Mr. KELLY. At the present time, one-fourth of all the post-office clerks of the country get their Saturday half holiday now? Mr. TROTTER. Yes, sir. Mr. KELLY. That being true, it does not cost a cent; there is no extra money paid out there. Mr. TROTTER. No. It does not show on the books. Mr. KELLY. That is already brought about, and there is not a penny of expense on that end under the present regulation. Mr. TROTTER. No; but the expense would come in those offices which are not granting time off on Saturdays at this time. Mr. KELLY. Why would you say it would involve the total expense of the four-fourths, where you have one-fourth already taken care of without the expenditure of a cent? Why should you not say it would be three-fourths? The CHAIRMAN. You do take that out and one-fourth more, do you not, in the consideration of that item, so that you provide for about one-half? Mr. TROTTER. Yes; about one-half we figure would be fair. Mr. TROTTER. There is an unknown quantity that we can not figure on, but we think that one-half would be fair. Mr. KELLY. You have counted that you would get a substitute and put him to work for two hours to take the place of a 4-hour clerk? Mr. TROTTER. No; we figured putting one clerk to work for four hours to take care of two clerks absent. That is the same thing. Mr. KELLY. It amounts to the same thing. Mr. TROTTER. Some offices would not have to put on any additional help, because business is closed down there and there is no work to be done. Mr. KELLY. Take it in offices where they have a busy Saturday afternoon and the clerks must work, is it not possible in most of those cases that on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, or on short days, you could give them those hours off without the expenditure of a cent? Mr. TROTTER. I can not say you could, Mr. Kelly, because we are keeping our forces right down to the minimum now and there is not very much leeway there and we usually have to allow substitutes on the days those clerks take their compensatory time. Mr. KELLY. You recall some years ago we had this question up and then no action was taken on it, and General Bartlett went over it carefully and figured it could be administered, the entire cost of it, as he estimated, at $6,000,000. Now here you have $13,000,000 cost. Mr. TROTTER. I do not think that figure of $6,000,000 was for the entire Postal Service; I think he said that figure of $6,000,000 was for his bureau. Mr. KELLY. I think he said sympathetically administered, the price of it would be $6,000,000 in his establishment. Mr. SPROUL. The railway mail he did not figure; that was $3,500,000. Mr. TROTTER. His $6,000,000, or whatever it was, compared with our $9,000,000. Mr. KELLY. It is about a 50 per cent increase there. Mr. TROTTER. $9,126,000-about 50 per cent increase. The CHAIRMAN. In that Railway Mail Service, you would not be able Mr. TROTTER. I am not going to answer for the Railway Mail Service; I do not know anything about the Railway Mail Service at all. They have the figures on that. Mr. KELLY. We will get the figures on that later? Mr. TROTTER. Yes, sir. Mr. KELLY. How have you figured it for the letter carriers, Mr. Trotter? Mr. TROTTER. I have no separate figures for the clerks or letter carriers. Now in the case of Saturday afternoon, there are a great many places where we can not deliver mail, because the people are not there to receive it; the business closes on Saturday afternoon and it is not necessary. In the Southern States they usually observe Thursday afternoon. But it is one day off a week and we give the same privilege on Wednesday or Thursday afternoon, or on whichever day business is suspended. On such days there is no place to deliver the mail. The business houses are closed and the people go home, close their houses, get in their automobiles, and go joy riding, and there is no place to deliver mail in the residential section. So that on Saturday afternoon there is no place to deliver in many of the cities; but there are places where they do not have this Saturday afternoon closing of business. They are coming to it very rapidly, but there are quite a good many cities that do not suspend business on Saturday afternoon. Mr. KENDALL. Generally that is left up to the postmasters whether they close, or not? Mr. TROTTER. We leave that very largely to the postmasters; but if we find a postmaster is not going along sympathetically, quite often we write to him and tell him what he is authorized to do under the Post Office Department's policy. There are quite a good many postmasters that do not understand they have authority to close the offices, that is, to curtail their forces, on Saturday afternoons. Mr. KENDALL. I find a great many postmasters are afraid to take steps to close their offices on Saturday afternoons. Mr. TROTTER. When our attention is brought to such cases, or the postmasters inquire about it, or some employees complain about it, we immediately go back and explain to the postmasters just what