WHAT ARE RAILS WORTH IN U.S.A.?

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 104, 30 October 1933, Page 8

WHAT ARE RAILS WORTH IN U.S.A.?

Uniform bidding by United States steel companies for supply of rails, at 37 dollars 75 cents a ton, has caused a dispute with the President; and it is difficult to see how similar disputes can fail to arise. The order of events is: The State requires of employers conditions of •wages and hours that fix a certain cost basis; employers come together to arrange a price that will enable them to produce on that cost basis; when they have arranged the price that they say is required (example, 37 dollars 75 cents for rails) the President says that they should be able to produce at a lower price (35 dollars, according to the cablegram) and calls on them to lower their tender or open their books for Government inspection, "after which President Roosevelt would fix a fair price." Thus the authorities are being driven' along "the vicious circle" to a wider (and widening) basis of price fixation than before. Forty years ■ ago the New Zealand Parliament appointed tribunals to fix wages and hours and conditions. It was left to the employers to fix prices. A long period of rising prosperity (the immediate result of refrigeration and prolonged by war over two or three decades of the twentieth century) enabled employers to fix prices that everybody could carry, though not without friction and some slowing-down of business. This neutral result was attained in a small market, without price fixation (except as a war measure). But the United States is a huge market caught not in a prosperity cycle bill in the reverse. How can price fixation be avoided? And how can it nun?