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Show HIGH PRICES HIT WHITE COLLAR WORKERS The millions of "whitecollar" workers whose incomes are fixed at the clerk and schoolteacher level, lev-el, face the prospect of being "pretty well wiped out" unless there is another depression. Dr. George Hedley, associate Sprofessor of sociology and economics econo-mics at Mills College, gave this conclusion to the Commonwealth club on the basis of a recently completed study of the white collar col-lar worker and other unorganized employees. "But a depression will only alleviate alle-viate their ' present condition; it will not solve their continuing problem," he added. "And the other oth-er six millions of the unorganized the farm hand and the domestics, will be the first to bear the brunt of lowered wages and wholesale layoffs." He said while in a serious depression depres-sion the clerk's or the teacher's pay is likely to be cut, it usually is reduced after prices fall, and not quite so far as they have fallen. fal-len. Conversely, his salary goes up much more slowly than do prices pric-es and almost never so far. In the hope unorganized workers work-ers would find a "free abundant I life within our national community," commun-ity," he suggested: "A program of continuing high production, based upon quantity manufacture, low unit cost, high wages, low prices, and low percentage per-centage profit as an essential to high gross profits. "It includes maintaining production produc-tion and wages, and cutting prices, pric-es, when signs of recession appear rather than maintaining prices while cutting production and wages. wag-es. "These policies I regard as integral in-tegral to lasting general prosperity; prosper-ity; and lasting general prosperity prosper-ity is the necessary condition to anything we can do specially to better the status of the unorganized," unorga-nized," Dr. Hedley asserted. He caid the three major unorganized unor-ganized groups, the Nation's agricultural agri-cultural workers, its household employes and its so-called white-collar white-collar workers represent about a third of the national labor force, "who have not been successfully organized in trade union terms and who seem on the whole unlikely un-likely to toe so organized in any visible future." |