they are permitted to do, and in that way a great many of them do close down on Saturday afternoons; others do not. I do not want you to get the idea we close the post offices. The CHAIRMAN. Are there any further questions? If not, we thank you very much, Mr. Trotter. STATEMENT OF WARREN I. GLOVER, SECOND ASSISTANT POSTMASTER GENERAL The CHAIRMAN. Will you make a statement or do you wish to be interrogated? Mr. GLOVER. In view of my chief's statement I do not think there is anything I can say unless you care to ask me some questions. Mr. KELLY. Will you give us a general idea how you estimate the cost in the Railway Mail Service? Mr. GLOVER. I think, Mr. Kelly, based on the use of substitutes at $1,850—that is, based on a salary of $1,850-we would need 2,162 substitutes. We estimate this bill would cost $4,000,000. The CHAIRMAN. You could not use compensatory time at all in the Railway Mail Service, could you? Mr. GLOVER. No, sir; not to any great extent. Mr. SPROUL. It is costing more now than it did a year ago. The statement was made in Congress a year ago that it would cost about $3,500,000 for the Railway Mail Service to go on a 44-hour week. Mr. GLOVER. We estimate it will be about $4,000,000. Mr. SPROUL. Now? Mr. GLOVER. Yes, sir. Mr. SPROUL. A year ago, or a little more than a year ago, it was estimated at $3,500,000. Mr. GLOVER. Yes, sir. Mr. KELLY. Your estimate was $3,700,000. Mr. GLOVER. $3,700,000, and we say now it will be about $4,000,000. Mr. KELLY. At that time I made a report on this bill, and I went into the Railway Mail Service quite carefully. You figure 2,000 substitutes there, do you not, at the full rate? Mr. GLOVER. Yes, sir. Mr. KELLY. To take care of that matter? Mr. KELLY. In figuring that I tried to calculate it on the exact number of class A and class B lines that would be affected, and a very much less figure was arrived at on that very basis; $1,900,000 will cover your entire number there of 2,000, figured at the regular rates. I can not understand just where you get the $4,000,000 now. Can you go into that a little more in detail? Mr. GLOVER. We have Mr. Fisher and Mr. Gove here, who arrived at those figures. They probably can explain them. It is rather difficult, of course, to explain them down to the last dollar, as you have done $1,900,000. Our conditions are somewhat different than they are in the other branches of the service. Mr. KELLY. I notice you have figured 122 hours relief for men in service on the road. I figured that at the full rate, not $1,850 but the higher rate, and that brings it up to $1,163,000. Just where the $4,000,000 comes in I can not figure. Of course, there is to be added to that the terminal clerks, but that we can figure out on compensatory time. But I can not get anything approaching the $4,000,000 figure, and I thought perhaps you could give us that. Mr. GLOVER. We have the men here who made those figures up, and they can tell you the way they were worked out, or we can submit them if you want. We would prefer to submit that for the record, if you will permit. Mr. KELLY. I called the general's attention to the fact, on the night differential of the Railway Mail Service, the department estimated when we were considering that bill it would cost $3,700,000 for the Railway Mail Service, whereas the actual experience, where we paid out the cash, shows it was about $1,900,000. Mr. GLOVER. $1,900,000; yes, sir. Mr. KELLY. Just about half of what the estimate was. The CHAIRMAN. Does anyone have any further questions they would like to ask of Mr. Glover? If not, we thank you very much. SHORTER WORK DAY ON SATURDAY The estimate of $4,000,000 additional for salaries in the Railway Mail Service în connection with proposed legislation providing for a 4-hour day on Saturdays is made up as follows: On June 30, 1929, there were 19,498 regular employees, exclusive of officials and office personnel, and their average annual salary was $2,444.43, or $8 per day. A full day's pay for four hours on Saturday adds to cost of service on a basis of 4 hours per week or 26 days per year to each employee, amounting to $208 (26 days, at $8) per employee. This gives a total for 19,498 employees of $4,055,584. There were also 845 acting clerks additional whose annual salary was $1,850 or $6.05 per day. Twenty-six days for these employees would cost $157.30 per employee, or $132,919 for 845 employees. Road clerks under proposed legislation would be paid a full day for each 7 hours and 20 minutes instead of 8 hours under present law. This would add 1 day's pay for each 11 days of service and raise the cost per road clerk from $208 to $224 or $16 per clerk. There were 14,001 road clerks and the additional cost would be $224,016. Eighty-seven thousand four hundred and eighty-one dollars is estimated for a normal increase since June 30, 1929, making a total of $4,500,000. There would be some saving possible in terminals, transfer offices, and lines; but it is impossible to estimate the amount. Possibly this saving