# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1935_S239
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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Ey. Luth. Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States. 1935. 227

strained. Our people have been given to understand that they are
at liberty to join existing labor unions or to form a union of their’
own; but they have wisely elected to do neither, since we are not
only doing all we can to give our workmen adequate pay for their
labor, but provide working space and working conditions as nearly
ideal as we can contrive to make them, a fact which, we think, is
gratefully recognized by our employees and is promptly observed and
commented on by every inspector and chance visitor.

During the past triennium we have continued the policy inaugu-
rated four or five years ago of not spending any money for major
repairs and improvements. We do not consider this policy quite as
wise as the policy we formerly followed, that is, to spend from twenty
to thirty thousand dollars annually on general improvements and
repairs. In the interest of keeping up reasonable dividends for Synod
we have, in the first place, now consumed as much of our surplus as
we think we should; in the second place, the time has come or is
coming when considerable repairs and also improvements must be
applied if we do not want to impair the efficiency of the Plant. Thus
early this year we discarded two very old presses and replaced them
with two very modern presses at a total cost of about $18,000. This
became necessary because with the increased circulation, particularly
of the Lutheran Witness, we should soon have been unable to keep up
with our work.

The question of engaging an assistant manager or an assistant
to the manager has not been solved during the past three years, partly
because we thus saved several thousand dollars a year and partly
because our present manager has been entirely willing to rearrange
his work in-such a way as to get along without an assistant, especially
as his able corps of department managers has cheerfully assumed addi-
tions to their responsibilities.

We gratefully acknowledge the cooperation in our work of

_Synod’s Literature Board, the Young People’s Literature Board, the

Board of Christian Education, the theological faculty of St. Louis,
which continued to do an increasing amount of censorial reading,
and all our editors and authors. We must also gratefully acknowledge
an appreciable degree of loyalty on the part of our customers. We
are perhaps more fortunate than other denominational houses in this
respect, and yet we regret that sometimes considerations of a seeming
(or even a real) monetary advantage prompt our customers, for in-
stance, to buy their church-collection envelopes from rival concerns.
We admit that on account of transportation charges we cannot com-
pete with certain concerns that are geographically nearer to our cus- :
tomers than we are; we admit we cannot compete in the way of prizes
or other prizelike concessions; but we have gone into the church-
collection-envelope business at the earnest request of some of our