Responsibility of Labor Unions

Report Outline
Roosevelt's Call for Higher Labor Standards
Reversal of Positions on Union Incorporation
Court Decisions and Union Responsibility
Proposals for Promoting Labor Responsibility

Roosevelt's Call for Higher Labor Standards

President roosevelt at a press conference December 29 denounced the gradual breaking down of labor standards since invalidation of the National Industrial Recovery Act, He declared that something must be done by the federal government to bring about elimination of child labor, long working hours, and starvation wages. In his annual message to Congress on January 6, the President paid:

The statute of N. R. A. has been outlawed. The problems have not. They are still with us. That decent conditions and adequate pay for labor … can be secured through parallel and simultaneous action by 48 states is a proven impossibility…. There are those who, sincerely or insincerely, still cling to state action as a theoretical hope. But experience with actualities makes it clear that federal laws supplementing state laws are needed to help solve the problems which result from modern invention applied in an industrialized nation which conducts its business with scant regard to state lines.

No specific proposal for accomplishing the labor objectives of N. R. A. has yet been endorsed by the administration, but various measures advanced in Congress are being studied by the Department of Justice.