Mr. PATTERSON. Mr. Holman, you do not advocate a low price for labor. Would you not like to see the people who struggle for a living get as high prices as possible for their efforts and for their energies? I know your answer to that is that if the processor is to stay in business profits must be made. I realize that, and I am for that, also.

Mr. HOLMAN. Well, Mr. Patterson, I have made speeches all over this country advocating good wages for all labor and good prices for all farmers, and a fair profit for all processors, but here is what you are up against in Washington: We are continually having to meet increasing demands for raising the wage scale that goes into products not only that we ourselves produce, but products that our people have to buy from others, and at the same time price ceilings are held down rigidly upon the products which we have to sell. So we are between the upper and the nether millstones of a cross-eyed public policy.

Mr. PATTERSON. Yes; there has been talk about it in the news. Therefore, if we stabilized prices by putting ceilings on prices and got them up high enough so that 65- or 75-cent wage could be borne you would be for it; then you would be for that as a minimum wage?

Mr. HOLMAN. You refer now to the processing plants, Mr. Patterson?

Mr. PATTERSON. No; all of the way through. Every businessman is in the same boat, and the business cannot exist, we realize, unless it makes a profit.

Mr. HOLMAN. That is right.

Mr. PATTERSON. We do not want to put any businessman or any farmer out of business, and I think every sensible man is willing to go along with ceiling prices in accordance with the ability to pay them, ceiling prices on the farmer or the businessman, but they should not take it all out in human misery and human indecency. That is the point; there is a standard of living that human beings are entitled to in order to live and eat, and to educate themselves and their children properly. I think that is the basic reason why some of us talked of a minimum wage, but in this industry where there is a sliding scale, and where, necessarily, it reflects a change in prices, I think it should go up and down.

I do not think you should take it out on a poor fellow because he happens to be a milker, or a hay pitcher, or because he makes butter; and it makes no difference whether he is working for the United States Steel Corp. or for General Motors if when we get through you can say these human beings are discriminated against in the farming region any more than they are in the industrial region. But I admit you must be kept from too deep a recession in prices as to farm and agricultural products in order to do no harm to those thousands and thousands of farmers who are living on and working on submarginal land. They ought to get off of that kind of land so that they do not starve. You cannot take something out of the soil that is not there. Neither the farmer nor labor should suffer in that regard. I do not think there is any radical tendency here but the desire to permit decent standards all over America, thus strengthening our democracy.

Mr. HOLMAN. Mr. Patterson, you and I would be able to come to an agreement if, for example, this committee had within its power the production of a coordinated type of legislation which would furnish the necessary protection for those who have to pay for the higherminimum wage.

Mr. PATTERSON. Well, we have to start somewhere on this. Whether we are starting out from the right side or the wrong side, we do not know, but we have to get started somewhere.

Mr. HOLMAN. Representative Pace has a bill that came out of the House Committee on Agriculture unanimously recently, providing for the simple matter of including all farm labor, which means both the hired labor, the labor of the operator, and the labor of his family, to be computed into the parity formula.

We have reason to believe that it has the opposition of the present Department of Agriculture. I know that it was opposed during the Roosevelt administration. That bill, in some form, has passed this House three times, and has been blocked in the Senate. We even had to withdraw it from debate on the floor of the Senate less than 2 years ago when the Honorable John Bankhead was our floor manager, because Mr. Lewis had another strike, and the word came down from the White House that if that bill went through, that the White House would veto it.

Now, Mr. Lewis has another strike provision up. Always the farmers have to wait until labor is taken care of.

Now, give me a bill that has your minimum wage running right through universally and with protection against cheaper products, dairy products, I will say, that come in from abroad, because we will then be on a very high elevation, and protected prices, and I do not say subsidy, as we are opposed to subsidy. As to the fellow who is on the submarginal land, let the Government buy it and transfer him somewhere else, but we want protected prices just as labor wants the minimum wage. Labor refused to take subsidies, except indirectly, when we gave them a 5-cent subsidy on butter, which has just been taken off the last week. The farmers' price was rolled back 5 cents to give the consumer a 41-cent price for butter at Chicago wholesale. Now, give me those things, and put them in one bill, rather than having one bill here, and one bill there, and another bill there, and another bill here, to be shut off completely from any possible protection from foreign production by the existence of the Trade Agreement Act and the legislation that goes with it that we are up against now. Of course, such a bill would be knocked out on a point of order.

