TABLE 2.-Per capita income: Annual and daily seasonal average wholesale price of apples in New York City-Continued

TABLE 3.—Income per year and per capita of persons “not on farms” and persons 'on farms"

Source: U. S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agricultural Economics.

(An additional table submitted by Mr. Fraser is as follows:)

TABLE 4.-Labor required on farms: Estimated requirements in terms of man-hour for crops, livestock, and other farm work, United States, 1939 and 1942-44

TABLE 4.-Labor required on farms: Estimated requirements in terms of man-hours for crops, livestock, and other farm work, United States, 1939 and 1942-44-Con.

1 Equivalent man-hours are in terms of the time required by average adult males to perform various farm tasks. Since many women, children, and older workers accomplish less in an hour than an average adult male, actual hours of work on many enterprises are in excess of those shown in this table. 2 Preliminary.

Includes the total labor requirements for all livestock enterprises, except for horses and mules.

4 This kind of work, amounting to about 15 percent of the work needed for farming, includes labor spent on fencing, repairs to buildings, machinery and equipment, farm woods, pastures, general land maintenance, farm business and other miscellaneous work. Some of this work probably has been postponed during wartime because of the scarcity of labor.

Senator TUNNELL. Mr. Fraser, we thank you very much for your testimony. I think you have made a good witness, although I have not agreed with a great deal of what you have said.

Senator ELLENDER. I think you have made an excellent witness, Mr. Fraser, and your testimony will be of much help to all of us. Senator TUNNELL. Mr. Charles Holman.

TESTIMONY OF CHARLES W. HOLMAN, SECRETARY, NATIONAL COOPERATIVE MILK PRODUCERS FEDERATION

Senator TUNNELL. Will you give the reporter your name and position?

Mr. HOLMAN. Charles W. Holman, secretary, National Cooperative Milk Producers, Federation, 1731 Eye Street NW, Washington, D. C.

Mr. Chairman, with your permission, since my testimony is relatively short, and rather technical, I would like to read my statement. Senator TUNNELL. That is all right.

Mr. HOLMAN. Our organization now consists of 74 farmer-owned and farmer-controlled dairy cooperations and several hundred submember groups. The farm families who are the member-owners of these cooperations number more than 350,000 and reside in 46 States. We have approximately 800 dairy plants owned by either the member or submember groups.

I am instructed by the board of directors of the federation, meeting in Washington, D. Č., September 25 and 26, to seek certain changes in S. 1349 introduced by Senator Pepper, of Florida. This bill is intended to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act, otherwise known as the wage and hour law.

The bill makes five major changes in the existing law, as follows: 1. Establishes a minimum wage for unskilled labor of 65 cents per hour for the first year after the enactment of the amendment, 70 cents per hour for the second year, and 75 cents per hour thereafter.

2. Grants to the Wage and Hour Division what is substantially the right to set, without hearings, the hourly rate to be paid to skilled workers;

3. Removes from the bill the so-called first processing exemption, whereby a dairy plant engaged in the first processing of milk, whey, skimmed milk or cream into dairy products, was exempted from overtime provision;

4. Removes from the statute the so-called "area of production' exemption whereby any individual employed within the area of production as defined by the Wage and Hour Administrator-that is in the present law-in processing agricultural products, was not subject to the minimum wage provision, or the maximum hour provision, which requires the payment of time and one-half after 40 hours in any one week;

5. Puts into the present law a statute of limitations permitting an employee to sue for back wages when an employer is found to be under the act-at any time within 5 years from the time such wages became first due.

(1) Although our producers supplying creameries are among the lowest income groups within the food industry, we have no direct recommendation to make concerning the proposed minimum wage scale in Senator Pepper's bill provided incomes of dairy farmers are not reduced below their present levels. We recognize that there are agricultural groups engaged in processing agricultural products which would find it a sacrificial act to be required to pay the new wage scale; also that in such communities these minimum rates would throw out of gear wage relationships with respect to occupations not directly related to interstate commerce. This dislocation would also apply to the competitive position in which dairy farmers would be placed with regard to the rates of labor on their own farms and the rates of labor paid in the various dairy and other plants located in rural communities.

(2) We object to the power given in the bill to the Wage-Hour Division to make adjustments of wages for the skilled employees. We do not believe that officials of Government are either equipped. or can equip themselves, to determine what rates of wages should be paid to such employees without regard to the price returns on commodities processed, and particularly without regard to the effect upon the income of farmers owning and operating, cooperatively. plants whose skilled employees are thus placed within the new jurisdictional power.

Delegation by the Congress of such power to the Wage-Hour Administrator abrogates the theory on which the original act was based. namely, the protection of minimum standards of wages for those in the lowest income brackets employed in handling products in interstate commerce. The new theory would give a Government administrator power to regulate and fix a minimum for all incomes-that is. all wage incomes-without even the procedure of a public hearing. It makes the will or the whim of the Administrator supreme wage law. (3) We believe that two important sections of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, omitted by the Pepper Bill, should be restored