AGRICULTURE: Down with Visions

Ever since it was founded under the League of Nations in 1919, the Conference of the International Labor Organization has met almost every year and dutifully passed resolutions demanding better working conditions round the world. Last week at its meeting in Geneva, a resolution was introduced calling for vacations with pay for agricultural and industrial workers everywhere. This was too much for L. Roy Hawes, a 50-year-old dairyman with a 165-acre farm near North Sudbury, Mass., where he has been a town-meeting moderator for many years. He jumped up and told the 603 delegates of government, labor and industry from 60 different countries that he was fed up with the I.L.O.'s "visionary and academic" resolutions.

Cried Hawes: "What can holidays with pay in agriculture do for 40 million workers in India, who only work four months out of a year anyway? They need a job; they don't need holidays." In Mexico, said Hawes, peasants need land reforms and a chance to earn a decent living much more than they need vacations with pay.

Delegates from Brazil, Mexico, Ceylon and other countries complained bitterly that they needed no advice from "an American capitalist." But Hawes took their complaints in stride. "I'm only trying to be constructive," he explained. "I doubt that there are five fanners here who can get up beside a cow and milk her."