Date

Seven years ago last week the stockmarket crashed as it had never crashed before, bringing the New Era to a disastrous, disillusioning end. To date the end of Depression was not so easy--regardless of this week's election results (see p. 23). For convenience, however, financial pundits fastened upon a symbolic day and hour when, if something happened, they could say that bad times were over. That something was restoration of full preferred dividends by U. S. Steel Corp., world's largest private industrial enterprise, world's largest employer of industrial labor. Last week the Steel Corporation not only declared the full $1.75 quarterly payment on its preferred, but also tossed in an extra $2 payment as a start toward clearing up the $16.25 arrears accumulated since 1933.

As an index of Recovery, U. S. Steel's dividend policy may have been distorted by the new Federal tax on undistributed profits, a measure calculated to spur any directorate to generous treatment of stockholders. What was significant was that U. S. Steel's directors had the means with which to be generous. In the past five years the net result of U. S. Steel's operations was a loss of $132,000,000. In announcing the dividend action Chairman Myron Charles Taylor reported that U. S. Steel's profits for the third quarter of 1936 were $13,600,000, for the first nine months of the year, $29,800,000. In the first nine months of last year U. S. Steel lost money ($4,200,000).

Chairman Taylor now reports on the Steel Corporation as an employer of labor as well as a profit-making venture. Last week he noted that the number of employes in the first nine months of 1936 averaged 216,000 compared to 184,000 in the same period last year. Total payrolls for the period showed a much sharper increase (from $184,000,000 to $242,000,000). This rise was not due to higher wages (in both periods the average rate was 73-c- per hour) but to longer hours. Last year the average U. S. Steel employe was working less than 145 hours per month, this year nearly 170 hours.

On the subject of a general wage boost, now being agitated by U. S. Steel's company unions, Chairman Taylor was silent. Consensus is that steel wages will be upped as soon as steel consumers can be persuaded to pay higher prices for the metal. For once the nation's steelmen are not adverse to a general pay increase because that action might undercut the efforts of John Llewellyn Lewis and his Committee for Industrial Organization which is out to unionize the citadel of the open shop.

Other notable steel earnings: Bethlehem Steel made $4,500,000 in the third quarter, best figure for that period since 1929. Said President Eugene Gifford Grace: "I should expect to see Bethlehem's fourth quarter at least as good as the third quarter."

Inland Steel's earnings of $3,788,000 were the largest for any third quarter in the company's history.

Jones & Laughlin, like U. S. Steel, restored full preferred dividends last week after reporting a $1,870,000 profit for the third quarter. In the same three months last year J. & L. made only $233,000.

Youngstown Sheet & Tube made $6,845,000 in the first nine months of 1936 as against a measly $103,000 in the same months of 1935.

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