A Message from FDR about the Living Wage [View All]

[WhoCountsTheVotes]

After many requests on my part the Congress passed a Fair Labor Standards Act, what we call the Wages and Hours Bill. That Act --applying to products in interstate commerce -- ends child labor, sets a floor below wages and a ceiling over hours of labor.

Except perhaps for the Social Security Act, it is the most far-reaching, the most far-sighted program for the benefit of workers ever adopted here or in any other country. Without question it starts us toward a better standard of living and increases purchasing power to buy the products of farm and factory.

Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000.00 a day, who has been turning his employees over to the Government relief rolls in order to preserve his company's undistributed reserves, tell you -- using his stockholders' money to pay the postage for his personal opinions -- tell you that a wage of $11.00 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry. Fortunately for business as a whole, and therefore for the Nation, that type of executive is a rarity with whom most business executives most heartily disagree.

Franklin Roosevelt's Fireside Chat, June 24, 1938
http://www.mhrcc.org/fdr/chat13.html