Patches

For nearly six months the U. S. public has put up with Federal wage-hour regulation in spite of the Wage & Hour Law. Administrator Elmer Frank Andrews has been able to get wide compliance mainly because: 1) he is a reasonable man; 2) the Act's demands are modest (25-c- an hour, 44 hours a week); 3) the penalties are so stiff that Business had to try to conform to a miserably written statute. Last week Mr. Andrews, vexed just as much as Business by the bungled law, asked Congress to cure the worst defects. His chief proposals :

1) Exempt from overtime pay employes who get $200 or more a month in guaranteed salaries (as distinguished from variable wages), thus removing an expensive and vexatious burden from employers without lessening benefits to low-paid workers.

2) Guarantee that employers will not be prosecuted if they follow the Administrator's rulings and interpretations, pending court decisions on moot points. Employers now take Elmer Andrews' advice at their risk, chancing heavy damages, fines up to $10,000, even six months in jail if the courts disagree with the Administrator on what the law means.

3) Don't make businessmen subject to punishment if they buy goods produced in plants where the Act is violated without the purchaser's knowledge.

4) Clearly exempt processors of specified agricultural products from paying overtime. Many of these are now covered by a clause which baffles even Mr. Andrews' astute General Counsel Calvert Magruder.

5) Exempt Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands from the arbitrary wage minima prescribed for the U. S. and let committees familiar with island industries figure out how to raise wages without ruining island industries now accustomed to living in an economy with a much lower scale of prices.

Last week New Jersey's Mary Teresa Norton, chairman of the House Labor Committee, offered Elmer Andrews' amendments to Congress. Doing so, she conceded that the Act as it stands "has tended to create hardship on employers, reduce employment and generally dislocate the flow of business in a particular industry."

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