Mr. Chairman, at this time if there are any questions we will try to answer them and I would also like brother Marshall, who is experienced in the smelter industry, and brother Wilson, who is a hard rock miner, to add whatever they care to to this serious situation for the benefit of whatever it may be worth this committee. We want to say again that we are in support of this bill as a minimum.

The CHAIRMAN. You are speaking now of Congressman Baker's bill? Mr. HAIN. Yes. We also think that there should be under the serious situation that exists today possibly broader bills studied and considered by this committee, but at this point as far as the lead and zinc workers are concerned in this country, we certainly support this bill as far as it goes.

The CHAIRMAN. We thank you, Mr. Hain. You made a very fine presentation and a very interesting one. Are there questions? Mr. MASON. Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Mason will inquire.

Mr. MASON. Mr. Hain, I have two of the oldest and one of the largest zinc smelters in the country in my district: Illinois Zinc at Peru and Matthiessen & Hegeler at LaSalle. Matthiessen & Hegeler own two other zinc smelters in the East. I did not introduce a bill. I was not one of this list that you read off here of those that have bills. Does that mean that I am not interested in this subject and interested in the fact that 400 or 500 men have been thrown out of employment in my own hometown? It does not, because with all these bills in the hopper I felt it was unnecessary for me to introduce another bill similar to these.

However, I am saying this: The Baker bill if adopted will throw the spotlight of publicity upon these groups of unemployed, special groups of unemployed, that have become unemployed because of the policy of the Federal Government, and I say that that bill ought to be adopted, operated a year, and then we will probably enlighten the country as to what our tariff policies have been doing to the workers of America.

Mr. HAIN. We appreciate your statement very much. I thought when you started to speak that maybe you had introduced a bill and by not knowing all the ropes around here I might have missed a bill or two and did not get you on the list.

Mr. MASON. I usually confine my bills to tax bills and maybe social securlty bills because that is what our interests are mainly.

Mr. HAIN. I think perhaps you and this committee that is with me today are in a great deal of agreement when you say that this bill will at least throw a spotlight on the situation. It supports the contention awhile ago that we would like to see this bill supported even though maybe we think it does not go far enough. It is a start in the right direction.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Marshall or Mr. Wilson, do either of you gentlemen have anything to add?

Mr. MARSHALL. My name is John Marshall.

The CHAIRMAN. A very celebrated name.

Mr. MARSHALL. That is right. That is my great-great-grandfather, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. Very fine.

Mr. MARSHALL. I am president of local 401, Bartlesville, Okla., United Gas, Coke, and Chemical Workers of America. I would like

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to call your attention to the very urgent need for this special group because the smelter industry, which I am from, has a unique situation in the family of industries in the United States. The horizontal retort smelters fill a necessity in the needs of the country both in peace and in war.

First, I would like to call your attention to the fact that the smelting industry in the United States, the processing of ores, either foreign or domestic, or secondary, has full capacity at this time and is operating so that it will produce sufficient zinc to take care of the appetite of the American people; and that any importation of slab zinc into the United States is in excess of the present production in the United States and therefore has caused a 25 percent reduction in the employment in the zinc smelting industry in the United States, which reduction has not met the lessened requirements because of the importation of zinc; and at the present time, in less than 3 years the stockpiles lying on the grounds of the smelters of the United States have jumped from 11,000 tons to over 200,000 tons, as of this day.

Most of this zinc has been imported from countries in which the Marshall plan and other aids have set up industries in foreign countries. The CHAIRMAN. I want you just to repeat that now again for the record.

Mr. MARSHALL. I said that most of this importation of zinc in the United States is coming from factories that the Marshall plan and other foreign aids have set up in foreign countries or rehabilitated destroyed factories, in Belgium, and Holland, and so forth.

Not saying anything against the Marshall plan, but it is the concensus of opinion of the zinc workers that these countries would do well to produce materials for their undernourished and underdeveloped countries of their own instead of trying to produce goods for the American people for dollars.

The CHAIRMAN. I did not vote for the Marshall plan. I have never been for it.

