A Message from FDR about the Living Wage

[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

[MrBenchley]

1. Republicans still hate FDR with a white-hot passion

but America loved him for saying things like that.

[kalian]

2. Have a question.....

do those low-income republicans realize that they are virtually
SLAVES of their own party and making? :shrug:
Are they actually happy living under such conditions...here, in
the "richest" and most "powerful" nation on the planet?
Something is just plain wrong with those people. And no, I'm not
talking about the suits and corporate execs that are to be expected
to be part of these elitist pigs...I'm talking about the low-brows
that consider it their duty to be repukes.

What is up with that?

[mtlipsc]

3. It seems to be a combination of...

Fear - because they think things could get worse, and they are hanging on by their fingernails. It's the same syndrome that people get when they are homeless. They can only think ahead as far as their next meal, or where they are going to sleep that night. It's something that seems to happen in a human being when survival is all-important. No long view. You just huddle down somewhere with all your stuff in a shopping cart where you can keep an eye on it.

Pride - or maybe more properly called machoism. Being tough in the face of adversity has become much of who they are. They don't want it made easier for anyone else. The "crabs in the bucket" syndrome. It too is archetypical. They tell the same joke in Russia, or so a son who lives in Moscow tells me.

It's a childish thing, too. My mother tells me a story about when I was about 8. I had moved to Portland Oregon after a couple of years of living abroad. I had a hard time fitting in. After I'd finally made the adjustment, a new kid moved into the neighborhood. My mother suggested I go over and be friendly, and I flatly refused. My mother suggested I remember what it had been like for me, and wouldn't it be nice to make it easier for her? I said something on the order of, "If I had to stand it, she has to stand it."

[WhoCountsTheVotes]

4. kick

:kick: