Mr. HEALEY. What are the hour and wage rates that you pay now in your plant?

Mr. HOLT. Well, of course, you do not expect me to give all of our

rates.

Mr. HEALEY. Let me ask you this: Has there been any change since the N. R. A.?

Mr. HOLT. The only change that has been made since the demise of the National Industrial Recovery Act has been upward, except in one thing, and we also believe this is an upward movement: Under cur code, our previously existing code, we could work 40 hours a week. We were allowed a tolerance of overtime of 10 percent-that is, additional 4 hours per week when the exigencies of business demanded it. However, if we worked the entire extra tolerance, that extra 4 hours per week, we had, in the 6 months' period, to lay off those men, or work them only 4 hours a day, or 3 hours a day, so that at the end of the 6 months' period we would not have worked a total of more than the number of days multiplied by the number of weeks, multiplied by 40 hours.

After the demise of the N. I. R. A., we now no longer pay any attention to that regulation which, we maintained, was against the best interests of our workmen, ourselves, and the users of our products.

Although our code did not provide for time and one-half, we always paid our men time and one-half when we worked them overtime. Subsequent to the demise of the N. I. R. A. we permitted our men to work as much overtime as they pleased, and we are working many of our men overtime today. In fact, out of some 8,500 or 8,700 men in our shops at the present time, I imagine that close to one-third of them are working overtime, and they are very glad to work overtime. If any man does not want to work overtime, he tells his foreman about it, and that is perfectly all right with our company.

Does that answer your question?

Mr. HEALEY. What pay do they get for overtime now?

Mr. HOLT. Time and one-half.

Mr. HEALEY. Have you gone on a 44-hour week?

Mr. HOLT. No, sir; we have a 40-hour week.

Mr. CITRON. You mentioned the evils of child labor and home work. Would you be willing to go along with the prohibition of that in connection with the present contracts?

Mr. HOLT. Well, as far as my own company is concerned, that is a question we do not know anything about, because we do not have any child labor. We employ nobody under 16. We do have apprentices and give them very excellent training.

Mr. CITRON. Well, a prohibition of that sort would not affect you? Mr. HOLT. Not in the slightest, because we would not hire them,

anyway.

Mr. CITRON. Would your present feeling be to object to anything of that sort?

Mr. HOLT. It is very difficult for one who is not familiar with those problems to say, offhand, that he would not object to anything like that. I think every one of use who is going to position himself on a matter of that kind ought to make a study of it, and I have

not made a study of it, because it has not come up in our business. If your question is this, if I have the same milk of human kindness in my breast as Mr. Erwin, who spoke here, and some witnesses who spoke Monday, I will say yes.

Mr. CITRON. Now, if the act did not go as far as the proposed legislation and was merely limited to child labor and home work and to the principal contractor, not affecting you or your firm, would you still be in opposition to such legislation?

Mr. HOLT. If I can specifically answer your question and that question only, I would say yes; but I must modify it this way: That I have never seen such a law drawn up that would not be far more extensive and much more far-reaching than those who drew it up intended, though I would be reluctant to have a law drawn up affecting all industry that might affect the conditions in my industry. Do I make myself clear, at all?

Mr. HEALEY. You are opposed to any law at all affecting contractors?

Mr. HOLT. I would not say that.

Mr. HEALEY. You do not want to see any regulatory act at all? Mr. HOLT. Let me see if I can make myself clear, Mr. Chairman. I do not believe in child labor. I think convict labor should be limited. I think these so-called kick-backs-incidentally, I never heard that word before until I read it in this bill-I think that, of course, is a perfectly pernicious practice.

I gather from what I have heard here in the last 2 or 3 days that there are bid brokers and bid peddlers, although we have never come in contact with them in our business. I would be very glad to see all of those things eliminated, or outlawed, were that possible, but I would want to demand that any law that did away with those things would be drawn up in such a way that it did not have any regulatory effect upon those businesses to which those practices are foreign.

Mr. HEALEY. All right, sir. Any other questions now of this witness?

Mr. DUFFY of New York. May I ask one question, Mr. Chairman? Mr. HEALEY. Yes, Mr. Duffy.

