Business & Finance: Davis Likes Foreign Models

William H. Davis, chairman of the War Labor Board and, next to the President, the most important Government man on the labor front, last week shed light on where he thinks the U.S. labor movement is heading.

“Industrywide collective bargaining seems a logical next development,” Mr. Davis wrote for a release summarizing the new Twentieth Century Fund’s survey on collective bargaining. It makes for greater stability throughout an industry, more responsible unions, and puts management on a more fair and equitable competitive basis so far as wage costs are concerned.

“It seems to me that what we principally need now is more organization among; employer and management groups. Such organization would do much to promote an equality of bargaining power between management and labor.”

Industry-wide bargaining is still the exception in this country, prevailing nationally only in coal and railroading, prevailing locally in a few industries like printing and the building and garment trades. In England and in Sweden it is the rule, and Mr. Davis was much impressed by its workings there when Mr. Roosevelt sent him abroad on a Government investigating commission in 1938.

In the U.S., employes of prosperous companies usually expect to share in their prosperity by being paid better than workers for less successful competitors. In England labor believes that wages should not be affected one way or the other by the success or failure of the employer.