Mr. MARSHALL. I am for the Marshall plan, but I think there are political atmospheres in European countries. They should start producing goods for their people instead of producing it for dollars. Our particular problem is this: All the smelters in the United States with the exception of one, I believe, is under union contract and have been prior to World War II, and the contracts all carry seniority clauses.

The 25-percent reduction in employment in these plants naturally knocks off the younger people. They are able in normal times to get reemployment in most localities, but this situation is standing on the brink of a house of cards, you might say. With the dilatory attitude of the administration in coming forth with at least some kind of a policy on importations of foreign zinc, we stand at this situation: In my plant in Bartlesville, Okla., we have some 22,000 tons of zinc lying on the ground and I think we are going to have to call on the Indian Agency of Osage County to find land to stock any more on if we keep on.

Temporarily the price of zinc went up because each and every day somebody says that information is going to come from the White House and they are going to start purchasing zinc under the recommendations of this proposition here in this Tariff Commission report, but it never comes out. The information is that they are going to

stockpile zinc. They are going to buy zinc under the recommendations of this report. It never comes out.

Should it materialize, and it has in the past, that the administration intends to do nothing, the price of zinc will hit the bottom and practically every smelter in the United States will shut down. It has before and it will again.

Mr. SIMPSON. Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Simpson will inquire.

Mr. SIMPSON. What information do you have regarding the source of purchases for the stockpiling?

Mr. HAIN. Of course, if the Government buys according to the recommendations, I believe they will buy from domestic sources. In other words, domestic-mined ores processed in domestic smelters will be purchased by the Government, thus relieving the situation. Mr. SIMPSON. You mean produced within the United States? Mr. MARSHALL. That is right.

Mr. SIMPSON. In other words, they would not be offshore purchases? Mr. MARSHALL. It would be a fallacy to recommend that the Government buy foreign metals.

Mr. SIMPSON. The question is, if it is for stockpiling, conceivably they could buy it from any source whatever. My question is whether you have any information regarding their intentions to buy it domestically?

Mr. MARSHALL. No; I have no information, but I would certainly be against them

Mr. SIMPSON. You would recommend that, would you?

Mr. MARSHALL. Buying Mexican and Canadian in the slab because I would know right away that it was not American workers that got the work that manufactured it.

Mr. SIMPSON. Thank you.

Mr. MARSHALL. What I am saying is that we have some distress now and it will not be long until their unemployment insurance will be running out, but any further distress will cause a very big hardship on the smelter worker because, as I said before, most of them have been here a long time. The average age in our plant, Mr. Chairman, is 49 years. You can readily see that any other industries do not want us fellows. We are contaminated, to start with, with smoke and dust and there is not a one of us that could run a half a block without wheezing.

Industry does not want the dregs of these smelters, so we either have to make work for ourselves, such as farming or made work of our own or we would be out. Therefore, we will have to have extra time that a younger fellow would not need, and I highly recommend this bill because it extends the time and gives these older fellows a chance to rehabilitate themselves. Some of these men worked 25, 30, or 35 years in the smelters and they would be at a loss to readjust themselves.

That, Mr. Chairman, is the crux of my plea.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Marshall.

Mr. Wilson, do you have a word to say?

Mr. WILSON. Yes, Mr. Chairman. I would like to make a statement for the miners in Tennessee. We are supporting the bill submitted by our Congressman-our Congressman because he is the Congressman in the district that I represent of the miners.

The CHAIRMAN. I want to say to you that you have a very able man and very sincere man representing you in Congress and working in your interests.

Mr. WILSON. We appreciate that and we are glad to hear that you do. With respect to the zinc mines, I would like to tell your committee that a hard rock miner is an animal different and apart from other industrial workers. In fact, most of them are sons of miners or grandsons of miners.

They have lived in mines all their lives. In fact, my great-grandfather was a miner if you wanted to trace my ancestry.

These men who work in the mines cannot adapt themselves to other industries very quickly. It takes some time to do it. In the mines in Tennessee anybody that wanted to work after 1945 was laid off. They have a seniority system. Nobody works there now that was hired by any of the companies since 1945, so you can readily see that those men who had been working, some of them 6 years in the mine. are now laid off and they cannot find a job.

In fact, just before I left I talked to one of the boys who had been hired in 1946. I said to him, "Have you found a job yet?"

