Mr. KNUTSON. For the record, how many of them serve full time? Mr. JONES. We have had no changes in the personnel of the district board from those elected during 1937 to 1939, and then we elected a new board in 1939 and they are still members of that board. They were not the identical members that we had in 1937.

Mr. KNUTSON. You did not get the import of my query. How many of these 17 put in their full time with the committee?

Mr. JONES. One of them; Mr. Charles O'Neill.

Mr. KNUTSON. They are the board of directors?

Mr. JONES. Yes.

Mr. KNUTSON. How many paid employees do you have in your district?

Mr. JONES. You mean employees of the United Mine Workers or under my supervision?

Mr. KNUTSON. Under your supervision.

Mr. JONES. About 22.

Mr. KNUTSON. All of these board members are practical operators, are they?

Mr. JONES. Yes.

Mr. KNUTSON. And they are selected by the mine operators?

Mr. JONES. Yes; except the one member who must represent labor. Mr. KNUTSON. It is my information that the operation of this law has increased the price of coal $1 a ton in the Northwest, and who gets that?

Mr. JONES. I wish that we did, but we do not.

Mr. KNUTSON. Does the Government get it?

Mr. JONES. Well, of course, we have no such movement in price in our area; I think the railroads pay about the same price under the act as they did before; there is no increase there and they are very heavy consumers.

Mr. KNUTSON. I think we are paying about a dollar a ton more than we did 3 or 4 years ago; to what do you ascribe that increase? Mr. JONES. Maybe it is taxes.

Mr. KNUTSON. I mean on bituminous coal.

Mr. JONES. I really cannot see where you could get a dollar a ton. Perhaps that is retail that you are speaking of?

Mr. KNUTSON. Yes.

Mr. JONES. There are many elements in the intermediate handling that I cannot account for, this act does not control the retail price of coal as sold to the consumer.

Mr. KNUTSON. I appreciate that fact, but what we are concerned with is its operation and effect.

Mr. JONES. We have had no substantial increase in realization. Mr. KNUTSON. I think it was testified to on Tuesday that a concern down in North Carolina was paying $75,000 annually more for coal than they did before this act went into effect for the same amount of coal. Now, who gets this, or where does it go?

Mr. JONES. We do not sell coal in North Carolina; I do not know. Mr. KNUTSON. The law is in effect in all of the coal fields, is it not? Mr. JONES. Yes.

Mr. KNUTSON. Have you anything to do with the Pocahontas field? Mr. JONES. No, sir.

Mr. KNUTSON. Or the Mahoning field?

Mr. JONES. No; that is anthracite coal.

Mr. KNUTSON. Well, it seems to be generally agreed that there has been a perceptible increase in the price of coal to the consumers, it is immaterial where the coal comes from, the effect is the same. Now where does that increase go to, can you give us that information? Mr. JONES. Well, as I say, the information that comes to me, which is only a casual observation with another operator, where he says his realization was up 1 cent a ton, and he mines over 1,000,000 tons of coal. Now he sells to the utilities, the big utilities, and rather large industrial plants, but the act did not change his price any, it is a mine that runs continuously, year in and year out, a very successful operation, and that is 1,000,000 tons.

Mr. KNUTSON. Of course, I realize that any tax that is imposed would be pyramided before it reaches the consumer. I recall away back in 1921 or 1922, I went in to have a suit of clothes made, and I think that the tailor charged me $15 more than he had for an identical suit sometime previously. I asked him why that was, and he said it was due to the increased tariff on wool and I asked him how much wool went into that suit and he said about 4 pounds, so that it could not have been over 80 cents by any stretch of the imagination.

But by the time the repercussions struck me, it increased to $15, and I just wondered if the tax imposed in this law has the same effect.

Mr. JONES. So far as my district is concerned, I can say, up to the present time we have no such pyramiding as you indicated and I really cannot talk for the country, I am not trying to avoid answering the question, but I do not know North Carolina.

Mr. KNUTSON. You concede that the law as it now operates does not give the consumer any protection?

Mr. JONES. I think the Consumers' Counsel has authority to work, but that is again out of my bailiwick.