Mr. PATTERSON. I would be very glad if you and I could get together and draw a bill up, other than on the international situation. I refuse to get into foreign trade agreements.

Mr. RAMSPECK. Mr. Holman, I have been a member of Congress for 16 years, and I have seen a good deal of you, and I think you have done an excellent job for your organization.

Mr. HOLMAN. I thank you, sir. We greatly esteem your fairness. Mr. RAMSPECK. If the proposals in this legislation were applied to agriculture generally, is it not true that the prices the farmer receives would have to go up about 300 percent?

Mr. HOLMAN. I do not know the percentage, but they would have to go up a great deal, Mr. Ramspeck.

Mr. RAMSPECK. I know, as far as cotton is concerned, that it is pretty generally understood that even with the present prices of cotton the cotton farmer gets about 20 cents an hour for his labor.

Mr. HOLMAN. I would not want to go back to Texas and grow cotton. Mr. PATTERSON. Mr. Chairman, are you for the cotton workers working for 20 cents an hour?

Mr. RAMSPECK. No, I am not; but I do not see any answer to it, Mr. Patterson, except the one Mr. Holman has suggested. If I understood what you said correctly, it would be a guaranteed price for agricultural products which would produce for the farmer something comparable to that paid to industry.

Mr. PATTERSON. Yes; I agree with you on that basis Mr. Chairman. Mr. HOLMAN. They would have to have between 40- and 50-cent cotton to take care of this wage increase in the South.

Mr. PATTERSON. Cotton is a difficult commodity to handle because it is in the world market like grain. It is hard to regulate, and it is a very difficulty commodity to handle.

Mr. RAMSPECK. Yes; I realize that is true.

I attended a meeting a couple of nights ago, and I think Mr. Holman was there, where a man undertook to demonstrate to us that the wages paid in industry were directly related to the income of the farmer. It is like the old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. I think his same charts could be used as an argument to prove that the income of the farmer was controlled by the wages paid to industry, and nobody could tell which was right; but it is true that, in my opinion, if the proposals in some of these bills were applied to agriculture that the cost of living would have to go up very materially. What the percentage of increase would be, I do not know; and I do not presume you do, Mr. Holman; but the average farmer certainly does not make 65 cents an hour; does he?

Mr. HOLMAN. No.

Mr. PATTERSON. We are used to paying a lot for automobiles, luxuries, and other things; but we are not used to giving the farmer a square deal for his efforts on the farm. I admit that; but, at the same time, I do not want to take it out on labor. All of us assume responsibility, along with labor, to the farmer. The farmer should not be discriminated against any more than General Motors or United States Steel should be discriminated against.

Mr. HOLMAN. Some of these bills ask for one little man to pay for the other, thereby lowering some little man's standard of living.

Mr. PATTERSON. Then you would be for some uniform plan on this throughout America, so that we could really do justice to everybody? Mr. HOLMAN. Yes; certainly.

Mr. PATTERSON. That is fine; and I am glad to hear you say that, Mr. Holman. Some of the people out here on the floor do not believe it. Mr. WELCH. I have always had great sympathy for the farmer because he was placed in a position over which he had no control during the war. Wartime industries, as we all know, were located in rural districts in every part of the country. The decentralization of industry had a serious effect on the farmer and the cost of his labor. If a healthy, young dairy worker could walk across the road or go half a mile up the road and get a job in wartime industry at increased pay, he would naturally avail himself of that opportunity. That left the farmer without help unless he met the scale paid by the industries to some degree, at least. That is the predicament the farmer was

placed in during the war. Whether the release of this labor is going to help the situation or not is a matter to be determined postwar.

Mr. HOLMAN. Yes; that is true. We do not know what is going to happen. We do not think that we are going back to anything like the prewar scale of wages, even on farms. If that is the case, then some provision must be made for stabilizing, at least, the prices of the products at the farm gates, so that those people who do live on the farms can have a relative standard of comfort and educational opportunities comparable to those which are afforded to those who live in cities where there are educational plants that their boys and girls can go to.

As I said before to Mr. Patterson, our people cannot see low prices plus subsidies as a permanent policy for agriculture. We cannot see stabilization operations based upon the principle of support prices. We cannot get adequate stabilization or adequate support for prices under the present provisions of legislation as, for example, the Steagall amendment or the Steagall commodities, as they are known.

