LIMITING WAR PROFITS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXII, Issue 99, 26 March 1942, Page 5

LIMITING WAR PROFITS

URGED 'IN UNITED STATES. WASHINGTON, March 24

Members of tbe House of Representatives to-day demanded ' that "the profit be taken out of the war" as new testimony was presented to the Naval Affairs Committee that the increases in the incomes of some corporation executives amounted to 700 per cent, last year. Representative Gore asked the committee for a strict limitation of war profits. He asserted that the scandalous increases in salaries and bonuses were evidence of two things—inordinate profits, and evasion of highbracket profit taxes. Representative Young asked the House to tax all profits over 3l per cent, on war contracts, and added: "We hear member after member denouncing Labour, but the unconscionable war profiteering has been met with smug complacency. Before yieldin" to the anti-Labour propaganda instigated by the 'hate-Roosevelt boys, let us immediately put an end to war profiteering such as that perpetrated by the Jack and Heintz Company. Officials of the latter war-contract-inc company testified to the committee that they paid over 500,000 dollars in bonuses to employees and executives last year. . Representative Andersen said tliat payment of such profits was a crime of the first order, and those responsible for the Jack and Heintz payments should be promptly treated as criminals. Representative Gore told the committee that Mr Bror Dahlbert, president of the Celotex Corporation, received a bonus of 158,000 dollars in 1941 though in the previous year he got only 46.000 dollars. Mr G. W. Mason, president of the Nash Ivelvmator Corporation, received a salary and bonus totalling 226.000 dollars in 1941 The secretary of the Cessna Aircraft Company, Mr Dwight Wallace, received 700 per cent, increase in salary from 2500 dollars in 1940 to 16,000 dollars in 1941. . ' . Yielding to requests from the Administration,°the Congress of Industrial Organisations and the American Federation of Labour announced that their members would forgo some of the extra pay that has been the subject of fierce Congressional controversy. The executive board of the C.T.O. has recommended that its affiliated unions forgo overtime pay for Saturday, Sunday and holiday "work when such work is performed within the 40-hour week.

In a report published yesterday, it was alleged that payments had been made in order to reduce the excess profit taxes, and that the extra costs had been added to the price of the articles manufactured.