Mr. HUMPHRIES. It varies in different parts of the State, but the scale we are paying now is 56 cents, on the average, but it varies, because competent employees naturally cannot work in harmony with incompetent and receive the same scale of pay.

Mr. KEARNS. You have to discriminate between competent and incompetent?

Mr. HUMPHRIES. Yes, sir. Everybody does, whether they admit it or not.

Mr. LESINSKI. Are there are any other questions, gentlemen?

Mr. McCONNELL. I wanted to ask about the maximum hours. How do they apply?

Mr. HUMPHRIES. In the wholesale industry in the South, it takes about 5211⁄2 hours a week to get the job done.

Mr. MCCONNELL. Do you pay time and a half over the 40-hour week?

Mr. HUMPHRIES. Absolutely. Every man gets time and a half over a 40-hour week.

Mr. McCONNELL. How about Saturday work? Is there any dif ferential there?

Mr. HUMPHRIES. It is time and a half, all over 40 hours, regardless.

Mr. LESINSKI. Are there any other questions?

Mr. LUCAS. Let me ask just one question.

Mr. LESINSKI. Mr. Lucas.

Mr. LUCAS. If this bill is enacted as proposed here, with a 75-cent inflexible minimum wage, will it result in your industry in further employment or unemployment?

Mr. HUMPHRIES. It will perceptibly decrease unemployment, because the operation has to be tailored to meet the operational cost in line with the gross profit to have any net profit; otherwise, you have a diminishing return to where you cannot operate.

Mr. LUCAS. Give us an example of that. Let us get down to your office or your warehouse.

Mr. HUMPHRIES. All right, sir.

Mr. LUCAS. You have, let us say, 20 employees working in your warehouse, to whom you are paying an average of 56 cents now. Some of them naturally must make as much as $1. Will some of these employees have to be dismissed if you have to raise the minimum wage up to 75 cents an hour?

Mr. HUMPHRIES. Yes, sir; they will. In fact, we have been working on revising the schedule of workers. Where a man was working 5212 hours, we will have to revamp our system of delivery and so on to put that down to 40 hours; either that, or decrease the number of men working.

Furthermore, as another angle of this, we have in all wholesale houses men working who have been there 15, 20, or 30 years, and we keep those men on. Those men will have to be eliminated for more efficient type of men if the wage scale goes up sufficiently.

Mr. BAILEY. May I interpose there?

Mr. LUCAS. Yes. I am through.

Mr. BAILEY. You were speaking of working 52 hours?
Mr. HUMPHRIES. Fifty-two and one-half.

Mr. BAILEY. Would it not be a matter of economy if you limited each individual to 40 hours, so that you could save on overtime and use that money to employ additional help, or meet the minimum?

It seems to me uneconomical to work 52 hours.

Mr. HUMPHRIES. We probably will. You will have to stagger your employees, however, and work out different schedules for them. Mr. BAILEY. That is exactly what I meant.

Mr. HUMPHRIES. But there is a certain amount of work to be done there which experience over a period of 50 years has justified thus far. There is not any way to do it except to get in there and fill those orders. I do not know much about some things, but I do know wholesale business. So I am going to try to answer your questions, just as you want, fairly and honestly, and that is the only way you will have it. In other words, you have your orders coming in there in the evening from your salesmen who are traveling. Those orders must be filled early the next morning to load them on the trucks, because some of them go as much as 50 or 60 miles, or more, out through a rural area. We have an extremely rural State, and in order to do that, then you have your pickers, as we call them in the trade, those who load it on to the trucks, and then you have your check-out people, and then you have your truck drivers. But these trucks have to get ready to roll, if they are going 50 miles and make, say, 27 stops, and get back in there by night. If you did not, they could not make the trip.

Of course, there are methods of revising this, and I believe that your suggestion will do us a lot of good in helping to work that out, sir. Mr. BAILEY. That is all, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Humphries.

Mr. HUMPHRIES. Yes, sir.

Mr. LESINSKI. Are there any further questions?
Mr. IRVING. Mr. Chairman-

Mr. LESINSKI. Mr. Irving.

