ago, but, as far as I know, that is a little out of my field because I am in the personnel relations, but so far as I know that situation is not urgent at the present time.

Mr. DURHAM. That is all.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Elston?

Mr. ELSTON. I presume that you have given the bill, H. R. 2339, some study?

Dr. WALTERS. That is right.

Mr. ELSTON. Have you given any thought to section 4, which is an absolute prohibition against any supervisory employee joining a labor union?

Dr. WALTERS. That is right; I have read it several times. I studied it for some time.

Mr. ELSTON. Now, if the act should pass, that would be the first time Congress has ever made a positive declaration that any person could not join a labor union.

Dr. WALTERS. Well, to me that is not denying him the right of a free choice. He still has the right to choose. In other words, if a judge chooses to be a judge, then he gives up the right of a personal practice. He chooses. If, as I understand, the honorable chairman is a Baptist, when he becomes a Baptist he gives up to a certain extent the right to be a Presbyterian or some other religion. And the same thing happens in many cases. You have the right to choose, but once you choose, in other words, if you choose to be a Democrat, or if you choose to be a Republican, if you choose one then you do not choose the other. Then, it seems to me, you have the same right under this act. You either choose, you give the foreman the right to choose himself whether he shall be a member of a union, or whether he shall be a member of management. We feel there is a certain conflict of interest there, and there may be an interference on the part of the foreman with the organization under him and when there is that conflict, then it seems to us the Government should step in and decide the conflict, that here is a standard by which we are going, "You either choose to be management or you choose to be union."

Mr. ELSTON. I am fully cognizant of your problem, and I also realize it ought to be decided by somebody. By the courts or by Congress, because I am wondering if Congress has the right to arbitrarily say that any person cannot join a labor union.

Dr. WALTERS. I do not object to the way that you put the question, but I would say this, you are not limiting his choice. And as long as you do not limit his free choice, then you are not going against the constitutional right of free choice. In other words, you are not stating to him that he must not be a member of a union or must be. You are telling him to choose of his own free will and accord whether he shall be a member of union or of management.

Mr. ELSTON. The way the act reads, it says that he shall not be eligible to membership in any labor organization.

Dr. WALTERS. That is right.

Mr. ELSTON. The way the act reads it says he cannot be eligible to any labor organization or organization engaged in collective bargaining with the contractor. I am not saying that is unconstitutional. I have not given it enough study to have reached any conclusion about it.

But if we should pass an act of this kind, it would be the first time Congress ever said that any person, no matter what his status might be, could not join a labor union.

Dr. WALTERS. My opinion is that you are not limiting his choice. You are giving him that choice. For example, when you say he shall not be a member of a union, that does not prohibit him from being a member of the union. When management asks him to be a foreman, the management asks him to choose whether he shall be a member of the union or whether he shall be a foreman or whether he shall be a member of no union at all for that matter. I suppose when we ask him to be a foreman, we do not know whether he is a member of the union or not.

Mr. ELSTON. I understand that. Where management asks him. which he wants to be. If he wants to remain an ordinary employee, or does he want to become a foreman? But can Congress say that he cannot do one or the other?

Dr. WALTERS. I believe it can because it does not prohibit his choice to free choice as to whether he shall be a member of management or labor.

Mr. ELSTON. Well, we say that he cannot belong to a labor union. Dr. WALTERS. That is right, but not until after he becomes a member of management.

The CHAIRMAN. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. ELSTON. Yes.

The CHAIRMAN. Doesn't it say that a labor union engaged in collective bargaining?

Mr. ELSTON. Yes.

Dr. WALTERS. Yes.

The CHAIRMAN. And doesn't that necessarily mean in collective bargaining with that particular management?

Mr. ELSTON. Well, that is the question, of course. And if those words were not in there, I do not think there would be any question but what the act would be unconstitutional, because I doubt very much that you can say that any person cannot join any organization that he wants to. I doubt that very much. But when you do say that he shall not be eligible for membership in a labor organization engaged in collective bargaining you may get outside of the constitutional prohibition. I do not know, but I am wondering if you have given any thought to that?

