Death Sentence?

When Royal Little bought his first New England textile plants as a nucleus for his mushrooming Textron, Incorporated, New Englanders cheered him. They needed a show of faith in New England’s declining textile industry. But recently New Englanders have booed Roy Little.

Quick Action. In little more than a year he had closed plants in four New England towns, sold their machinery, abolished the jobs of 5,000 workers. Last week Roy Little announced that he would also close his sheet and blanket factory in Nashua, N.H., and open up six new plants in Puerto Rico. In Nashua 3,500 more workers were out of jobs.

To Textileman Little the deal offered by the Puerto Rican government looked too good to turn down. Hot after new industries, Puerto Rico will build him six plants for $6,000,000, sell them to his Puerto Rican subsidiary for $500,000 down and let him pay off the rest out of profits, tax free for twelve years. Another incentive was Puerto Rican labor at 25¢ to 75¢ an hour as against $.90 to $1.30 in Nashua.

To Nashua, where one-fourth of the working force was employed by Textron, Roy Little’s Puerto Rican deal looked like a death sentence. Cried a local labor leader: “A disaster for the entire community.” A textile man was just as sore. “It is ridiculous,” said he, “to demand that labor act with responsibility while capital takes an irresponsible attitude.”

Their sentiments were echoed by New England officials who have long been alarmed at the rate the textile industry is moving away, chiefly to the South. In Washington, the Senate Small Business Committee ordered an investigation.

Slow Going. But the Senators would find Little a hardheaded witness with a plausible story to tell. Little has never made a secret of his belief that Yankee workers no longer earn their high wages. When he bought eleven Southern mills (TIME, May 27, 1946), he said he found that his Southern workers’ productivity was one-third higher than that of his New England crews. One reason was that Southern plants could be run on three shifts; most New Englanders refused to work night shifts. “When you can’t work your plant three shifts a day,” said Little, “it isn’t worth modernizing.”

In effect, Little blamed the New Englanders for their troubles. Since 1921, he said, no new textile mill has been built in New England and the number of its spindles has been cut more than 75% to 5,000,000. More than a year ago, Little had warned that the plant’s output would have to rise but it remained low.

For Little, higher productivity had suddenly become very necessary. With the slump in textiles (TIME, Aug. 30), he was beginning to find it difficult to sell some of his products. Although Textron’s net profits have jumped to $3,805,000 in the first half of 1948, from $2,841,835 in the same period last year, its current gross sales, running at a rate of $100 million, were off $25 million from 1947. Little thought next year would bring a further decline. To see him through the leaner years ahead, he was concentrating on his Textron brand name products, shutting down his money-losing sidelines. Few textile men thought that a mere Senate committee would budge tough Roy Little.