Co-operation Un-co-ordinated

Co-operation Uncoordinated

While Big Business, at the conference of the National Association of Manufacturers was proclaiming its new-found passion to cooperate with the New Deal in Manhattan last week (see p. 49) the Council for Industrial Progress, called by President Roosevelt's Coordinator for Industrial cooperation, met in Washington with not a single top-notch business leader in attendance. Prime reason for Big Business' boycott of this first post-Election attempt to devise a substitute for NRA was that the Coordinator for Industrial Co-operation is big, smooth, hairy-fisted Major George Leonard Berry, who is also longtime president of International Pressmen and Assistants Union.

Coordinator Berry's invitations to his first co-operation party, year ago, were also turned down by the nation's industrial leaders, who then made no bones of their antipathy to New Deal meddling (TIME, Dec. 16, 1935). Since Nov. 3 Big Businessmen have professed themselves more than eager to cooperate, but not under the supervision of a Labor leader. The biggest businessman Coordinator Berry could get to chairman his Management section was John G. Paine, Manhattan, who heads the Music Publishers' Protective Association. Perfectly willing to let NRA-substitute ideas simmer in more than one pot, President Roosevelt sent the Berry conference a noncommittal greeting, written before his South American trip, expressing the hope that their deliberations would "promote the stability of our whole national economy."

Even Labor, split by the feud between the American Federation of Labor and the Committee for Industrial Organization, was not unanimously represented at the conference. With A. F. of L.'s President William Green leading the Council's Labor section, C. I. O. Chairman John L. Lewis announced himself out-of-town, resting. But some 900 representatives of Labor and small business turned up, sat down for a two-day talkfest about Government regulation of Business.

"There was definite agreement," declared Chairman Paine when the conference was over, ''on the need for systematic reduction of hours and increases of pay." But the formal conclusions of the conferees were so nebulous that seasoned Washington correspondents despaired of finding in them real meaning. Contradictions in the Council's recommendations were left to be ironed out by a committee to be appointed by Coordinator Berry, which would also decide whether they should be submitted to Congress in legislative drafts or merely presented to President Roosevelt for his consideration.

Evening after his conference adjourned, Major Berry took to the radio, offered to resign as Coordinator for Industrial Co-operation if large industry would thereby be persuaded to cooperate. "Of course," boomed he, "I fully understand that there are those who previously declined to join us because they disliked the President and also because they disliked the representation of organized Labor. . . . Now they don't dislike the President. . . . They want to cooperate. But in order to cooperate with the Federal Government the President must get himself a new co-ordinator."

Coordinator Berry's offer, cracked an associate, was in tune with the times but sounded less like Edward VIII's offer to give up the throne than like Mrs. Simpson's offer to give up the King.

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