Mr. FORBES. Will you permit me to do that a moment later?
The CHAIRMAN. Yes.

Mr. FORBES. I would therefore have to throw away my commercial work, and my Government work has run as high in some years as 80 per cent of my possible product and has dropped as low as 10 per cent. It is generally with the Government a feast or a famine. Now, why the bureaus differ in their systems I can not say, but they do; but the reason why that crank cost us so much more is this: In the first place, I have to take about three times as long to make out every order. I have to send nine sets of blueprints for that order. I have to go to the people who really know Government work and beseech them beseech is the right word, gentlemen-to make these smaller articles, because they are not very profitable. The forgings, when they are not in large quantities and are light, are not very satisfactory in a money way. They specify a grade of steel which has nickel in it, which has to be treated with extreme care. When that order goes in they can do nothing until everything is in proper order so that they can trace it. Every inspector there has to put his stamp upon it as it goes through, and when I tell you the enormous price of that crank I add to it the fact that I was pretty nearly seven months in getting those two cranks, and I was about ten days in getting the one that I furnished to the Standard Oil Company. That shows the difference.

We are all taxpayers. Your bill practically says to us. "Put up the price of your work, if you are going to do the Government work, so much." How much are you going to put it up? In my own shops the books will clearly show that in the first three weeks when I went on eight hours I got actually more work than on the ten-hour system. That pleased me. I thought I was on the right road. I went to the eight hours because in my experience I found that the greatest mistakes made by my concern, by me and others, generally were made after 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I therefore thought we were working the men too long. I thought they would keep up the pace they said they could, and we would go along on nine hours. Inside of two months I was doing just 11 per cent more work. Now, you know, you practical men, that you can not make a cent of money on a loose pulley. You have got to keep your machine going and producing stuff, or you can not make any money.

Referring again to the cost of articles: If I am furnishing the Bureau of Equipment a steam engine for driving their electric lights, it is practically the commercial price on that engine, barring the fact that we have to furnish a little more in spare parts, which they are of course willing to pay for, and do pay for. But when I come to the Bureau of Steam Engineering, or the Bureau of Construction and Repair, it goes up just about 200 per cent. I have illustrated that by the instance of that crank. It is the thing of the utmost importance that our Government shall get its work well done, of course, and at a reasonable price, and by this bill you are asking us taxpayers to give up, according to my figures, about 11 per cent to make good.

Mr. EMERY. A moment ago you referred to your nine-hour day and you said you got 11 per cent more work. Did you mean less work?

Mr. FORBES. No, sir; I did not intend to give that idea. I say I got more work for the first two or three weeks, because the men started quickly and did not stop so quickly; but they soon struck their old pace, immediately afterwards. The novelty wore off, and it was just the same.

Mr. EMERY. After that you got 11 per cent less?

Mr. FORBES. Yes; 11 per cent less. In my entire year it showed about 11 per cent. I have had one strike in my shop, but generally I get along very well with the labor unions, and I get along very well with real laborers, too. I have been among them. I understand my business, and consequently we do not have differences from misunderstandings. We understand what we are talking about, as we are both machinists. But this bill, gentlemen, is one that tends toward a universal eight-hour day. Everybody is to work it. While I have had no direct demands made absolutely, when I was having my strike the committee told me that they seriously objected to my system of working ten hours a day and stopping at 11 o'clock on Saturday, because it proved practically their assertions that the eight-hour day would be such a great benefit to the workingman. In England and Scotland, overrun as they are with labor organizations and demands, they actually cut out of existence the bill for a universal eight-hour day. There it is in the Sun; that they would not consider it, and it was sidetracked.

Now, Mr. Chairman, you and I belong to the same State. We are. interested in that State, and that great industry near Camden there is doing the heft of its work for the Government, as all other yards are that build ships, and on the chest of that just breathing corpse, the American shipbuilding industry, you want to unload another weight to crush it, and let it die. On the escutcheon of our nation are the words "Liberty and prosperity." If you introduce this bill and carry it through you are cutting off our liberty and crushing our prosperity, and I beseech you as a man who stands among workmen, as a manufacturer, not to let it go further.

ADDITIONAL STATEMENT OF MR. GEORGE R. HOWE.