Mr. KNUTSON. But you are an intelligent man.

Mr. JONES. There are a lot of things that I do not know.

Mr. KNUTSON. You have undoubtedly studied the general effect of

the operation of this law.

Mr. JONES. To some extent, yes; I have studied it.

Mr. KNUTSON. You look reasonably intelligent.

Mr. JONES. Perhaps it is a bad assumption.

Mr. KNUTSON. You might not be as frank as we would like to have you.

Mr. JONES. Wait a minute, I seem to be in trouble again; you said I am not frank.

Mr. KNUTSON. You may not be as frank as we would like to have you, I am not saying that you are or you are not, I do not know, I cannot read your mind.

Mr. JONES. I do not know how you would like to have me.

Mr. KNUTSON. You look like a man who would make a very good fishing companion. But getting back to the consumer, have you looked into that at all, to see how much the operation of this law has increased the cost to the little fellow who buys 10 tons a year?

Mr. JONES. You can take the town of Altoona, where I live; we have 250,000 tons of truck coal coming into that town, and the price has not changed there on that coal at all, it is the same price as last year. I will go further on that, the coal industry in central Pennsylvania has always lost money, I expect the act to raise the price 10 cents a ton, so that we will have something out of it, and get out of the red ink, and if it does not do that, it is not worth anything to us.

Mr. KNUTSON. Well, the industry has been losing all this money all the time, how does it create so many millionaires?

Mr. JONES. Show me one.

Mr. KNUTSON. All I know is what I read in the papers, as Will Rogers said.

Mr. JONES. You do not read the right papers.

Mr. KNUTSON. I probably do not.

Mr. JONES. There is no money-making today, Mr. Congressman, in central Pennsylvania. In the very prosperous times, in 1926 to 1929, the coal industry was not making any money.

Mr. BOEHNE. We have heard the word "realization" here so often, I am just too dumb to know what it means; will you define just what realization is?

Mr. JONES. It is the amount of money, the gross realization, as we describe it, the amount of money received for the sale of a product. Mr. BOEHNE. It is not the net profit?

Mr. JONES. No, sir.

Mr. BOEHNE. It is the gross?

Mr. JONES. It is the gross realization.

Mr. BOLAND. Mr. Jones, the evidence of Mr. Wallin here was to the effect, if I understood him correctly, that he had no redress with your board or with the division, as you call it; did he ever ask for a hearing before the division or did he ever have one?

Mr. JONES. He never did. He never asked for one, so far as our records indicate. We will take care of wagon mine operators, that is one of my greatest cares, everyone in the office is told to be particularly nice to them. Some of these chaps come in there and accept the code and cannot read or write.

Mr. BOLAND. Do I understand that most of his trouble could have been adjusted with the Division if it was brought to them in the proper manner?

Mr. JONES. I think so.

Mr. BOLAND. And there was no tendency on the part of your board to exclude him or any individual operator from presenting their grievances to you; is that right?

Mr. JONES. You are absolutely right, and if he will make a petition to us, we will give him the immediate consideration the same as every other one that comes before this board.

Mr. BOLAND. I think that that is a direct answer, and I do not want to go into details; that is exactly what I wanted to find out.

Now then, will you tell me, briefly, Mr. Jones, what effect, in your opinion, it would have upon the bituminous industry in the event that this extension was not granted, presuming it would go back to the old days without any Guffey Coal Act or anything else?

Mr. JONES. I think it would have a most disturbing effect. You will have bidding for labor which would disturb the labor situation

badly. You would have mines opening right and left, creating unreasonable competition and absorbing transportation facilities which ought to be left for the big mines while they are operating so that we may have 100 percent production and no car shortage. I am quite convinced that the act ought to be continued, and not alone as my opinion, but our own district board voted unanimously last week to endorse the resolution for a 2-year extension.

Mr. BOLAND. In other words, these operators who are operating the 40,000,000 tons, say, or the biggest part of it anyhow, are of the opinion that this act will be a benefit to the industry, it will at least give the industry a chance to make a dollar where heretofore it has always been in the red, and all of this talk about the price of coal being raised a dollar a ton and all of that, well you must understand that in the old days before this act, that coal was being sold at such cutthroat competition that they were getting it in some places for almost nothing, men were operating mines and losing money upon their investment; is that not right?

