Filene Urges 30 Hour Week and Increased Real Wage As Plan to Revive Industry

A thirty hour week and an increase in the real wage of the worker are the fundamental principles of a plan to revive industry presented by Edward A. Filene, internationally known Jewish merchant and philanthropist, who is president of William Filene’s Sons Company of Boston.

Writing in the “New York Times,” Mr. Filene calls for a six hour day and a five day week in his plan to provide work for the unemployed.

“It is pretty generally agreed that there is but one road back to prosperity,” he writes. “We may say that it lies in an increase in the worker’s real wages—that is in the amount of goods his wages will buy.” By increasing the worker’s buying power, business is stimulated, Mr. Filene holds.

He proposes a trial period, “during which the individual worker’s pay for a thirty hour week shall remain what it was for a longer week, with the understanding that the workers, individually and collectively, shall try during that period so to increase their efficiency that the unit cost of the product will not rise. If at the end of this trial period, which might run from six to nine months, the unit cost has risen, wages shall be reduced until

it is restored to the old level. If the unit cost thereafter drops, this pay cut shall be restored.”

Mr. Filene believes that no risk would be involved of producing goods in excess of the market demands, if this plan were adopted by the key industries of the United States.

“A minimum wage based on unit cost admittedly introduces a new element into the relations between labor and capital,” he writes. “It means that labor ceases to be a commodity bought in a ‘labor market’ and becomes a sharer actually, though indirectly, in profits. It means that employers stop thinking of the worker as a producing machine and begin to think of him also as a consumer. It means that some of the benefits of inventions and of improved methods of management, which in the past have gone almost wholly to employers and owners, will be distributed in the form of wages. It introduces a balance wheel to prevent production from outrunning consumption.

“Possibly this is a modification of the capitalistic system as Adam Smith and other classical economists saw it. But nearly everything that has happened since classical economy was invented has been a modification of capitalism. The system survives, like plants and animals in the long processes of evolution, by being constantly modified. If evolution is to hold its own against revolution, capitalism must somehow manage to transfer to labor some of the benefits of technological progress,” Mr. Filene asserts.