More Pay, Less Work

When a businessman demands that labor get more pay for less work, that's news. Last week, a big businessman made such news by telling Congress: the U.S. should boost the legal minimum wage from 40¢-an-hour to a minimum of 75¢.

At the same time, he recommended that Congress prepare legislation to establish a 40, a 36 and a 30-hour week. Commerce, industry, the trades and agriculture would be classified into three major divisions and three work weeks. But all would get the same weekly minimum wage, $30.

This suggestion came from dapper, poker-faced Robert Wood Johnson, 53, wartime brigadier general (in Ordnance and as boss of the Smaller War Plants Corp.) and board chairman of Johnson & Johnson (surgical supplies). To a Senate labor subcommittee, now considering a bill to raise the minimum to 65¢ an hour, Johnson said: not high enough; the U.S. can now "pay higher wages and sell at lower costs. This equation needs no proof beyond the record of the past 50 years, . . . We can honestly say, at least in our country, that man does not have the right to employ his fellow man unless he can pay a subsistence wage [and] the average American workman cannot keep body & soul together on less than $30 a week anywhere in the U.S."

To the argument that higher wages in the U.S. would mean the loss of foreign markets, Johnson replied: U.S. products sold abroad now were manufactured almost exclusively by high-wage industries.

Bob Johnson's best argument was his own company. It now has the highest minimum wage in the industry. Average hourly earnings for day work, excluding overtime and premiums, are 76¢ for women and 85¢ for men, while piecework rates run higher. In his southern textile mills Johnson pays a minimum now of 65¢—at least 10¢ higher than competitors.

Anticipating critics who would not fail to point out that Johnson does not practice what he preaches, he said that he would be glad to pay more if competitors were forced to do the same.