NRA Hearing on Minimum Price Controversy

(Continued from Page 23) that body's directors voted to ask elimination of minimum prices.

Mr. Robinson, stating the Delta group of mills for which he was speaking represent as mu'ch as 5O per cent of the lumber production of the Institute's member mills, declared that the elimination of cost protection prices would result in a return to the 5-and-10 ,cent hourly wages for sawmill workers prevailing in 1932 and early 1933, that the fact that so many of the price-violating mills are also wage violators constitutes in itself sufficient evidence of the consequences of a bottomless lumber market, and that once price prote,ction is removed thousands of sawmills would take advantage of the vast surplus of labor in the South obtainable at 10c an hour or less. Enforcement by NRA of the Lumber Code provisions, not their abandonment, he declared, is the crying need.

Harry W. Cole, San Francisco, Calif., spokesman for the California Redwood Division and the California Redwood Association, said that compliance with "all provisions of the code, in,cluding prices", has been obtained in that division, that the industry is operating at 50 per cent capacity now, compared with 20 per cent in May, 1933, and is employing 6,000 men instead of the 2500 employed then.

"We don't want to go back to the conditions that prevailed in 1932 and early 1933", he said. "Our people feel