Mr. IRVING. Both witnesses have testified that they think the minimum wage will cause unemployment, and particularly Congressman Hays said it will cause considerable unemployment. Experience does not bear that out in 1929 and the 1930's. We had no minimum wage and we had from 12,000,000 to 15,000,000 unemployed in the country. I do not know the peak figure, but we certainly had plenty of unemployment at that time without minimum wages.

Mr. LESINSKI. Are there any other statements? If not, the gentlemen are excused, and we will meet at a quarter to 2, and the witness will be Mr. William T. Jobe, counsel for the National Association of Ice Industries.

Mr. BAILEY. Mr. Chairman, are we going to accord the courtesy of asking Mr. Reid Murray, of Wisconsin, to come back?

Mr. LESINSKI. We will. Congressman Murray had to leave, and he has not come back yet; so I do not know at what time we will have to put him on.

We may have to arrange for another time for him.

We will recess until a quarter to 2.

(Whereupon, at 12:15 p. m., a recess was taken until 1:45 p. m. of the same day.)

AFTERNOON SESSION

(The committee reconvened at 2:10 o'clock p. m., at the expiration of the recess.)

Mr. LESINSKI. The committee will come to order.

Mr. Jobe.

Do you have a prepared statement, Mr. Jobe?

Mr. JOBE. No, sir; I have not. I made arrangements with the clerk to submit that later.

Mr. LESINSKI. You know under the rules you are supposed to have a prepared statement so every member knows what you are going to talk about.

You may go ahead.

TESTIMONY OF WILLIAM T. JOBE, GENERAL COUNSEL, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF ICE INDUSTRIES

Mr. LESINSKI. Please state your name.

Mr. JOBE. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, my name is William T. Jobe. I am general counsel for the National Association of Ice Industries, the only national organization representing the interests of the ice industry.

And by way of explanation I wish to apologize to the committee for my failure to supply you with a copy of the statement which I would normally make, but it was not until 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon that arrangements, special arrangements, were made with the clerk of the committee to appear this morning at 10:30. Up until that time we had received written notice from the committee that our industry would not be able to appear before the committee due to the brevity of time allotted to these hearings. I have, as I stated, arranged with the clerk of the committee to submit a formal statement for the record. My remarks, therefore, will be oral, and to some of you gentlemen may be somewhat repetitious.

I appear this afternoon on behalf of the 6,500 ice companies in the United States, and specifically for the 2,600 companies in our association, the membership of which produced approximately 70 percent of the 54,000,000 tons of ice produced and distributed in the United States this last year. These companies have a capital investment exceeding a half a billion dollars, and they provide the livelihood for some three-quarters of a million persons each year. I mention these few facts to give you some idea as to who it is I am speaking for.

The operation of a typical ice plant is perhaps one of the best examples that you can have discussed of a truly small business enterprise. The ice business is one of the oldest in America. Collectively, it is a group of small, privately owned, privately operated plants or establishments, doing business in practically every city, town, or urban community in the United States. I am sure that there is not a member of the committee who does not have a number of the establishments about which I am speaking in your district. Like every other industry, we have a few large ones, but the vast majority of them are small operations. They are owned by families generally whose investments have gone back three or four generations. They range in size from an 8- to a 10-ton plant, to one of 400 or 500 tons daily capacity. The

capacity of the average ice plant in the United States is approximately 40 tons daily.

These brief data are given for purposes of showing you that we come not in a passive mood, but to demonstrate our deep interest in the legislation now before you. We do not come for purposes of just voicing opposition for the sake of being opposed to something, but instead we earnestly desire and hope that some of the comments or remarks that I may make may prove helpful in your study of this bill.

The ice industry feels very keenly that the measure you are considering in the form of the so-called committee print is far more important and deserves much more consideration than the scheduled hearings would indicate it is to receive.

Our people question the wisdom of Congress attempting to rush through a piece of legislation that is as far-reaching in scope and effect as is the apparent aim of the proponents of this bill.

