Word: laboring
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...work for their money (though still not work anywhere near the legal maximum of 44 hours a week for privately employed workers), earned the approval of private employers. It promised to promote efficiency in WPA. That it now produced a fierce racket from all three big political wings of Labor was intensely embarrassing. It put Franklin Roosevelt, already bedeviled by an Isolationist bloc in the Senate, on a new and unexpected hotspot...
When Congress set up WPA four years ago, friends of union labor saw to it that union hourly wage scales, as prevailing in different sections of the U. S., were provided for skilled workmen. Thus, if union carpenters were getting $1.75 an hour in private employment, carpenters working for WPA got $1.75. Result: to earn the maximum monthly wage of $92.89 allotted to them, they need work only 53 hours a month. The unions' interest in thus preventing Unemployment from breaking the market for their labor was only natural. But WPA's prevailing-wage provision had other effects...
...based on regional living costs and he said, "It is my recommendation that persons employed on projects of the WPA be required to work 130 hours per month and that the earnings of such persons be on a monthly basis . . . that substantially the present national average labor cost [to WPA] be maintained...
Obviously that meant more hours of work for the same pay, and pay-per-hour far below "prevailing" (union) rates for skilled labor. Administrator Harrington argued this would be "an important factor in determining need." WPA jobs, calling for 130 hours of work per month, would become less popular. Incentive to get private employment, and hold it, would be enhanced...
Last week, first week of the new law's operation, union labor startled President, Administrator, Congress and taxpayers by a nationwide performance daring and unprecedented; a strike against a law of the land...