Tell 'Em

One day last week, General Electric's big, genial President Charles E. Wilson returned to his office to find 50 red roses in a basket beside his desk. "My favorite flower," he murmured, thumbing through them for a card. When he found one, from a Chicago bank, he was obviously touched. "Why," said Wilson, "they aren't even customers of ours."

The roses and dozens of other bouquets around the room were a tribute to Wilson's first half-century in what G.E. calls its "family." Fifty years ago, at the age of twelve, young Charlie Wilson had come out of the slums of Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen to take a $3-a-week office boy's job with a company that later became part of G.E. Now it was Wilson's turn to get the same small, 50-year button that, as president, he had pinned on so many other G.E. oldtimers. Last week, at a small banquet in Manhattan's Hotel Pierre, Old-timer Wilson got it from ex-G.E. President Gerard Swope. Then Charlie Wilson took a long, hard look at the past and the future of the U.S.

Only ten years ago, he said, when the national income was $70 billion, people thought it fantastic to talk of its ever reaching $125 billion. "Now it has exceeded $200 billion. I don't think President Truman's goal of a $300 billion national income is fantastic at all, provided we maintain the American system about the way it is today. If we get farther over on the side of a planned economy, or socialism, I don't think we can do it."

To reach the $300 billion level, said Wilson, the labor unions, which had already achieved "monopolistic" power to "dominate and control the economy," would have to exercise statesmanship. "If the unions strive only to outdo one another in their demands, and Government-by-edict enforces an endless series of wage increases without regard to industry's costs, it will lead, inevitably, to nationalization of industry."

But Wilson thought that management itself was partly to blame for the union demands. It had not made its case clear to employees and it would have to do better. Said he: "For the last six months, in every plant we have, management has gone in and given [workers] the low-down facts on the business ... I think they are entitled to know. I know that if I were back at the bench working I would want to know a darned sight more than I was told. Forty-five years ago, they told me nothing."

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