At the plant of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron I was told that the plant had been reduced from 30,000 men to 6,000 men in less than six months without turning men off wholesale. The labor turnover did the trick. The plant stopped taking on new men several months ago, when it began to look as if the strong demand for tires was not going to hold. Each week thereafter some of the migratory workers left. Normally they would have been replaced by new migratory workers who presented themselves for jobs, but in this way each week the payroll decreased automatically. Week after week the usual number of men called for their time and struck out, some because it was summer and their native mountains called them, some to wander further afield into other industrial towns. This went on all summer and fall and when, in November, it became necessary, the management thought, to curtail production sharply there were only 14,000 instead of 30,000 in the plant. The rest had disappeared in the normal labor turnover. In the other rubber plants in Akron the same process went on, so it was not a case of turning tens of thousands of men into the streets when the real slump came. Much the same thing happened in Detroit. Last year it had more than 100,000 more people than it could properly house. These people had been drawn into Detroit by the high wages. Handy men with intelligence were getting $15 to $30 and more a day. Then came the slump in the automobile market. Beginning last May, the demand for labor in Detroit began to decrease, factories took on fewer men, but the city did not become crowded with idle men. For a certain number took their time each week and moved on. The overpopulation began to disappear. Detroit as a working man’s bonanza was working out. Coming eastward in November from the Pacific Coast, I encountered everywhere men with a few hundred dollars in their pockets, “easy money,” made in Detroit, looking now for something else. By the time I reached Detroit I found the factories had 150,000 less workmen than they had four months before and there was no idle “proletariat” standing about. Not Possible in Europe. It is only in wonderfully rich America such things can happen. Here alone we dare organize industry on this bonanza scale. In Europe the big industrials know that if they build in this rapid fashion they must be prepared for the slump. The soil will not reabsorb the migratory workers as it has done for Akron and Detroit. In Europe the workers belong to a proletariat divorced from the soil, descendants of a long line of workmen. They are also class conscious and they do not conveniently disappear in the labor turnover.