The labor journal. [volume] (Everett, Wash.) 1909-1976, 1918-07-19
SHAMEFUL FRAUD;
CRIMINAL GREED

PHILADELPHIA, July 13.-The
Ledger voices the sentiment of many
thinking people in the following
criticism of the recent exposure of
the criminal profiteers, when it says:
at is not alone what the feder-
al trade commission characterizes
as barefaced fraud and inordinate
greed leading to corporate and in
dividual profits in the steel and coal
industries, in flour and meats, that
reach all the way up to 263 per cent
That is bad enough. Men and wom-
en- who scrimp and save to pay the
expense of this war know how ter
ribly difficult it is to buy bare nee
essities which the profiteers are ex-
plotting That is barefaced fraud.
That is inordinate greed. If proved,
the fatteners upon nation that is
devoting its best efforts to the war
will deserve the heaviest penalties
that the law can inflict But what
makes it so hard is not the S121,-
100000 in excess years, or the in
ordinate returns to the oil refiners,
the millers, the bituminous coal OPP
orators and the United States Steel
corporation and its affiliated com
panies.
"Why prices are so high has hith-
erto been connected to all but the
most expert eyes. 1t is that these
men, in order to make their profits,
have also checked production. They
have stopped it 40 per cent, so per
cent, 60 per cent, 70 per cent short
of what should be the normal out
put; they have reckoned the costs
of idle machinery, idle men and
poor planning as legitimate over
head expense and have asked of the
government and the consuming pub
lie full reimbursement for that cost
and their margin of profit besides
at is a crime that grows out of
ignorance. The minds of business
men generally are in some phases
of the art of production wrapped in
medieval mysticism They don't know
what their costs are. In the So
called model mills and factories.
where efficiency engineers have speed
ed up labor and machines, every eff
fort has been made to achieve a
so-called standard unit of work for
those machines and the men that
are working. Little if any account
has been taken of the machines and
men that do no work at all
at would astonish almost any
manufacturer to be told that con-
stantly at least 40 per cent of his
available machinery is idle, not chief
lythrough strikes and shutdowns. but
through experiments that do not
work, failure to get supplies, fail
ure to get and keep labor, fail
ure in planning the prompt Sc
quence of operations and for other
causes which might readily appear.
once the factors of idleness were
segregated from the list of legiti
mate overhead expense.
THE men of whom the federal
trade commission complain have sim
ply run riot in this blind area of
business inattention. Of course, it
Is cheaper to them, more profitable
to them In money, if managers have /
no other care than that of idle mills |
and machines, the losses on which /.
are reckoned as proper investments
for which the public must pay in the |
ultimate exorbitant price of a small
net output Such managers would
prefer to pocket the profits thus
awarded to idleness. They employ
men skilled in piling overhead upon
overhead at expense to the public
IN money, but principally at expense
IN nonproduction. Until the price
fixing bodies of the government shall
establish agencies to go after and
search the factors of idleness in the
great industries that deal in the ma
terlals of public necessity and of
war, they will not have scratched
the surface of the waste that turns
abundance into scarcity and makes
whole nations starve."