Dr. WALTERS. I have very definitely. I come back to my original argument because it does not limit his free choice of collective bargaining. He can be a member of a collective bargaining agency if he wants to, and the example I gave you of one of our foremen who was a member of a union before, an officer of a union, and after he was a foreman he felt, or he decided, he made the wrong choice. In other words, the same as you may be a member of a certain church, and you want to go into some other church, you certainly can. Well, the foreman, after he is a foreman, and he decides he wants to be a member of the union and a member of our collective bargaining group, therefore, he has a right to choose and we do not limit his right in any way, and he went back into the union and is just as active as he was before. When he was a member of management he was definitely a member of management and helped us to make policies and helped

to make the safety rules and all the other rules coming under the present labor relation laws. But then he felt he should become a member of the collective bargaining group and he could not sit on both sides of the table and make rules for them and bargain collectively and help us make our contract and at the same time be a member of the union. We believe there is a conflict of interest there. There is an interference on the part of the foreman of the free organization of his employees. We believe there is an inherent desire in everybody in industry, or practically everybody, to advance and when he gets to that point of advance, management should have the right to select its management representatives to the extent that we can ask the man to choose freely whether he shall be a member of management or whether he shall be a member of the union.

Mr. ELSTON. I appreciate every one of your reasons, every one of them, but the only thought in my mind is whether it is within the power of Congress to say he cannot belong to a labor union that is engaged in collective bargaining under the Wagner Act.

Dr. WALTERS. My answer is, I believe that this can be done, because it does not take away his right of a free choice.

The CHAIRMAN. The witness has stated his position five or six times, so let us not encumber the record.

Mr. ELSTON. Did you ever get a legal opinion from your counsel on that?

Dr. WALTERS. That is right. Our legal opinion is to that effect, that you cannot mix the two; that is, you cannot mix management and labor.

Mr. ELSTON. That is all I wanted to ask.

The CHAIRMAN. Are there any further questions? If that is all, we thank you very much for your statement, and appreciate your clear distinction between a prohibition against a free choice and a right to make a free choice.

STATEMENT OF GUY W. VAUGHAN, PRESIDENT, CURTISS-WRIGHT AIRCRAFT CO.

The CHAIRMAN. We will now hear from Mr. Guy W. Vaughan, president of the Curtiss-Wright Aircraft Co. Will you give us your position on this matter? Do you have a prepared statement that you wish to make?

Mr. VAUGHAN. I have not a prepared statement, but I have a statement to make today in connection with this hearing.

The CHAIRMAN. All right, sir.

Mr. VAUGHAN. We are very happy to have the privilege of coming here, and I represent in so doing the East Coast War Council comprised of eight companies, the Aviation Corporation, the Bell Aircraft Corporation, the Brewster Aeronautical Corporation, the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, the Eastern Aircraft Division of General Motors Corporation, the Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corporation, the Glenn L. Martin Co., and the Republic Aviation Corporation. Those companies represent 469,776 employees and 24,067 foremen, and had shipped, in the year 1912, $2,870,796,762 war equipment. That is, 98 percent, at least, of war equipment. The only other business we have done during that period is to supply some spare parts to air lines under Government release and some minor export business.

I do not want to take the committee's time unnecessarily, but I thought you might know that I started when I was very young pushing a broom and finally got into a machine shop and took my apprentice course. I have been a workman at the bench, a machinist, a foreman, a superintendent, and a factory manager, and I think I know the line of demarcation between the employer and the employee, and where management begins and where the work end of it starts.

