in the labor-market area, with respect to the particular job classification, or which was, during the week involved, excluded from measured working time by the express terms of or by custom or practice under a bona fide collectivebargaining agreement applicable to the particular employee."

Or if the committee should conclude that the amendment might and should be limited to collective bargaining, then it could read as follows:

"(r) Hours worked: In determining for the purposes of sections 6 and 7 the hours for which an employee is employed, there shall be excluded any time which was excluded from measured working time during the week involved by the express terms of or by custom or practice under a bona fide collective-bargaining agreement applicable to the particular employee."

We believe the latter suggestion would for the most part dispose of the problem in covered establishments in the baking industry, and so far as we know it would do so in industry generally.

Nothing in our proposal conflicts with or requires amendment of the Portal-toPortal Act, which merely sets up various bars and defenses against liabilities which would otherwise arise under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Even section 4 of the Portal Act (barring liability for traveling and for activities "preliminary" or "postliminary" to an employee's "principal" activity) still would have some application, if it has any now, to unorganized establishments if the committee and the Congress were to adopt our suggested amendment, to the Fair Labor Standards Act itself, limited to collective-bargaining agreements.

The other amendment suggested here earlier under the heading "Overtime on overtime" would dispose of this problem as well as of the overtime on overtime and related problems, but if that is not adopted, we urgently request that you adopt one of these three alternative amendments pertaining to "hours worked."

The "portal" emergency of 1947 followed many unheeded signs and warnings. We urge this committee not to let this history repeat itself.

Mr. LESINSKI. We will reconvene at 2 o'clock.

(Whereupon, at 12:20 p. m., a recess was taken until 2 p. m. of the same day.)

(At 2 p. m. it was announced that the members of the committee were required to be present on the floor of the House and that the committee would meet at 10 a. m., Thursday, February 17, 1949.)

AMENDMENTS TO THE FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT

OF 1938

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 1949

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,
COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND LABOR,

Washington, D. C.

The committee met, pursuant to adjournment, at 10 a. m., Hon. John Lesinski (chairman) presiding.

Mr. LESINSKI. The hearing will come to order. Gentlemen, our next witness is Paul Sifton, national legislative representative, UAWCIO. Mr. Sifton.

TESTIMONY OF PAUL SIFTON, NATIONAL LEGISLATIVE REPRESENTATIVE, UAW-CIO, ACCOMPANIED BY IRVING J. LEVY, GENERAL COUNSEL, UAW-CIO

Mr. SIFTON. Mr. Chairman, I was reading last night from the Congressional Record. There is a statement on page A786 by Representative Forand, in introducing a comprehensive public-assistance bill. I would like to quote briefly from it, because I think that it has a bearing on the matter under consideration before this committee. He said:

This bill recognizes that the need for assistance should decline as insurance protection, full employment, health insurance, and other programs for medical care serve to reduce dependency to a minimum. The role of public welfare should itself be increasingly preventive and most of its present difficulties spring from the fact that it is having to pay the price in staggering assistance loads for our failure to enact other measures to prevent dependency and give it the resources to dress this part of its function.

Now, one of the reasons for this act, as I understand it, is to see that the wage earners of American industry receive, as part of the productive processes, at least a subsistence income, as part of it, rather than having to make it up in assistance and relief payments, to make up for what should have been received by them from the productive processes. My statement is for the purpose, first, of emphasizing the ĈIO position, stated early in these hearings, that the minimum wage should be $1 an hour, as called for by convention resolutions of the UAWCIO and the CIO, and provided for in H. R. 2033, which sets an immediate 75-cent floor and provides for increases to $1 as rapidly as possible;

Second, demonstrating the unwisdom of the provision in both the committee print and H. R. 2033, section 8 (f) for cutting minimum wages during a depression; and,

Third, further supporting the proposal now in H. R. 2033 for extending the coverage of the act to hired farm labor on large commer

cial-farming operations so as to promote fair competition between such operations and family-type farm enterprises which attempt to sustain a family on an American standard of living the year round. In that connection, I believe that the testimony of Representative Pace yesterday supported the view that, if family-type farming is to be protected, there must be some floor established for them in the minimum-wage structure, to equalize competition between them and these large commercalized-farming operations in this country.

As to the precise point of delineating the division, that is a matter of study. We subscribe to the formula that was evolved by the Wage and Hour Administrator in his report, on pages 145 and 146, I believe. Mr. LESINSKI. If the gentleman will yield for a moment. I will say that I was surprised at the testimony Congressman Pace gave.

