| Show opinions vary on success of mexican labor plans west southwest farmers reported objecting to minimum wage clause many prefer familiar Pad ronel system by news analyst and commentator service 1313 11 street NW N W washington 1 I 0 what has happened to the scheme for bringing mexican labor into the united states to help oil fill the gap left by the drain which industry and the draft have made on the farm in trying to got get an answer to that question I 1 turned up some rather interesting data which I 1 wish to submit as an answer to that slur on our fair city that you hear frequently frequents y these days washington is a mad house it may sit at least explain what makes the wild cat wild I 1 first went to an official in one of the wax war orien cies with my query about tin labor ile he Is a ver very y energetic worker an anti new bealor who Is here trying to do his share to win the war I 1 am not permitted to use his name lie he said somebody in our government with a lot of high ideals went to the mexican government and made an agreement to send mexican laborers to the united states they arranged to have a contract which would deal with each laborer as a free agent and put in all sorts of conditions which the farmer who had to hire him had to agree to including housing transportation and a minimum per diem rate but instead of sending over experienced perien perlen ced farm laborers the mexican government gathered together a lot of neer do wells and hoboes hobles it work in fact the farmers got less help than usual the trouble was that before the social conscious officials took a hand the american farmers had been making contracts with padrones bosses who got the money and the workers established the working conditions and paid the workers as they saw fit they brought in trained workers and they made them work but the starry starr eyed members of the mexican and american governments hear ol of mak making ing use of the system that sounded very bad to me so I 1 called up the offices of senator downey of california and senator mcfarland of arizona who are members of a special committee holding hearings in california and new mexico on this question of imported farm labor success reported senator downey was still in california but his office was enthusiastic I 1 was told about how successful the use of this imported im ported mexican labor had been under the governments plan in the beet industry how it worked in the great grayle rubber fields of which acres have been planted as part of our home grown rubber program how the senator was arranging with the state department for the tha admission of more foreign labor then I 1 talked with senator mcfarland he said he would go along with senator downey in some of the things but not till all ile he said the farmers complaint in arizona was that they got neither the quantity nor the quality of workers they wanted cotton and dairy workers are their chief needs he said that some of the farmers sign a contract which the american government required all protested against it the objection was to the clause which established a minimum daily wage the farmers said that the worker came out to the field in the morning picked until he wanted to quit and then weighed in but in order to be sure he had worked his minimum hours it was necessary to have a timekeeper and a bookkeeper to check on his time and the whole process was too expensive long staple cotton ile he said on the whole that the arizona firmer farmer get as many workers as needed and get as good ones as he had expected on the department of agricultures agri cultures program for the next year there is a quota of acres of long staple cotton one hundred thousand acres are allotted to arizona normally we import most of our long staple cotton from abroad senator mcfarland said that unless some solution of the farm labor problem was reached unless the present contract was modified and the arizona farmers were assured more and beatr hands at a lower costa cost they be able to invest their money in planting the long staple cotton the government wants neither senator domneys Dow noys office offic e nor senator mcfarlands McF arlands had any comments on tho the system then I 1 talked with a department ot of agriculture official lie ile was of the opinion that tho the contracts had worked out fairly well and he pointed out that thero there was an ideological as well as a practical objection on the part of the farmers to the contract the objection to establishing tab lishing a minimum wage for farm labor here are three quite different viewpoints they re represent presen t a tiny fraction of the tangle which washington has to untangle has to reconcile it if washington Is a madhouse who made it mad macarthur lauded for leadership when the chapter of war history dealing with the battle of new guinea Is written it will be one of the most important in the whole book that is what military men hero here tell me they began telling me that bit by bit just before the second front in africa opened then the african story wiped everything else off the first pages recently they have been talking about new guinea again they keep saying to me a little reproachfully fully the american people dont realize what macarthur has achieved down in that jungle country these arent the macarthur men there are such in the army a little group of hero worshipers who perhaps worship a bit more fervently than logically but the men who have watched the new guinea campaign from moresby straight up over the owen stanley range and down the other side and up to the eastern coast of the island tell me that macarthur and the leaders he has about him have done a great and a significant ant job it Is gre great at because he has accomplished what it was freely predicted the japs could not do and it is significant because it has proved that australians and americans given the training can beat the jap at his own game they can and have beaten him with less training without the fatalistic quality of the jap whose religion is to die rather than surrender even when dying a military necessity there are two reasons which military men put forward why the battle of new guinea has not been painted in its true colors represented in its true importance one is the fact that macarthur leans backward in his another is a peculiar copy desk prejudice of american newspapers which causes them to play down reports from the distance and play up the reports from the war department in wash ington there are two reasons why mac mac arthurs reports are given out from his headquarters in australia instead of by the war department in washington one is that the australians and perhaps macarthur want it that way ay and another is because american newspapers who pay a lot of money to keep correspondents in that area dont like to have their men scooped by washington why he Is 18 winning macarthur may have another reason for not ballyhooing ballyhoo ing his achievements ile he was beaten in bataan lie he may feel that until he has a complete victory to his credit he want to sing too loudly but macarthur has won so far in new guinea because the men under his command were able to do what they never had a chance to do on bataan because of lack of numbers supplies and food on new guinea they were able to do better than the japs could the very things which the japs could do best and thoy they did it in the kind of jungle country in which that best was even better they were able to adapt themselves to the environment which required a kind of fighting and a kind of endurance for which the japanese had spent years in preparing the kind of fighting that resulted in the fall ot of singapore and the kind which the conventional british soldiers even the far eastern experts said was impossible |
