The "Topics of the Times" column that Sunday was a tongue-in-cheek look at easy jobs. It took off from a whimsical consideration of the latest demands from the head of the musicians union to double the pay of studio musicians to $200 for a ten-hour week. The idea of collecting overtime after the morning coffee break seemed a sweet deal. The column went on from there to consider other easy gigs as ascertained from current new reports.
One cushy position would be as a delegate at an international meeting where your government disapproved of the agenda and your duty was to absent yourself from the sessions. That would not even add up to a ten hour week.
Participants in labor-management disputes seemed to keep long hours "but apparently do nothing except sit around and smoke cigars," making the same speeches to one another until they get bored and a compromise was announced. The government conciliators it would seem worked round the clock trying to break up deadlocks but since neither side was willing to listen to arguments it seemed the conciliators actually had a lot of free time waiting until one side gave up.
Editing a Communist newspaper was another no-brainer. You simply had to reiterate the party line of the moment as dictated from Moscow. As a recent example, the column cited a report from Frank Kluckhohn from Chile on the leading party newspaper now assailing the US as an imperialist power having previously praised it as an ally in the fight against fascism.
The column returned to the musician union's demands on a more serious note. The real problem was the embedding of perpetual featherbedding in the demands. Featherbedding could be justified as a temporary means to protect workers displaced by technical change but not when it became a permanent policy inducing workers to enter industries where real jobs did not exist,