would amount to approximately 10 per cent or about $500,000 which would leave $4,000,000 as the estimated additional cost of this bill for Railway Mail Service salaries. STATEMENT OF JOHN W. PHILP, FOURTH ASSISTANT POSTMASTER GENERAL The CHAIRMAN. Do you care to make a statement, or would you prefer to be asked questions? Mr. PHILP. Why, there is nothing in my bureau that is affected by this, except the vehicle service. The estimates that they give me on that, as to what will be involved, are between three and four hundred thousand dollars. Mr. KELLY. You figure on that the entire time off, I suppose? Mr. PHILP. No; it is figured on the necessary time to handle the mails during that period-say four hours on Saturday afternoon. Mr. KELLY. The whole four hours you figured? Mr. PHILP. Yes, whatever service would be necessary. Of course a lot of service would not be necessary if Saturday afternoons were taken off. That was not taken into consideration in making our figures. Mr. KELLY. How about compensatory time the next five days? Mr. PHILP. We do not have much chance to give compensatory time. Our automobile service is very limited, as you probably know, and compensatory time is a very hard job for us. We even have to work on Sundays. It is pretty close figuring to get compensatory time in; in fact, we seldom do. We use substitutes in many instances to give compensatory time. There is not any absorption there to amount to anything; the personnel is too small and too scattered to permit of it. Mr. KELLY. How many are there? Mr. PHILP. About 5,000. So that you can see, with their being scattered around as they are over a number of cities, with a Governmentowned service, we can not have much chance to give compensatory time without putting some man in the place of the man who is off. Our schedules are like railroad schedules. We furnish a lot of cars, you understand, for delivery by carriers, and parcel post and the collection service, but we are not figuring those; we are figuring only on our own chauffeurs and mechanics that have the actual operating of the cars. Mr. KELLY. You were postmaster in Dallas for a number of years, were you not? Mr. PHILP. Yes, sir. Mr. KELLY. In Dallas, is it customary to work all Saturday afternoon in the stores and private industries? Mr. PHILP. In the stores; yes, sir; every one of them. Mr. KELLY. How about private industry? Mr. PHILP. Private industries are about 50-50, but the offices probably not that percentage; about 25 to 75. The system is growing very much stronger in the offices than it has been. It is increasing all the time. Industry, I suppose, is doing about the same thing. In our large industries it depends on the kind of work whether they work Saturday afternoon or not. Those that are not on time schedule, where the work is important, can not always lay it aside and give Saturday afternoon off. In Dallas we made no deliveries in the afternoon in the business district. The residential carriers were permitted to catch up their swing and carry only first-class mail and the daily papers on their second trip, which permitted them to get off about two hours. On heavy days, of course, they had to work a longer time. The CHAIRMAN. Are there any further questions? If not, we thank you very much. Mr. PHILP. I am very obliged to you. The CHAIRMAN. If there is no other representative of the department here, we will be glad to call on the representatives of the associations first. STATEMENT OF THOMAS F. FLAHERTY, SECRETARY-TREASURER NATIONAL FEDERATION OF POST OFFICE CLERKS Mr. FLAHERTY. In behalf of the National Federation of Post Office Clerks and the Railway Mail Association, I would like to submit, for printing in the record, a brief that we have compiled covering thoroughly and comprehensively, we believe, this subject matter. It is not my intention now to go into the subject at any great length, except to call to the attention of the committee members one portion of the brief which I believe answers, in part, the Postmaster General's statement of a few moments ago that the 44-hour practice in private industry was confined largely to factories or mills or building trades or to workers employed by the hour. In that connection let me read: The American Management Association recently made a survey covering 304 establishments with a total of more than 174,000 office employees, and discovered that the working day on Saturday averaged slightly over four hours. Only 51 per cent of the offices worked longer hours in winter than in summer. Several reported closing all day Saturday in summer. Another citation, which is even nearer home: The Personnel Classification Board reported to the Seventieth Congress (H. Doc. No. 602) that it had investigated the practices of 1,372 firms employing 446,626 office workers, and found that "there is a marked tendency to work short hours on Saturday throughout the entire year." Some offices close for the entire day in the summer months. "Seventy-three per cent of the offices, |