They feel further, and know, from actual experience, that this wagehour law is one of the most, if not the most troublesome Federal statute with which they have to deal. And with increasing certainty they definitely know that the proposed bill will create still more oppressive and difficult conditions to operate under.

We contend that the working conditions and the characteristics of one industry may be, and in most instances, are, entirely different from those of other industries, and yet this bill makes no provision to take these matters into consideration.

We feel very strongly also that if Congress is to establish a minimum wage for the entire country it should take into account the wide variety of factors existing in the different areas of the country, and especially the particular characteristics of different affected industries. For example, the seasonal characteristics of the ice business. We feel that perhaps there is no other industry that is as typically seasonal in its entire operations as is the ice business.

And it is in this respect that this wage-hour law causes us so much hardship. As you must realize, the ice business is a hot-weather proposition. Over 50 percent of the total ice produced each year in this country is produced during the three peak summer months, and because of this heavy demand for ice during these 3 months there necessarily must be continuous around-the-clock operations. There could be no pulling of the switch in an ice plant when the weather gets hot.

What does this mean? It means long hours and much overtime during these 3 months. Following the summer peak the demand for ice drops off, and during the winter months, as we are now experiencing, a great many plants are practically shut down in order to enable them to become rehabilitated and repaired, looking toward the new

season.

This seasonal fluctuation in the demand for the product of our industry creates serious manpower problems. In order for an ice company to prevent having to go into a new season without the experienced help, they must retain the basic nucleus of their personnel organization, even though their load factor is extremely low in the wintertime, and in practically every instance there is not enough work for them to put in a 40-hour workweek.

To state the situation another way, the application of the proposed increased minimum to our industry, with the tremendous amount of

overtime during the summer months, is, we believe, unjust because traditionally the employees in our industry have been accustomed to a weekly or monthly payroll. Our employees are accustomed to this, and they like to know what their pay check will be on Saturday night, or at the end of their particular pay period.

Morever, they are perfectly willing to work a little harder and put in longer hours during the three summer months, at no special overtime premium rate, realizing they will make it up during the winter in the off-peak months when the hours will be less, and the work easier than the required 40 hours, but yet they will continue to receive their basic weekly or monthly pay check.

By the same token, ice-company management is perfectly willing to pay their employees through the winter, or offpeak months, realizing they will make it up in the summer, or peak months, when they will have to work harder and no longer at no exorbitant increased rate for overtime.

During the winter off-peak months, for example, thousands of our employees work less than the 40-hour statutory week. Instead, many work as little as 20 hours, yet they continue to receive their weekly or monthly earnings.

The employers fully appreciate the fact they must pay their employees a living wage; otherwise they would never be able to hold them when the summer peak arrives.

At the same time, however, they object, and they feel very keenly that to increase the present minimum to 75 cents, as proposed, without having an opportunity to adjust or equalize the wages to be paid commensurate with the amount of work that is actually performed, or the number of hours which their employees are on duty, is unfair and unreasonable. If this bill is enacted into law it will not only establish a 75-cent minimum for the lowest-paid employees, but it is inescapable that all throughout the entire personnel structure there must be corresponding increases depending upon the classification and the work being performed.

This type of increase will penalize the small plants. The larger plants can endure it much easier because they are in a larger community where the demands for their product are more constant, and they can endure or accept the extra penalty of the 75-cent minimum, but the smaller plants will just not be able to do it.

It is in cases of this kind that we feel the act should make some exemptive allowances and not treat everybody, every company, regardless of its size and location, the same.

Moreover, we wish to express ourselves plainly to the committee that in our wisdom Congress should go cautiously in the consideration of this legislation. We are still on a plateau of distorted post war economy. Economists have testified already, and perhaps others will fol low, that they are not exactly sure when recession is coming, but they seem to be in total agreement that one is sure to come, and once the 75-cent minimum is on the statute books it will be very difficult to take it off. When this condition arrives it will affect both employer and employee alike.

When employers who are faced with high minimum rates established by a Federal statute, find it impossible to meet the pay roll, there is only one thing can happen, and it is unemployment. We have the