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The steel industry actually has managed to eliminate featherbedding more than many industries, and management, when pressed for examples of make-work, can only complain that a ten-man hearth crew does the work of seven men, that in one plant five crews are employed to move steel where four could do the job. Featherbedding has helped to break whole firms: automakers now contend that it was a major factor behind the demise of Packard, Hudson and Kaiser cars. The United Auto Workers often insist that several types of skilled workers—machinists, oilers, carpenters, metal handlers—work on a single job that management says could be handled by one man.
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Management is hard pressed to combat such excesses. The Taft-Hartley Act rules out payments "for services which are not performed," but the Supreme Court has held featherbedding legal as long as workers perform any service—or just stay on the job. Moreover, management is often embarrassed by featherbedding on its own level. The American Institute of Management reported that 90% of U.S. companies suffer from featherbedding in the executive suite—managers who are kicked upstairs to show jobs, vice presidents (and their nephews) who have little to do after a company merges.
Instead of blindly disputing each other on the highly charged subject of featherbedding, both management and labor need to realize their duty to themselves—and to the U.S.—to work together in eliminating a luxury that the U.S. cannot afford in a competitive world economy. Featherbedding pushes up prices, pinches productivity, penalizes the consumer and the productive worker to reward the drone. Worst of all, by discouraging the use of time-saving and production-boosting new machines, it retards U.S. economic growth. Every economist agrees that the best way to create more jobs is to make the economy grow faster.