Mr. Howe. Will you pardon me for just another word? I have been greatly interested in what Mr. Forbes has had to say. I have had the same experience in our own factory. Three years ago the Manufacturing Jewelers' Association of the city of Newark decided voluntarily to reduce the working hours to fifty-four or fifty-five hours a week, either to work nine hours a day straight for the five days or ten hours a day for the five days and a five-hour day on Saturday. We put that matter to a vote by ballot of the 300 hands in our factory, and more than two-thirds majority said they preferred ten hours a day. They said, "We want Saturday afternoon. To give us half an hour morning and evening is of no earthly account whatever. The jewelers in Newark are running on that plan, not exceeding fifty-four hours a week. Where they stop Saturday afternoon they really get a little more. During the six months after our force was put on nine hours I kept a most systematic, careful account of the amount of product produced, and I found that our goods increased in cost on the basis of wages paid when the change was in

troduced, not taking into account the advance in wages which was paid consecutively during that six months, just about 83 per cent over what they were when they worked ten hours.

STATEMENT OF MR. WALLACE DOWNEY.

Mr. DOWNEY. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, I am here representing the National Metal Trades' Association. I am a member of the New York and New Jersey branch of that association. The general body exists all over the country, and in the aggregate represents, probably, about 100,000 employees. We have been in the habit of late years of getting along very happily with labor unions, making contracts with the unions representing their men, and while we have had more or less strikes we are getting on a better basis all the time, and I want to say for all of the employers represented in this National Metal Trades' Association that they are opposed to the passage of this bill, and for practically the same reasons that have been so ably put forth here to-day by different manufacturers, that it will certainly result in great disorder and disorganization of the present manufacturing system. There are scattered over the country some people working ten hours, some working nine hours, and some eight hours, and so on, and a great many that are doing more or less Government work; and, as has been well said here, the passage of that bill, the establishment of an arbitrary eight-hour day with no leeway to come and go on, would make it necessary for the manufacturer to choose as between his Government work and his commercial work, and it would be practically impossible for him to operate his business systematically and successfully on the two systems of hours, eight hours and

nine or ten hours.

I would like to say that personally I have absolutely no prejudice against any efforts of labor unionism to benefit itself in any way. I believe in labor unionism, and I am heartily in accord with all their efforts to improve the general conditions, and I am heartily in favor of the highest rates of wages and the shortest working hours for American workmen that are compatible with successful and permanent maintenance of business in the United States against all other countries, but I believe that it is a very, very small majority of labor unionism that is behind this bill, and I do not think it is the great laboring masses that are asking for an arbitrary eight-hour day. There are always in all organizations some few men that get behind an idea of that kind, and they push it, and the mass of the organization does not get in very close touch with such a movement, and really they do not understand how it would affect the industry of the country economically. Able lawyers have read the bill, manufacturers have read it, and no doubt workmen have read it. But while I pretend to have no very great penetrative powers, I can not understand how manufacturers, workmen, and the Government could intelligently carry out a contract under that bill without complications that would almost inevitably have to be settled in the courts, because there are so many ramifications and there are so many technicalities that it would be impossible to settle a dispute arising out of that bill without going to the court. Take two manufacturers getting into trouble over that bill, and they might sit down and settle the thing to suit themselves, and while it might not be in absolute accordance

with the law, they might save themselves a lawsuit in that way. But when the Government makes a contract and you come to the final settlement of your bills-and this bill contemplates holding up payments due until such questions are settled-the contractor would come up against the authorities here in Washington who have that money in hand, and he would be told, "Well, we have no authority to say anything one way or the other, whether you shall have this money or whether you shall not. We would like to give it to you, but we will have to have a court's decision in the matter to clear our skirts." I had that happen in a Government contract a few years ago, where everybody representing the Government side of the contract admitted that I was entitled to the money as a matter of moral right, and all that sort of thing, but technically they said it must go to the Court of Claims to be settled; and that is about ten years ago, and it is still in the Court of Claims. If that bill were passed, inside of a very few years the Court of Claims would certainly be loaded up with cases of that kind, of money being held up because of a dispute over the hours, and it could never be settled outside of the Court of Claims.

