The Waterbury Democrat., 1943-04-08

Peter Easem division, will ere. ate a new labor oftlce under Rober, K. Lamb, former chief counsel oi the defunct Tolan House Commit tee Investigating labor migration, to work with War Manpower Com mission. Out of all this reorganlz- ing Is supposed to come action, one part of which is the idea of selling management and labor on further use of the incentive payment,
 An incentive payment by any other name Is not as fair. In harsh, pre-war Arnericanse, back in the days before a closed shop became known as maintenance of member ship" the theory of the incentive payment was known simply as "piecework". Catch on?
 PATCHWORK vs SPEEDUP
 Now piecework as such is one oi the things that the labor statesmen have been trying to get away from for years. piecework is associated with the speedup. the Bedeaux sys- tenn, efficiency experts, stop-watches, rate cutting and all that Stuff. Con- seQuently, any effort to take work CTS off hourly or daily pay rate bases and put them all back on piecework is going to meet with op- position.
 The trick, therefore, will be to get labor and management to agree that there's Q war on and something should be done about 1t, so how about adopting incentive payment for the duration? This may be one of the first propositions put up to the newly constituted WIPE Man agement-Labor Council, made up of the president of the c. l. O., A. F. of L., U. s. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manu- lecturers. L,
 Reduce the case for incentive payments to simple example, and you come up with something like this situation which actually de- veloped last summer:
 The wife of a leading, well-to-do citizen in an Ohio town got patri- otic and went to work in the local canning factory at the height of the tomato harvest because the manager simply couldn't get enough help to handle his war crop, The good lady call her Mrs. Tiara-waS assigned to peeling tomatoes, and was she lousy. One buShel a day was about all she could do. though working right next to her was a nice fresh country girl - call her Miss Nim. bleflnger who could peel four bushels of tomatoes a day and never cut finger. But
 Under the Fair Labor Standard act, cannery workers must be paid by the hour, not by the bushel. So Mrs. Tiara gets the same wages by law. for her one bushel that is paid to Miss Nimblefinger for her four, and is that fair?
 THE SOVIET SYSTEM
 The same principle might apply to loading shells. making gas masks, laying bricks. riveting, sewing shirts. As the labor supply thins out, more and more unskilled labor will be used and it will be paid the same wages as the skilled. The advocates of the incentive payment plan say that there should be a minimum ba- sic wage for a given unit of work. But if any given worker can turn out two units of work in a normal shift. that worker gets double pay.
 That is not necessarily cruel cap- italism. grinding workers to the bone. If you can stand a little dose of Soviet propaganda-from each according to his ability. to each acc cording to his labor-it might be re- corded tht the Russians have gear ed up their war production in just this way. There is a standard unit of daily production for every class of work-pl0wing ground, making brad, making bullets.
 The workman who turns out a unit and a half a day gets pay and a half. The extra producers are the Stakhanovites, the heroes of the production line who get their medals just like soldiers. as well as extra pay. That's the way the So- viet gets production.
 In the United States, the incen- tive payment is not unknown, and a number of war industries have bonus plans of one type or another. Most notorious are the records of some of the Cleveland rugged inc dividualists. like Jack and Heintz, ]. P. Lincoln of Lincoln Electric. whose workers make sSy0OO a year and up and are feeling no pain. But the professional labor unions don't like the idea and 1t win be a job to sell them on it. even as A war