He said, "No. I lost my car the other day, they took it away and my wife is going to have a baby. I cannot afford to spend this $26 I am getting. I am only to get it for about 6 more weeks." He said, "I just cannot take that money and go and hunt for a job. I am just going to have to stay home."

There is a situation where if we do not pass the Baker bill and extend that fellow's insurance, what are we going to do about it? He cannot get a job. What operation they are doing in the mines in Tennessee constitutes the storing of the concentrates. They are not shipping any out.

Mr. Marshall told you about the imports hurting some of the smelters. It does not hurt the smelters half as much as it does the mines because they ship into this country concentrates which at a cheap price are run through the American smelters, but the concentrate put the American miner out of work so we are pleading to you and your committee to pass the Baker bill and help these fellows out who are trying to rehabilitate themselves and trying to get a job somewhere.

I will tell you this: That if the administration and Government in this city sits around and allows the American zinc mines and lead mines to go out of business and we ever got into a war they could not start them up again. It would be impossible. The question was asked here of Mr. Kennedy: How long would it take to start the coal mines back up again? I am telling you it would be impossible to start a zinc mine up again.

The CHAIRMAN. They cannot start them if they flood them with

water.

Mr. WILSON. Full of water, but then you lose the experienced miners. They are gone and it is only the experienced miner that could do it, so we cannot afford in my opinion to ever let the mines in this country go down.

At least this Baker bill will do something to try to keep these miners alive until we can devise some policy to get the mines running. They are not able to find a job anywhere else right now. We would like to see them kept fed until we can get some kind of a policy through the Government to get our mines opened up.

The CHAIRMAN. We thank you very much, Mr. Wilson, for your testimony, and also Mr. Marshall and Mr. Hain. Are there any questions?

Mr. BAKER. Mr. Chairman, I want to ask Mr. Wilson one question. The CHAIRMAN. Yes sir.

Mr. BAKER. How many men are normally employed at the Mascot mine at Mascot, Tenn.?

Mr. WILSON. Normally we employ around 600 in a bargain unit. That is excluding supervisors, clerks, and people like that. If you did not exclude them it would be close to 900.

Mr. BAKER. How many of those men have been laid off in the last few months?

Mr. WILSON. Last month-some have been laid off since thatthe secretary of our union got the checkoff check from the company and I checked with him. There were 325 dues-paying members, and they all belonged to the union last month.

Mr. BAKER. Then it is down about two-thirds from normal.

Mr. WILSON. That is right.

Mr. BAKER. May I ask Mr. Hain one question?

The CHAIRMAN. Certainly.

Mr. BAKER. Mr. Hain, you have made an extensive study of this entire problem, have you not?

Mr. HAIN. To the best of my ability.

Mr. BAKER. To what do you attribute that vast unemployment in lead and zinc? What has caused it?

Mr. HAIN. I may not be an old expert. I went to work in the zinc smelters with brother Marshall back in 1936. He was there when I got there, but through the years we have always had figures before us and discussed this matter in the various zinc smelters and our various unions and so forth. It is our opinion from the records that we get that we used to produce about two-thirds of the lead and zinc. We mined and smelted. Two-thirds of what this country uses was produced and made here in this country.

I think the last figures I saw on the situation indicated it turned around to the point to where this country is only mining and manufacturing and producing about 27 percent. I do not know whether that answers your question or not.

Mr. BAKER. The answer to my question is obvious; that it is due to the importation of the material.

Mr. HAIN. When you go from somewhere around 66 percent to 70 percent down to 27 percent, it appears to us that the problem is not too hard to figure out as to why.

Mr. BAKER. Mr. Wilson, have you something else?

Mr. WILSON. I would like to say in answer to your question to Mr. Hain as to what he attributes it to, we in the mines know what the cause is. The concentrates are being shipped in from Mexico and Canada, Australia, and they are even shipped from other countries. However, those are the major sources and they will lay it down in this country cheaper than we can produce it at the wage we are getting, and we have already taken a 6-cent-an-hour wage cut. Our wages have been cut, but we still cannot produce in that fashion and the companies indicated that the only way that they could meet that and not shut down any mine would be to cut wages further about 50 cents an hour-and the top miner only gets $2.10.