We object to the bill on the basis that it is not intelligible. We can not tell what it means. We object to it on the basis that it certainly will upset the present system of industry, which is the outgrowth of evolution, coming through centuries, almost. I want, also, to oppose it particularly from an economic standpoint. In the case of our interests, the interests of the United States against all other countries in industry, we have got to take that position. The brotherhood of man is a very fine sentiment, but when it comes down to business we have got to oppose all our competitors. The reduction of hours of labor in this country of one hour per day would mean a reduction of at least 12 per cent. That is just a simple mathematical calaculation, the price per hour remaining the same; and then I think from the general upset that it would make it would make an additional cost perhaps of 20 per cent. The export business of this country amounts, of course, as you all know, to tens of millions of dollars per year, and as some of the gentlemen here have said, that export certain amounts of their goods, those goods are manufactured now in competition with Germany and other countries, and I know that a great majority of our foreign exports are sold on a very, very fine margin of profit. In some cases they are sold without any profit, they are the surplus production of our mills. It is better to sell them to foreigners and bring the foreign money here and keep our men going than it is to knock the men off and shut the mills down. An enormous amount of our foreign export trade is made up of such stuff as that. Now, suppose that we were going to limit the amount of profit still further. A vast amount of our export trade, an enormous amount of it, is hanging on a very thin margin of 5 or 10 per cent, possibly, and if you reduced the producing capacity of the men 10 per cent by an arbitrary regulation of the hours that would add to the cost of the goods 10 to 15 per cent, it must pull down an enormous part of the export business and destroy it. As one of these gentlemen said, if you add 10 or 15 per cent to the cost of his goods, that he is manufacturing in competition with Germany, he is absolutely wiped out of the proposition; he can not do it. He is only one man representing tens of thousands of men in this country.

It has been claimed by representatives of labor that we will get just as much work in an eight-hour day as we do in a nine-hour day, because the men in that shorter time will work more efficiently, and their product will be just as large. That is one of the greatest fallacies in the world, and as you gentlemen of the committee possibly are not manufacturers I would like to illustrate that in this simple way. The men are knocked off now between 12 and 1 o'clock in the day, but this afternoon there will be tens of thousands of machine tools operating lathes revolving a certain number of times per minute, and other machine tools making a certain number of revolutions per minute, and those tools can only produce so much per hour. You can not hurry them any faster. They just produce so many units per hour or per day. Alongside of those tens of thousands of tools there are mechanics standing, tending them, not working very laboriously, either, but they must be there to attend to the tools. You can understand very easily that if instead of all of those tools working up until 5 o'clock to-night they should be knocked off at 4 o'clock, even though the laboring masses of the country were will ing to produce the same amount in eight hours as they have been producing in nine hours, they can not produce it when those tools are stopped. That enormous number of machine tools is working in this country, and if you knock the men off it would stop their work and produce a decrease to that extent; and a decrease in the production of this country has the result of stopping the whole of the tools running. Supposing we had a universal eight-hour day: that decrease would be something so fabulous that it would astound you if put into figures. It would be billions of dollars a year. We do not say that if that was done the manufacturer would lose it all. The manufacturer can not lose it all. It will put the manufacturers out of business; they could not stand it. But the loss must fall upon some one, either upon the consumer or the purchaser of the goods, or upon the laboring masses by way of reduction of wages.

There are only two sides to the question. If we lost a great amount of our export business that undoubtedly would fall directly upon the laboring masses in weekly decreases in pay rolls. There can be no doubt about that. It is illustrated here in our shipyards to-day. If conditions existed in this country that would make shipbuilding possible on a large scale, as it is in England and Scotland, we would have an army of splendid workmen working in the shipyards. There are a few shipyards running in the country, and running in deplorable shape. I believe to-day that as a pure, simple, profitable commercial proposition, there is not a shipyard on the Atlantic coast or on the Pacific coast of the United States that has got any reason for existing as a profit-making organization. Now, that is a hard thing to say, almost, in a country of this kind, but I believe it is a fact, that if it was brought down to a cold-blooded proposition of settling up and saying Will we run this yard as a profit-making concern, or will we shut it down," they would shut it down. They have been running on hopes, hopes of a subsidy bill, or something of the kind, and they are just running on hopes; and any action on the part of the workmen or upon the part of the Government or upon the part of the manufacturers that tends to increase our expense of production to-day is bound inevitably to work against us all in a loss. I am perfectly satisfied to-day that the employer of the country, while