Business & Finance: Capital's Partners

For ten months a Senate subcommittee created by a resolution of Michigan's conservative Vandenberg has been studying the relationship of the U. S. wage system to labor disputes, and to national prosperity. This week, in a 351-page report, it gave its findings.

"Wages will never settle the labor problem because the saturation point will never be reached," wrote Arthur Vandenberg and his colleagues. "Wage increases create the same result as the serving of red meat to animals at the zoo—satisfaction for the moment, a more ravenous appetite later."

The committee recommended no specific legislation, but it did recommend a business policy: profit-sharing by which workers can share in the thumping harvests of fat years, pile up a competence against old age. (For a company which uses such methods see p. 68.)

Said the report:

"The worker's income must be automatically related to the rise and fall of the price structure. If this is done a proper balance will always be maintained.

"On this basis, and with such a flexibility, the peaks and valleys of unemployment; of industrial progress and prosperity; of labor unrest, will be leveled and stabilized.

"Blend the wage scale with a profit-sharing differential and the same human being who was previously concentrating his attention on wages will discard the combative spirit—his self-preservation instinct previously centred only on a flat wage scale will cease."