A NEW RECRUIT
A New Recruit THE LOOSE organization we know as the society to solve everyone else's problems first had a new recruit last week—none other than the good old National Association of...
...In addition, the Department recommends that national advertisers spread their advertising more widely, thereby bolstering the shaky economic condition of the smaller publishers...
...To adopt a program such as proposed by the big publishers would reward the same men whose wild orgy of institutional advertising over the past two years is responsible in large part for the shortage we now face...
...It stirs the competitive urge —and that is what gets the job done...
...Alert Progressives know that international cooperation is a basic requirement for the maintenance of peace...
...The NAM's post-war committee, for instance, has burst into print with a resolution calling for the maintenance of peace by an international organization exerting the force of arms...
...Advertising—And Paper ADVERTISERS and publishers are being urged by the Department of Commerce to cut the size of advertisements and accept a lesser volume as a means of meeting the threat of a serious paper shortage...
...Despite the surging antagonisms which Kaiser and other keen observers detect, there is a modest but healthy development of cooperation between labor and management...
...And there is nothing like responsibility to keep people on their toes...
...From these significant beginnings may come a partial check to the "bitterness abroad in the land...
...The behavior of the men becomes a direct responsibility of the union...
...If money is to be spent for so-called good will advertising it is only fair that it go to those who "have suffered under the war economy...
...Many of the smaller publications that depend largely on consumer goods advertising have sustained serious reductions in advertising revenue...
...Moreover it is becoming increasingly evident that they are the only ones who can handle new accounts...
...It is obvious that any losses involved in this scheme proposed by the big boys would fall heaviest on the small weeklies and dailies which carry very little institutional advertising...
...Pleading for a closer relationship and a more sympathetic exchange of ideas, Kaiser made this acute observation recently: "There is bitterness abroad in the land today, class conflict and deep antagonisms, men hating each other without cause...
...With the closed shop," Kaiser observed the other day, "matters are simplified...
...By the end of the year, war production officials predict, 4,000 labor-management committees will be functioning in war industries employing nearly 8,000,000 workers...
...For Kaiser, peculiar industrialist that he is, is convinced that it is not less democracy that is needed in labor-management relations, but more...
...A New Recruit THE LOOSE organization we know as the society to solve everyone else's problems first had a new recruit last week—none other than the good old National Association of Manufacturers...
...It's a challenge...
...The ranks are filling fast...
...If industry will ignore the newspaper and radio labor-haters who are more royalist than the crown and adopt a 20th Century outlook on labor-management relations, and if organized labor will keep its leadership clean and function as a mature, responsible organization, both will have gone far toward heading off a violent economic explosion, "Men's hearts must be right," said Mr...
...A Hopeful Development MODERN industry, the totalitarians used to say, cannot function effectively within a democratic framework...
...If anything in the fantastic production record of the United States during the past year has contributed to a revision of that judgment, it is the production miracles performed by the vast Henry J. Kaiser enterprises...
...Government officials report that where labor-management programs are functioning effectively, there is higher output per worker, less absenteeism, fewer unnecessary jobs, better processes, improved products...
...Among the big business men of America he is probably the most outspoken advocate of complete cooperation between employers and employes...
...Kaiser, who has proven over and oyer again that he knows what he's talking about...
...Curiously enough, the NAM came knocking on the door of rampant internationalism during the very week that Thomas W. Lamont, chairman of the board of J. P. Morgan and Company, blossomed out in a literary magazine with a piece which said, among other things, that Wendell Willkie and Walter Lippmann were simply priceless for being so internationally minded...
...The Department of Commerce's recommendations should be given serious consideration by the President's Newspaper Advisory Committee...
...This plan strikes us as far more practicable and equitable than the program, said to be favored by the big publishers, which would impose rationing on local advertising and allow the national cam-faaigns to go virtually untouched...
...Men's hearts must be right...
...Meanwhile, other NAM committees are cooking up proposals like sales taxes, dilution of social security, abolition of domestic planning, etc., as the program they propose for the home front...
...And these savage wars of peace can never be resolved by riot, mob violence, or martial law...
...This trend is all the more encouraging when one recalls that it has been going on quietly in the midst of smear campaigns against labor by professional haters on the radio and in the press...
...Kaiser has recognized that if labor is to share in the responsibility for industrial production, it is necessary that the men who work be united behind their spokesmen just as management is...
...But they know too, that unless they emphasize the basic importance of putting our own house in order first, they will be doing little more than running errands for the Morgan-Lamont-Willkie-Wall Street and NAM crowd that thinks internationalism is simply wonderful as long as it blinds Americans to the job at home...
...Progressive-minded Americans who feel that our problems are global and require a cosmic solution are finding themselves sitting next to the boys who run the NAM and J. P. Morgan & Company and international banks and huge cartels—all burning with zeal to have us focus our attention on the rest of the world and thus relax the pressure for basic improvement at home...
Vol. 7 • December 1943 • No. 50