Mr. SIFTON. I believe Congressman Reid Murray also supported that viewpoint.

Mr. LESINSKI. I thought that he would be entirely against the minimum wage, but I find that his testimony was entirely the opposite. What he wants to do is protect the smaller farmers.

Mr. SIFTON. Well, of course, the CIO is for the farm-price-support system, which is the minimum equivalent minimum wage in the family-type farm operations.

We will offer later in my presentation the CIO resolution on that subject, which was described by one of our Columnists, Mr. Lowell Mellett, as so understanding and sympathetic of the farmers' problems that it might have been written by a farm organization.

Mr. WIER. Mr. Chairman, may I ask a question?

Mr. LESINSKI. Mr. Wier.

Mr. WIER. I would like to ask you a question at this point. I would like to stop you right here, because I find that in these whole hearings of 3 weeks now-and I will say that I come from an agricultural State-I find that the most delicate part of this whole report of the Wage and Hour Division is hinged around its getting into the field of agriculture.

I think that has given us more substantial argument, as contrasted to the great amount of more windy arguments that we have had around here it has been more windy than anything I have heard since 1930.

What is your reaction, now, the reaction of you people in the CIO? You have gone into a lot of so-called processing and packing operations on agricultural products.

Where do you think that this Labor Committee or this Congress ought to draw the line between the term commercial farming and the fellow who is farming to make a living-God bless him, let him make a good living. Where do you draw that line? That is what I want to find before this committee makes a report.

Mr. SIFTON. Well, when they work on straight factory operations. when they are engaged in the handling, the processing, the packing, the preparing, the storing, and so on, that should be covered by the act. That is an industrialized operation. Those people are wage earners and they work there and they are entitled to it for all of the reasons that apply to factory workers in other industries, such as the textile industry, automobiles, steel mills, or anything else.

As to operations in what are called factories in the fields, we feel that those people, too, are wage earners and they have to live all the

year around. They may be migratory workers paid for part of the year, employed for a part of the year, and they may be on relief for the rest of the year. I feel that at the least they should be given a subsistence wage.

As to the family-type operator, in point of equity, we believe that it is valid. We believe that it must be recognized that that familytype operator has to keep his wife and children and himself alive all the year around 365 days a year-he has to buy clothes, shoes, and he has to get them doctor and dental care, and so forth.

If he is going to compete with a great farming operation like Di Giorgio Farms or Kern County Land Co., who employ people when they are needed and who throw them off when they are not needed-we feel that if he has to compete with them, that the minimum protection for this family-type operation, which has a labor force all year around, is the payment of these minimum wages to the migratory workers while they are employed and working in the field.

Mr. WIER. Let me ask you this: I am in agreement on the industrialized part of agriculture. However, let us follow up from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border, which is our great farming area in the Middle West.

We have, whether it is wheat or cotton, two seasons when the farmer or group of farmers uses labor, when he has his peak loads, so to speak. Those two seasons are, first, the sowing and plowing seasons. The other is the harvesting and threshing season.

Now, follow that right up through. There may be a combination on the threshing, there may be 25 men, or on the harvesting there might be 30 or 40 men, for a period that is exempted by the law, although I do not think that it lasts 14 weeks.

The same thing is true in the canning and sugar beets, in the growing and processing. I ask you now, where do we start to apply this law to the people engaged in that? Following it through, when you have to have your peak load employments, where do we start to pick up this law, in all of this growing and harvesting and packing?

Mr. SIFTON. According to the Administrator, it is 300 man-days of hired labor in any of the four preceding calendar quarters which brings the enterprise under the act.

It has been pointed out and it has not been challenged that that would cover only 2 percent of the farms in America and only 4 percent of the farms hiring labor; but it would bring under the protection of the act 1,000,000 of the 2,000,000 farm workers in America.

I think that is a pretty good establishment of the desirable objective. It seems to me that if you can devise a formula that only affects. 2 percent of the farm operators, none of them strictly family-type farmers, and yet which gives protection to half of the farm laborers in America, and all of the hired farm labor on these big corporate absentee farm enterprises where they mine both the land and the people, instead of farming on a reproductive maintenance basis-we feel that you will have accomplished a good thing.

Mr. WIER. That is all.

Mr. LESINSKI. You may proceed.

Mr. SIFTON. Our first point is that the minimum wage should be $1 an hour. Our national income in 1938 was 67.4 billion dollars. In 1948 it was 224 billion dollars, 233 percent above 1938.