National Affairs: More Horse Trading

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Three months ago five U. S. cotton textile men, headed by Dr. Claudius T. Murchison. went to Japan and accomplished something remarkable. The Japanese had begun to make alarming inroads on the U. S. market for cotton goods. In recent years the almost standard method of competition in foreign trade has been horse stealing—for exporters to steal as much of a foreign market as they could by underselling, for the victims to steal it back by imposing political quotas, tariffs and restrictions, fair or unfair. Dr. Murchison and friends in a mere ten days got the powerful Japan Cotton Spinner's Association to agree to steal no more of the U. S. market. The U. S. textile men promised to steal nothing back from the Japanese by political methods. Horse trading was substituted for horse stealing (TIME, March 8).

Last week in Washington was launched a still bigger and better attempt at horse trading. In the gilded auditorium of the Department of Labor Building in Washington, John G. Winant, former head of the Social Security Board got up to address a skimpy crowd of 300, most of them stodgy, elderly men. "Can we not reasonably expect," he asked, "that, without creating inconsistencies between the textile industry of an individual country and the economic structure of that country as a whole, other social conditions in the textile industry can likewise be raised to the level of other industries?"

Many of his audience leaned forwrd in rapt attention, many of them listening not to his voice but to the voices of interpreters speaking to them through earphones, for his audience included Belgians, Czechoslovaks. Finns, Letts, Mexicans. Dutch. Poles, Swedes, Uruguayans, Yugoslavs, French, Chinese and Japanese. Equally rapt were British, Canadians, Indians. For all knew that though John Winant's words sounded like idealism, they were really business.

I. L. O. Before the U. S. definitely turned its back on the League of Nations, one of the League's subsidiaries, the International Labor Office, held its first Conference in Washington. Since then I. L. O. has gone about its business elsewhere. Annually I. L. O. holds a meeting at which its 62 member-nations are represented by three kinds of delegates; one representing each country's labor; another, its employers; and two, its Government. The meetings' chief activity is to draft treaties affecting labor conditions, and the treaties are submitted to the member nations for ratification. To date some 50 such treaties have been drafted, over 700 ratifications (two to 35 per treaty) have been obtained. The subjects of the treaties vary from prohibiting the employment of children under 14 at sea, to regulations for night work in bakeries.

Permanent head (director) of the I. L. O. is a tall, angular, alert, onetime British Civil Servant named Harold Beresford Butler, who attended the first I. L. O. conference in Washington in 1919. In 1934 President Roosevelt took the U. S. into the I. L. O. after an 18-year abstention.

One of the first U. S. Government delegates sent abroad to an I. L. O. conference was John Winant. Last week when another I. L. O. meeting assembled in Washington, John Winant was chief U. S. delegate, as such was elected president of the meeting.*