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Show News f By PaulMallon J- Released by Western Newsp-iper L'mon. KAISEK SETS PACE ix kecoxveilsiox plaxs SAN FRANCISCO. The Pacific coast has about the same postwar worry as the rest of the country but in more accentuated and positive form because of the vast expansion throughout the state in planes, ship, yards and other war industries. The Kaiser shipyards industry, for example, has been losing about 5.000 employees a month. The last four pages of their newspaper in its last issue contained want-ads of workers seeking ride - sharing automobile seats to return home. Their yards payroll at Richmond near here has been cut from peak employment of 93,000 down to -10.0,10 already (and it has had 500,000 different persons : employed in the past four years). I met the emperor of this most fabulous accumulation of American industries during the war, Henry J. Kaiser, and talked with him for more than an hour. His is not only the largest but most varied of 5 all the nation's strictly new war en- ' terprises and con- $ 4 tains 100 industries. Lf 4' f 1 Thus he also has the biggest of all Henry J. the problems of re- Kaiser conversion and I was interested in ascertaining how he would meet it. He is a crisp, heavy-set man with a knowledge of what is needed and with unlimited ideas of how to do the job. He has both business hops and faith a confidence that the imagination of the American people will devise methods of carrying for-, ward our industrial postwar system and faith that it cannot fail. What he aggressive lone wolf industrial in-dustrial fighter that he is thinks the country needs primarily is competition. compe-tition. The first postwar industry to which he is turning his attention is, naturally, shipping. He was growling about another business leader who made a speech a few days back advocating scrapping of the American merchant marine. We now have more ships than any nation na-tion ever had on the seas, (number is a military secret) and he thinks they should be used. This will require re-quire government subsidy in his opinion because competing European Euro-pean lines have subsidies. I judge that he has in mind American acquisition ac-quisition of the trade which Japan formerly had in the Orient. He did not mention a current rumor that he may build postwar ships for Russia, although I saw him shortly after he left Molotov. HAS MANY PLANS The nation also needs 2.000,000 homes, low cost homes, and he sees in this field vast opportunities for postwar activity, in his opinion. Transportation should be entirely revised. A lower cost fare should be worked out on the railroads. Speed highways should be extended, as the nation in the future will continue to move out from the cities. He sees opportunities for building lower cost cars in the automobile industry (which he does not believe is competitive com-petitive now) and great possibilities in development of health facilities for the people. He would promote health facilities in every possible way to a scope amounting to a national na-tional industry. Here is a man with ideas and the kind of energetic imagination which conceives new ventures when old ones fail. He is now in metals, conceiving con-ceiving a new magnesium alloy for steel, a new kind of plaster, gypsum; gyp-sum; planes, chemicals. BELIEVES IX COMPETITION He is also in coal and steel, and in each industry he attempts to main-) main-) tain a competitive spirit. He keeps i three ofTices in Washington instead j of one and thus promotes greater j work energy among his own era-1 era-1 ployees and, of course, more production. I I suspect his own reconversion j plan is already well under way. There is much well-advised talk about him expanding into foreign production in Latin America and elsewhere. 1 His enthusiastic spirit is symbolic of the feeling among other business i men with whom I talk throughout ' this area, In this respect it is some-1 some-1 what different from the East where the trend runs to pessimism or doubt, although labor is going home in droves. ' Everyone out here figures the 'Jap ! war to take another year (my guess i is somewhat less than that) and sees San Francisco and the Pacific coast as gateways to the newly 1 opened island empires of the Pa-I Pa-I cine and the Orient. We may ex- pect a doubling of our trade west-j west-j ward, and perhaps more. There is much remaining of the forty-niner gold strike ambition among these business people and I would not be surprised if they meet their postwar problem which is heavier than any other section, as well as any another. |