Shakedown

Having plowed through no less than 60 industrial agreements affecting the work and wages of 11,000,000 people, NRA last week completed its four-month shakedown cruise. Result of the shakedown was a re-organization of NRA into five permanent branches: Extractive Industries (including motors and shipping); Construction & Machinery (including lumber and metal products); Chemicals, Leather & Other Manufactures; Trades. Services, Textiles & Clothing. Each now has its own administrator, who acts as a deputy to General Johnson. General Johnson personally takes over the fifth department: Compliance. Structure of the Compliance Board is based on 26 district officers of the Department of Commerce. Anyone who has a complaint to make against a code violator may go to his post office, procure a blank, file the charge with the district compliance officer. If he cannot settle the case it goes to a Divisional Administrator. If he cannot settle the case it goes to the National Compliance Board. If it cannot settle the case it goes to General Johnson, who can turn it over for prosecution to the Attorney General or to the Federal Trade Commission. "The district compliance director," General Johnson cautioned his new organization, "must bear in mind that his function is to attain compliance by education, expla nation and adjustment. He is not an enforcement officer in any sense of the word."

By Jan. 1 the revamped NRA expects to get through most of the 200 codes still pending. Most important code now in the mill is that of the construction industry. It is facing determined opposition by labor leaders who contend that as it now stands. the code, by fixing a minimum of 40-c- an hour for unskilled labor, jeopardizes union wage scales. After the building code is settled, anthracite coal will be tackled.

Administrator Johnson was in high dudgeon last week when the monthly Federal Reserve Board Bulletin stated: "The decline in industrial activity during the past two months has come in large measure in the industries in which expansion previously had been most rapid. It has also been marked in industries in which processing taxes or codes have become effective recently."

"NRA, of course, has nothing to do with processing taxes," the onetime cavalryman snapped back, "but as to the effect of codes, the situation is the reverse of that pictured in the Board's statement. Practically every major industry has been operating under a code since August. . . . With the exception of the steel industry, every report we have received from major industries shows a definite upward trend." Dr. Emanuel Alexander Goldenweiser, the Federal Reserve's chief researcher and statistician, was treated to a telephone tirade by General Johnson who subsequently announced that Dr. Goldenweiser admitted the Reserve's statement was "inadvertent." Dr. Goldenweiser would not discuss the matter for publication.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.