for continuous presence on the job. The incentive amounts over-all per plant, per worker, to 15 cents per week, which is infinitesimal.

Mr. MOSHER. I have sat in some discussions and listened to arguments between personnel men as to effective methods of preventing absenteeism. When I sat on the War Labor Board most of those schemes that came through were excuses for raising pay more than what they purported to be.

Senator KILGORE. 15 cents a week could not be classed a pay raise.

Mr. MOSHER. Hardly.

Senator KILGORE. I think the way it is handled in this plant would be interesting. The 15 cents is lumped in blocks of 600 workers and if any member of the block is absent any day in a week he cannot participate for the distribution of the price. And it is self-policing because the other 599 workers police the recalcitrant worker.

Mr. MOSHER. There is a nice bit of human psychology there. You gentlemen wouldn't know anything about betting on a long shot, but the long shot gets them.

Senator AUSTIN. Mr. Chairman, before we leave this point I ask to have inserted in the record an extract on pages 15 and 16 of British Information Services, revised to March 1944, on the subject of absenteeism and lateness.

The CHAIRMAN. That may be inserted.

(The extract regarding absenteeism and lateness is as follows:)

If any worker under an essential work order is absent or persistently late without reasonable excuse, the employer may report the matter to the national service officer, who must submit particulars to a works committee or other suitable joint council, if such a committee exists. The committee gives the worker 4 days in which to state his case orally or in writing, and then reports to the national service officer. The question of prosecuting the offender is left to the officer, but where there is a suitable committee no prosecution may be made before it has reported and attempted to settle the matter itself. Where there is no works committee, the national service officer deals with the matter himself. 3. Success of system: Penalties inflicted:

The penalties for failing to comply with any "direction" 16 are:

(a) On summary conviction, imprisonment up to 3 months, or a fine of £100, or both;

(b) On conviction on indictment, prison up to 2 years, or a fine up to £500, or both. In the case of a corporation, the amount of the fine is unlimited.

If, after conviction, the offense continues, the worker or employer is liable to a further fine of £500 a day for every day that the offense continues.

That the essential work orders are working well is confirmed by official figures given. In the month of August 1942, out of nearly 7,500,000 workers covered by these orders, only 1.7 percent sought permission to leave their jobs, and employers sought to discharge only 0.6 percent. In most cases the permission was granted, and appeals were lodged against only 0.5 percent of the national service officers' decisions. In the same month, there were only 245 prosecutions for absenteeism or persistent lateness.

Ôn May 21, 1942, the Minister of Labor defended the operation of these controls in Parliament, against some critics who argued that workers had frequently received unreasonable "directions" or had been severely punished, often by imprisonment, for absenteeism or other offenses not really deserving of such punishment, and not indicative always of a lack of desire to help the war effort. Mr. Bevin said that the proportion of complaints and punishments was infinitesimal compared with the vast job which had been achieved. He gave figures showing that in the 3 months up to February 1942, national service officers had dealt with 413,000 cases of transference and direction (with very few cases of complaint) and with 381,000 changes of job. Out of 31,000 cases connected with discipline, few had led to prosecutions. Fifteen women had been imprisoned, two for offenses under the order, and 12 for refusing to obey a direction; 26 employers had been prosecuted, 3 under the order, and 23 under the restriction on engagement order. None had been imprisoned, but severe steps had been taken. In some cases, managements had been removed. In other cases, the Ministry had threatened to deschedule the plants, and remove the workers. In every case, the objective of the Ministry was not to punish workers or management, but to devise ways of persuading all to continue working at full pressure. Some final sanctions must remain, applicable to these, as to other parts of the defense regulations.

Senator O'MAHONEY. Is that turn-over and absenteeism more pronounced among emergency workers than among ordinary, normal workers?

Mr. MOSHER. Oh, yes.

Senator O'MAHONEY. Among men?

Mr. MOSHER. It is among the women.

Senator O'MAHONEY. And this bill applies only to men?

16 These are the penalties for any offense under the defense regulations.

Mr. MOSHER. This bill applies only to men and only to a few men. Senator O'MAHONEY. This bill applies only to men. Do you think it would affect materially these other factors of turn-over and absenteeism in which women play such a large part?

Mr. MOSHER. I see nothing in the bill that would help those situations and I do see some things in the bill that would materially make them worse.

Senator O'MAHONEY. You are going to develop that?

Mr. MOSHER. I am going to develop that thoroughly.

Senator BURTON. You then would be in agreement with whatever policy is adopted if it were such a policy and had such a mechanism that we can continue our present controls for women and men under 18 and over 35 at the same time?

