The Butler County press. [volume] (Hamilton, Ohio) 1900-1946, 1932-10-14
DOAK BACKS
Five-Day Week and Assails
Wage Reductions

Washington, d. c. (ILNS)-Back-
ing the five-day week and opposing
wage cutting, Secretary of Labor w.
N. Doak this week addressed the
Morris Plan Bankers Association
convention with an address predicated
upon the proposition that an economic
system justifies itself by its results
in terms of living conditions.
mo economic system can survive" !"
Secretary Doak declared, (which will
not support a standard of living COM
mensurate with the social enlighten-
ment of its day. Rather, it is our Job
to weed out of our system those col
lossal wastes involved in mere money
making without return of goods or
services. We must eliminate the
usurer whether he be found in high
or low places. We must bail the water
out of soaked and sinking capital
structures. We must call waste by its
right name wherever it is found-and
cast it overheard.
Backs Right TO Job
BY such vigorous action alone can
we fully restore and stabilize employ
ment. And / hold the minimum in
depreciation of the American princi-
pie of equal opportunity is the right
to job. If that involves the five-day
week, | say let US face the question
courageously. We must readjust our
selves to current realities. When we
fail to do so, economic and social
facts have an inconvenient way of
rising up and shifting US. Incidentally,
the department of labor operates
upon a fve-day week.
"As bankers, know that you are
all cognizant of the degree to which
the federal government has found it
this year to enter the field
of private banking Through the Re-
Finance Corporation,
and its allied agencies, and the Home
Loan Bank System, billions of credit
are being pumped into the financial
of the country. This trans
fusion of credit necessarily must pro-
ceed through the main financial
1t has taken time for its
effects to reach the capillaries
Chides Impatient Souls
''There are those impatient souls
who contend that we should have re-
versed the process and given skin in
jections, but by so doing we should
have never reached the vital points in
the financial structure. We should not
have realized the stimulating effects
which are already apparent.
eve should realize that the speed
of our recovery will depend upon the
extent to which we have effected fun
damental business correctives. Among
these none is more important than a
statesmanlike control of our national
credit-a control which will prevent
an early repetition of that infationary
which we have now all
learned to call by its right name.
Other Nations Harder Hit
"It appears to me that we should
have convinced ourselves that low bad
debt losses may indicate business
health, or they may mean unjustifi-
ably high collection costs. We ought
to have learned that credit delin-
quency, measured by yardsticks de-
signed to conceal business facts, does
not have anything to commend it.
"The use of credit instead of sales
or advertising, the high-pres-
sure extension of credit, the imposi-
ton of credit costs on cash customers
in merchandising, and similar un
sound practices of the boom period
ought now to have been relegated
permanently to the business scrap
heap, Secretary Doak asserted.
81 do maintain, however, that with
all our difficulties we have retreated
less under the crushing weight of
this depression than any other people
upon the globe. do say that we have
less of principle, we have
resisted more the pressure against
our material and spiritual standards
than any nation on earth"