Mr. DUFFY of New York. Did the number of your employees increase since the N. R. A.?

Mr. HOLT. Yes. We had between 4,000 and 4,500 and we have more than doubled the number since then.

Mr. HEALEY. I am glad to hear that.

Mr. MICHENER. As soon as you got rid of the N. R. A. you commenced to go up; and you are objecting to another N. R. A.?

Mr. HOLT. In all fairness, I must say it started to go up before the decision of the Supreme Court.

Mr. CITRON. Do you know anything about the workings of the Davis-Bacon Act?

Mr. HOLT. I am familiar, to a certain extent, with what is the purpose of the act, but I cannot testify as a witness on it. May I have the privilege of saying one thing more?

Mr. HEALEY. Go right ahead.

Mr. HOLT. A question was asked several of the witnesses in regard to the effect upon the company which maintains its hours, its maximum hours and minimum wages, when it is in competition with a company which does not maintain as short hours or as high wage

minima. Our own company is a case exactly in point, because we fix our wage rate at a little higher than the wages in our immediate area, and also a little higher than the wages paid in our industry. Now, the question, as I understood, which was asked others who testified here, was whether some so-called chiselers, by working longer hours and cutting wages, could not entirely keep the more conservative manufacturer out of Government business? There is an answer to that question that has been very badly overlooked, and perhaps is the reason that we pay, in our own company-I think we pay higher rates than anybody else, because we want to attract good workmen. We can get more Government business and more business from the average consumer, too, by paying high wages and giving good living conditions and having shorter hours-we will produce a better quality of goods and we will sell more of them.

Mr. CITRON. That is really efficiency. Maintaining those decent standards amounts to efficiency.

Mr. HOLT. There is so much competition today to get certain classes of labor, that if you are going to get choice labor, you have got to put your prices up, and we pay just a little more than anybody else, so we get choice labor, and by getting choice labor we probably produce our goods a little bit cheaper, and certainly we produce them better.

Mr. CITRON. Is your main objection to this bill the fact that there is a question of interpretation, whether or not it goes to the subcontractor, all the way down the line to the basic materials?

Mr. HOLT. I cannot say that I see much question about that.

Mr. CITRON. If that was eliminated it merely applied definitely to the principal, and your standards being so high and your company not being affected, would you still object to this bill?

Mr. HOLT. Yes.

Mr. WALTER. Why?

Mr. HOLT. I object to it for this reason: If this did not go down to our supplier or our subcontractor, but stopped right with us, and if the Secretary of Labor should fix maximum hours and wage rates respectively higher and lower than ours are at the present time, it would not hurt us today, but we would have no assurance of what those limitations might be fixed at 6 months from now, or a year from now, or 10 years from now.

Mr. WALTER. To go back to your other point, if it was limited to the principal contractor and to child labor and home work alone, would you still object to such legislation?

Mr. HOLT. I would object to no legislation in regard to child labor and to home work.

Mr. CITRON. Do you think industry in general feels that way? Mr. HOLT. I think they do in my kind of industry; yes.

Mr. HEALEY. All right; now

Mr. WALTER. Mr. Holt, I had in mind exactly the same objection you have to the bill when I introduced my bill at the last session. Do you think it would be possible to eliminate the apparent hardships that would be worked on a contractor, when a subcontractor did not comply with the standards such as we think he ought to? Mr. HOLT. I am afraid I do not understand that.

Mr. WALTER. Will you read that question?

(Thereupon the reporter read the pending question as above recorded.)

Mr. HOLT. No, sir; I do not think it would be possible to do so. Mr. HEALEY. Now, I am going to ask Mr. Zimmerman, who has been here all day, if he cares to make a statement..

Mr. ZIMMERMAN. I am sorry, but I have not my file with me.
Mr. HEALEY. Very well; Mr. Connery, our colleague, who I know
is awfully busy, wants to make some remarks.

STATEMENT OF WILLIAM P. CONNERY, REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM MASSACHUSETTS

Mr. CONNERY. Mr. Chairman, this is very reminiscent to me of our 30-hour-week hearings we held in our caucus room, when every big businessman who came before us said, "It might be a good bill, this 30-hour-a-week bill; it is all right for everybody except me"; and it is very reminiscent, and I have listened to it from the time I have been here today.