I think in support of this bill, if something of the kind is not enacted, you are taking the one link away from management to workmen to produce efficiently and in quantity; that is, to produce, to have efficiency you have got to have authority. The foremen are selected because of their ability to handle men, and their responsibility rests with management to see that the proper foremen are selected. They are selected because they have ambition to do what is scheduled for them to do, and do it properly. They are just like anybody else in carrying that out they have got to be able to pick their own men. They cannot be hampered by serving two masters. I cannot imagine anything more detrimental to production than a man in a department or a factory that is associated with his own union fellows and that his object is to increase the membership in that union from the union point of view and in doing so he has got to be prejudiced. He cannot be impartial. I just cannot imagine anything that would produce any more loss in efficiency due to the inability to manage his own fellows in the union and a direct shifting of the foreman to the top in management that cannot in any way connect with the shop. You have to work through foremen. They are the fellows that really do the work, and it depends on them whether the efficiency is up or down. Foremen have councils in all these big firms. They meet frequently. They are in perfect accord with management and they are in perfect accord with unions. I think the right to choose, as the gentleman before me said, is still their privilege, but I do not see how you can mix water and oil, and there is a line of demarcation. The working man is not interested in the whole picture. He is interested in getting his work out every day on a machine. He has no responsibility and does not want it. That is, the average.

The exception wants responsibility and in wanting it has an ambition and a desire to go ahead, and that is the reason he is selected as a foreman. As soon as you mix it with unions, I am sure that the production will fall off due to inefficiency and that the whole war effort would be hurt considerably. But I am not prepared to say how much, but we all know it would create a very unsatisfactory condition all around. I believe the policy of our company is today not to expand further. We have gone from about 800,000 feet to 123,000,000 in the last 3 years. Onr supervision has spread tremendously thin, far too thin. I think today that if we got our plants that we now have and are now occupying running efficiently we can produce 60 percent more product than we are doing at this time. If we expand further and thin our organization out we will have a less efficient management throughout, due to its spreading and you just won't get the production if you stay in what you have today and bring it up to the state of efficiency that we know is possible. That, I believe, is sort of a parallel situation to reducing the efficiency of men that we have now in the position of foremen, which it is bound

to do. I am sure if we do not pass legislation or do something that will correct this condition, you are going to have to put up more buildings, you are going to have to get more men, and you are going to have to get more equipment to do exactly the same job we are doing today with the equipment, men, and buildings we have. I do not think there is much more I can add to that that is of any great importance. But I am perfectly certain of what I say-that you cannot serve two masters. You either serve management or you serve union, and the exception possibly proves the rule.

Thank you very much, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. All right, Mr. Vaughan, you may sit down if you wish.

How many foremen did you say you employed and how many men do you employ?

Mr. VAUGHAN. The total of the eight companies that I gave you which I read is 469,776 employees with 24,067 foremen. We employ 8,400 foremen and we have 156,000 employees. I said that we issued last year in war materials, $2,870,796,762. That is the east coast council, which I mentioned, and I think you have a record of that. The CHAIRMAN. I believe you said you started as a boy sweeping the floor in the factory?

Mr. VAUGHAN. Yes, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. And went all the way up to the presidency of the Curtiss-Wright Aircraft Co.?

Mr. VAUGHAN. I am now president of the Curtiss-Wright Aircraft Corporation and the Wright Aeronautical Corporation, which is a subsidiary of the Curtiss-Wright.

The CHAIRMAN. How many of those 24,067 foremen were promoted from the ranks of the workers?

Mr. VAUGHAN. I imagine in our own show, of which we have a little over 8,000, about 7,400 were promoted from the ranks. In other words, we have a very small show. We had 20,000 people before the war, it was 20 or 22 thousand, I am not sure. Mr. Willis is our industrial relations manager. I forget what was the exact number.

Mr. WILLIS. About 20,000.

Mr. VAUGHAN. We have about 156,000 today.

The CHAIRMAN. So that out of 8,000 foremen in your own plant, the Curtiss-Wright plant

Mr. VAUGHAN. Seven thousand four hundred or seven thousand five hundred are new men.

The CHAIRMAN. And came out of the workers' ranks?

Mr. VAUGHAN. Came out of the ranks.

The CHAIRMAN. And into management?

Mr. VAUGHAN. Yes, sir. It is our policy and I think it is the policy of most large companies not to go outside when there is ability in the ranks and to bring the men up as foremen. And that policy is established because we think if a fellow works hard and tediously and does his best for a number of years or a number of months, whatever it might be, when you have to pick out somebody if you pull somebody in from the outside there is no use for him to do that at all and it is very discouraging and reduces the morale of the whole outfit. We pick them from the ranks.