If our operations had to go back down to the 90 percent of parity, which is the only provision that Congress has made for the 2-year postwar period after hostilities have ceased if that were to go into operation we would suffer a gross loss of income of between 35 and 36 percent for every man selling either milk or fat off of his farm. That is just how precarious the dairy situation is today. In addition there is the prospect that western Europe will very quickly regain its dairy production capacity, and that after another year when the drought condition ceases in New Zealand and Australia that they will resume exportations, and always we have the fear of the possibility of what Argentina may be able to do to our dairy price structure.

Our organization has to speak for some several million dairy farmers because they are not organized, and we carry the load for them.

Gentlemen, You will note that I have not said one word in opposition to raising the minimum wage for the unskilled workers in plants. I have expressed extreme opposition to giving the Administrator the power to raise or fix the wages of the skilled jobs. That is where the economic cost is going to come. I think in most instances that our own dairy plants right now are able to pay pretty close up to the scale set forth in the Norton bill. I have no authority to say "yes" or "no" to it. I can only say we do not object to it. But we do think it should be confined to the minimum wage for unskilled labor.

Mr. RAMSPECK. It ought to be confined to a minimum wage and not permitted to go on up to the top.

Mr. HOLMAN. And we feel that the committee should give us a correct series of exemptions, first on processing and on area production. Mr. WELCH. Is it not a fact that the skilled workers, even in processing plants, receive a higher scale than that provided in the Patterson bill or the other bills?

Mr. HOLMAN. Most of the unskilled workers do now in our plants. We have unskilled workers whom we are paying as high as $1 an hour in the West, right out there in your country, Mr. Welch, and all through the intermountain region.

Mr. WELCH. They cannot get labor out there. I saw in the San Francisco papers that I received yesterday page after page of ads for labor of all kinds-skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled.

(Discussion off the record.)

Mr. HOLMAN. 65 cents an hour on a 10-hour day is $6.50 a day.

Mr. PATTERSON. Yes.

Mr. HOLMAN. No; they are not getting that.

Mr. PATTERSON. They are not?

Mr. HOLMAN. No; how could they?

Mr. PATTERSON. I know they are not, but I assume that they are in many of the larger areas.

Mr. HOLMAN. In the Los Angeles district they milk on a 24-hour schedule; three tricks a day. Your milker there is a very skilled person. They milk by hand and by machine. A hand milker milks 30 cows a day, and he is supposed to be able to milk 30 cows in 4 hours. Your machine milker milks 50 cows a day, and they run right around on a 24-hour basis, but I know of no other part of the country where those rates are being paid. We frequently have cases of where a man with a family who devotes all of his time to working on a dairy. farm may get as high as a house and lot and his milk, or half a hog, a vegetable field, and 150 a month, but he is generally in charge of that farm.

Mr. PATTERSON. I do not think in this day and age that you are going to be concerned about the minimum wage. If those fellows in Los Angeles can do it, I think they can do it all over the United States.

Mr. HOLMAN. We do not have mass production except in the Los Angeles area in the milk business. The average dairy farm in the country runs less than 13 cows per farm.

Mr. PATTERSON. I would not say that Los Angeles is the only place where they have it. Up and down the San Joaquin Valley they have mass production, and I suppose that is true of other places.

Mr. HOLMAN. Change that last statement. Sixty percent of the total dairy farms of the United States have 13 cows or less per farm. Mr. PATTERSON. Sixty percent of them?

Mr. HOLMAN. Yes, sir; 60 percent.

Mr. PATTERSON. In other words, in the larger plants they do pay over 65 cents an hour in most cases?

Mr. HOLMAN. In the dairy plants; yes, sir. We have quite a few in the Middle Western territory that pay around 50 to 55 cents an hour for unskilled labor, like the fellow who hauls cinders out and things of that kind. It is very unskilled labor, and does not require any particular brains to do it, but when you get into the plant itself, where you are dealing with milk, they are practically all in the skilled classifications.

Mr. RAMSPECK. Thank you, Mr. Holman.

The next witness is Jacob S. Potofsky, general secretary-treasurer of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.

STATEMENT OF JACOB S. POTOFSKY, GENERAL SECRETARY-TREASURER OF THE AMALGAMATED CLOTHING WORKERS OF AMERICA

Mr. POTOFSKY. Congressman Ramspeck and members of the committee, my name is Jacob S. Potofsky, and I am general secretarytreasurer of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.

I am appearing before this committee today as spokesman for the 325,000 members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. These are the workers who make men's suits, overcoats, shirts, neck