Incidentally, I was very much interested in the question of the chairman of the preceding speaker, when he asked him what his rates were. He did not answer that question, but said, "You don't expect me to give all of those rates." men wanted to work overtime. Perhaps the wages were so low I was wondering why all of those they had to work overtime. That has been my experience with most of these questions in the past.

Also, I wanted to know whether the gentleman employs organized labor's representatives or whether he just goes out in the open market and picks up the poor devils who have to get whatever they can get in these days of depression.

We just listened to a message from the President of the United States on the floor of the House. After that message I listened to the distinguished gentleman from Virginia, Mr. Woodrum, tell about the taxes pouring into the Treasury of the United States today, showing that there are lots of people in the United States who are making money, and yet we have 11,000,000 people out of work today in the country; and the President says in his message that he estimates that at least 5,000,000 must be taken care of on relief.

Here we have, on this side of the picture, the big corporations making money. On the other side of the picture we have the W. P. A. and the C. C. C. and we have other agencies trying to keep people alive, feed them and keep them warm, because, of course, that is all the relief agencies are doing at this time.

As I say, this is very reminiscent to me, but I do not want to take more of the time of the committee, except to say that I favor this legislation. This is along the lines of the legislation which came out of my own committee, the Metcalf-Connery bill, which passed the House and passed the Senate and was vetoed by President Hoover, that called for the prevailing rate of wages to be paid on all Government work throughout the country.

The Bacon-Davis bill provided that the prevailing rate should be paid on public buildings, and that when the Government was engaged doing this work the prevailing rate of wages must be paid.

We had testimony before that committee, and in one instance we had a case of a man who worked for a contractor for 10 days, and after he paid for the tent that he lived in on the levee, and paid for the ice water that he had to pay to the contractor, he owed the contractor $1.05. Those were conditions that we found throughout the country. This is a step forward, to my mind, this Healey bill, which I have just read.

I have often wondered why the big employers of the United States, who are on the level-I do not mean the chiselers, but those who are on the level-do not want to see legislation passed by Congress which will prevent that, which will prevent the chiseler from interfering with their business. The gentleman preceding me, or one of the speakers, said, "If you let us alone"-that is not his exact language "but if you will let us alone, we will agree to shorter hours and higher wages." Now, the chairman and gentlemen of this committee know that no one ever agreed to higher wages or shorter hours without a hard, bitter, sometimes drenched with blood, fight on the part of organized labor. Ordinarily, the employers of the country-the exception proves the rule-never raise wages of their own volition, that is, free of organized labor, the workers who say, "We refuse to be slaves; we refuse to bring up our families and feed our wives and children and try to educate them on the starvation wage that you want to give us.' So you do not get shorter hours.

The President, in his message, today, said, again, you all remember when we appealed in Constitution Hall-during the life of the N. R. A., we appealed to all of the employers of the country gathered there, and we asked them to raise wages and shorten hours. Yet within 6 months after that, I took the floor of the House one day that less than one thirty-fifth of 1 percent of the employers of the United States had increased their wages or shortened their hours. The President, today, said, "We are going to do that by legislative fiat", but he said "We can get better conditions in the United States if the employers of the country will voluntarily shorten their hours and increase their wages." He realized the situation; 11,000,000 people unemployed; money pouring into the Treasury in income

taxes.

To get back to what I said before, there is something wrong somewhere, and it certainly is not wrong with the worker who is walking the streets and wants to get a job. I think this bill will not do any great hardship to the employer or manufacturer of the United States; all it says is that, if you want to sell things to the United States Government, you have got to pay a decent wage and you cannot have slavery conditions in your factories. The testi

mony shows, in my own State of Massachusetts, in the fuel situation, where they pay the cheapest kind of wages and have long hours of work. I resent that. I do not want to see those people put the decent manufacturers out of business, who pay decent wages and give shorter hours of work.

I admit I feel a selfish point of view there. I am thinking of the interests of the shoe industry in Lynn, in the textile industry in Lawrence that pay decent wages. I think they have 40 in shoes, but I would like to see it 30 hours, because they cannot employ all of the people they have, but they are competing with other sections