Microcosm; D. G. Smith

By 1971, because of increased Federal regula tions imposed on defense contractors, this job had grown to a full-time position: 40 hours a week spent as an overhead charge. By the time I left in 1975, I not only had a full-time administrative clerk, but another typist was authorized to assist her when needed. Thanks to the Great Society and the increased complications of doing business with the federal government, we had to expend more than 40 Mr. Smith, a frequent contributor to The Freeman, lives in Santa Maria, California. hours a week in lost time to produce the same amount of work we had turned out ten years ear lier. We not only had to contend with affirmative action and OSHA, but with edicts from such Fed eral departments as Defense, Commerce, Labor, and HEW, as well as state and county bureaucra cies. All these involved forms, and most required memos and letters as well as exhaustive book keeping. And there was record-keeping. Lots of it. We even had to record each employee's over time, keeping a kind of point system so that each person had an equal share of the premium pay, as though we were passing out party favors.

This alone proved to be an added cost, since overtime, up to that point, had always been re garded as nothing more than a wayto meet a dead line. The idea had been to get the job done and then go home. So, we used to meet an overtime assignment by grabbing the best people and get ting the job out as fast as possible, saving the com pany and the government money in the process. With the coming of the Great Society,however, we had to be fair.We had to bring in the slower and less productive people to do little more than stay out of the way, at premium rates, in order to justify the workers who were there to get the job out. Bond drives required additional record-keep ing. The federal government leaned heavily on defense contractors to have their employees buy bonds through payroll deduction. Management made it clear that everyone was expected to 235 participate. The few holdouts were repeatedly reported, and lists were kept on every level of the management hierarchy.

What I have noted here is the little world of a rather insignificant organization that existed almost 20 years ago. The importance of this micro cosm, however, is that it was not unique. It was, in fact, typical. During the Great Society years, gov ernment intervention into private industry grew at an alarming rate, and if it has since been retarded, which I doubt, it has never been stopped. Most cer tainly it has not been reversed. I haven't kept a close tab on the activities at the old post, but I know that the 40-hour group clerk is still a fact of life, and the non-productive paper work is worse than ever. No one produces more work than before, but it requires far more over head to do the same job. It is interesting to note that the Great Society years are precisely when foreign manufacturers began to make deep inroads into traditionally American markets. The automobile is the obvious example, but let's not forget that the commercial air~raft market is no longer an American show either, with the Concorde and the Airbus coming to us from foreign factories. In electronics we see pretty much a lost cause, and clothing and shoes are rapidly disappearing down the black hole.

The irony is that the chief adversary of Ameri can business is our own government. Our declining role in world markets is not solelythe fault of man agement or labor. It is the fault of stifling govern ment regulations. We cannot have one employee in 12 assigned to government paperwork and still hope to survive in a competitive world. Government should take its hands off the free enterprise system and let people get back to work. Private industry cannot continue as the nation's record-keeper. It cannot provide for the health care, the recreational and psychologicalneeds, and the baby sitting of its employees. Let companies hire according to their needs, and let them get rid of unproductive employees. Above all, let's eliminate the mountain of paper work and use the talents of every employee in the cause of honest competition. As long as we are forced to employ 40-hour group clerks, we have lit tle chance of surviving. D 236 Are We Only Good at WagingWar?