Business: Five Days

Shell Oil Co. (a U. S. relative of Sir Henri Deterding’s Royal Dutch Shell) last week announced a five-day week for field, pipe-line and refinery employes. “In line with practice generally established . . . aiding in the relief of the unemployment situation,” explained the announcement. Back in 1929, the five-day week was a sociological movement, widely publicized. Lately it has been a corporate retrench-ment, little discussed. Westinghouse and Eastman Kodak in their factories have been recent converts to the five-day week. Some Ford plants run on a five-day, some on a three-and-one-half-day schedule. But the five-day week of 1931 differs in one notable respect from the five-day week of 1928 and 1929: The Bull Market theory was to cut the time but not the wages; the Bear Market theory is to cut both.