Mr. MOSHER. I have some figures that I intend to show. On July 8, 1944, according to Labor Force Bulletin of November 1944, which as you know is issued by the Bureau of Census, there were 55,000,000 people in the work force. There were 17,230,000 males between the ages of 18 and 44. If my arithmetic is correct that is a little over 30 percent all affected by this bill we have in front of us.

Incidentally there were 12,650,000 females in those ages, a total of some 29,000,000.

I look at October 11, 1944, figures and I find a drop in the total force from 55,000,000 to 52,870,000 or a drop of 2,130,000 in the work force.

Of course, some part of those went into the armed forces but I suggest and it is my guess-it could be only a guess on my part-that that is the drop that drifted away and moved out of the so-called work force.

Whereas there were 17,230,000 workers on July 8, 1944, in November 1944, that was 17,030,000 people, a drop of about 200,000 or a little over 1 percent, where as the total drop, as you will remember, was from 55,000,000 to 52,870,000.

I point out the relationship between the 17,000,000 and the total work force of 52,000,000 or 55,000,000. That is about one-third, and that is the number covered by the proposed bill. And the other two-thirds are just as important.

Senator KILGORE. And that 18 to 44 group contains all the men who went into the armed forces so there are some inevitable drops which would materially reduce the amount that drifted out?

Mr. MOSHER. I assume these figures are correct. That was in the 18 to 44 group which was 17,500,000 and dropped to 17,030,000, whereas the total labor force went down 2,000,000 and something. One can draw the conclusion, I think, that the group of 18 to 44 covered by this bill, stayed at work. I can draw no other conclusion from those census figures.

Senator O'MAHONEY. May I see those figures, please?
Mr. MOSHER. Certainly [handing document].

Senator BURTON. We are now operating on the voluntary system for the whole group lodged under the Director of the Manpower Commission. Under the bill that passed the House apparently the Manpower Commission did not have the same jurisdiction.

Under the amendments proposed, it is open to the Director of Mobilization and Reconversion to give them the same jurisdiction. Is it not possible under the amended bill to make the two groups operate in a consistent manner?

Mr. MOSHER. So far as I am familiar with the bill and the amendment, you would have to further amend the bill to make it apply. We don't think you should pick out the 18 to 45 group.

Senator BURTON. You are looking for a national service act?

Mr. MOSHER. Under the conditions we recommend.
Senator BURTON. You mean women as well as men?

Mr. MOSHER. They are a large part of the work force. They are the bulwark in many industries today.

Senator KILGORE. Now, that the younger men have gone you have to rely on women. In one plant that normally was 30-percent women the last figures give it as 55 percent. In another plant with no women we go 28-percent women.

Senator BRIDGES. You think this particular bill insofar as solving any problems, would be just pecking at the problem?

Mr. MOSHER. That is my honest conviction. You have less onethird of the group. I am going to point out some of the things that we suggested.

We have contacted these 150 State organizations and 300 members and have accomplished a lot. Here are 50 telegrams which anyone who wants to see them may have, and they have come from all over the country.

Senator MAYBANK. Are you going to put them in the record? Mr. MOSHER. They are here for that purpose if you want them. leave it to you gentlemen to say.

Senator KILGORE. I would like to see them in the record.

I

Senator HILL. Without objection, they will be put in at the close of Mr. Mosher's remarks.

Senator HAWKES. What is the gist of these telegrams?
Are they all along one line?

Mr. MOSHER. They are, and they were not dictated. If someone else had them, I would suggest they were dictated, but they were not. Here is one from Louis J. Bosee, Associated Industries of Kentucky. They are all addressed to Walter Chamblin. [Reading:]

Believe pro

Association passively opposed to May bill. Prefer strengthening voluntary program. Kentucky other than Louisville manpower not serious. posed May bill would not materially help Louisville. Sending our January 15 survey air mail. For confidential use only.

Senator MAYBANK. How would you construe the word "passively"? Mr. MOSHER. Not too much against it.

Senator CHANDLER. They will leave it to me, and I will be against it. I will construe "passively" as not to be active. I will add what I know to what they know.

Mr. MOSHER. Here is the Employers Association of Portsmouth, Ohio:

We look upon the May bill as detrimental rather than helpful to the present situation. If there had been continuous coal production last year there would have been several million more tons of coal on top of the ground for war production and homes at the start of winter. If there had been fewer strikes during '44, essential and civilian surpluses would be greater today. It is impossible to enact a blanket law to cure all evils and not create others which might prove equally as bad. We don't believe the May bill is the panacea.

Senator AUSTIN. Do you suppose they have seen the bill since we got at it and amended it?

Mr. MOSHER. I have no reason for not thinking so; but I do not know.