Living Wage Quotes
Statement made during televised debate with Walter Mondale, October 21, 1984 (see citation).
She improved the economy considerably but was stuck in a socialized economic ideology that inhibited major private sector growth, without which it is impossible to eliminate poverty and with which excessive greed can also produce poverty.
At the time, industrialists could not even conceive of the notion of negotiating over wages must less collective bargaining.
This was a description of the famous Lawrence, MA, textile mill strike.
What was so unusual about Mrs. Roosevelt was that she came from a very wealthy, upper class, family. She never had to work a day in her life; nor did the men in her family. Yet she learned about, understood, and empathized with the poor and their problems in a way that few “aristocrats” and politicians ever did.
Corporate Executives had urged that the laws requiring overtime pay for more than a 40 hour week be put in abeyance for the remainder of the war. Increased production was necessary for the war effort and manpower was getting short. When the Automobile Workers Union proposed that the wealthy executives also accept “patriotic” limits, the executives wanted little part in that plan. The manpower pressure was relieved when women entered the manufacturing plants but most executives and male union members and officers did not think that women could possibly be even as productive. They were wrong as women learned critical skills as they had the opportunity and out-produced the pre-war men.
In 1902 there was a major coal and railroad labor crisis. The owners and operators refused to negotiate or bargain with labor: This quotation is very famous because it is an iconic picture of the views and attitudes of the large industiralists at the turn of the 20th Century. More than opposing labor unions, they actually believed that God had selected them to run the economic and business affairs of the country if not the world. It was their Christian values and paternalism that the workers should look to in order to determine the rights and priviliges of the working man or woman. This upper class attitude was one of the major reasons that class warfare broke into the open. Ironically, there was not much difference between the attidudes of the industiral leaders and the notions of fudalism.