Mr. JONES. That is true.

Mr. BOLAND. Now then, you mentioned the fact that you had been connected with the Lehigh Valley Coal Co., which is an anthracite producer.

Mr. JONES. That is right.

Mr. BOLAND. That is correct, isn't it?

Mr. JONES. Yes, that was in 1916.

Mr. BOLAND. From your experience in the anthracite industry, are you not aware of the fact and sure of the fact that if the anthracite industry had similar regulation as this, that the chaos would not be in the anthracite industry that is there at the present time. Am I right about that?

Mr. JONES. After being away so long, I am reluctant to make a recommendation as to anthracite.

Mr. BOLAND. But the operators in the anthracite district, the reason that they do not have regulation is because of the uncertainty among themselves, of being unable to agree among themselves, to accomplish something for the benefit of the industry. That is causing havoc in the anthracite industry, and I say that if this law is extended 2 years, and proves itself in the way I think it will prove itself, that it is only a question of time when the anthracite industry has to operate under the same kind of conditions, to bring that industry up to where it ought to be.

Mr. JONES. I agree with you; I do not know about the conditions in the anthracite industry at the present time, but I want to try this act for 2 years.

Mr. BOLAND. That is all.

Mr. JENKINS. Mr. Jones, let me ask you two or three questions. What did you do before you became connected with this coal commission?

Mr. JONES. With the district board, you mean.

Mr. JENKINS. Yes.

Mr. JONES. In 1902 I came out of Yale as a civil engineer and followed railroad evaluation, and railroad construction and was 3 years on the Pennsylvania Terminal, and I was valuation engineer for the Norfolk & Southern Railroad.

Mr. JENKINS. How much experience did you have as a valuation. man for coal mines or coal properties at any time?

Mr. JONES. About 2 years and a half.

Mr. JENKINS. Do you give the job of being secretary of this commission your whole time?

Mr. JONES. Practically.

Mr. JENKINS. What kind of a salary do they pay you, is it a private matter or is it a public matter?

Mr. JONES. I will say $12,000.

Mr. JENKINS. The job that you do for these people who produce 40,000,000 tons a year is a $12,000 job.

Mr. JONES. I think it is, because they do it.

Mr. JENKINS. And they must have thought you are worth it, and your past experience would justify that conclusion, I think. How many people do you employ?

Mr. JONES. About 20 or 22.

Mr. JENKINS. What do they do, just give us generally what they do; I know you have to have some stenographers, and I know you have to have people like that, but what other people do you have that assist you, that would be comparable to you in their efficiency and in their knowledge?

Mr. JONES. Mr. O'Neill is chairman of the board, and then we have a lawyer and, of course, bookkeepers, we take care of 2,100 accounts and that is quite an item, and we have a statistician, engineers, and there is a price-fixing committee.

Mr. JENKINS. How much do you pay your attorney, for instance? Mr. JONES. We quarrel with him about that, too. We do not have a retaining fee, it depends on the character of work he is doing, if he is arguing a case that is one thing, and if it is something else that is something else.

Mr. JENKINS. Does it take all the time of one good practicing attorney?

Mr. JONES. It depends, it varies, he has been here a month on the Wheeling case.

Mr. JENKINS. What I am trying to find out is, how big is one of these boards, that is what I am trying to get you to tell our committee, what is the work of one of your boards, how much do they do, and so forth?

Mr. JONES. We sample the coal, classify the mines, and compile all of the data on production, distribution as far as we can get it, and the sampling of the coal is quite an undertaking, and maybe this will answer your question, our expenses run from $9,000 to $12,000 per month as a district board.

Mr. JENKINS. When you say that you sample the coal, I suppose you have a regular formula that comes to you from the Washington Commission, to tell you how to sample the coal?

Mr. JONES. No, the men working on that truck are engineers and they follow the American Society of Testing Materials' rules and regulations.

Mr. JENKINS. What I am coming to there is how do you know that your method of sampling is the same as the method used in some other district?