Wages & Hours

Representative Joseph Jefferson Mansfield of Columbus, Tex. is one of the two members of Congress who operate in wheel chairs.* A gentle, mild-mannered oldster of 76, who has been paralyzed since 1921, Congressman Mansfield created a furor in 1932 when he rolled himself down to the rostrum to sign a petition to discharge the Judiciary Committee from further consideration of a proposal to modify the 18th Amendment, and thus bring it to the floor. His was the 145th signature which the petition needed to become effective, a coincidence by which Congressman Mansfield professed to be greatly surprised. Last week, Congressman Mansfield surprised himself even more thoroughly by another coincidence of exactly the same kind. This time, the bill to whose rescue he raced on his wheel chair was the Fair Labor Standards Act, to provide for minimum wages and maximum hours in U. S. industry, item No. 2 on the President's program for the current extra session.

The Wages & Hours Bill has had hard sledding. Introduced in both Houses in the thick of the Court fight last spring, it got through the Senate in July. In the Senate, the bill found stern opposition from Republicans like Michigan's Arthur Vandenberg, who considered it a step on the road to "the centralized, authoritarian State" but in the House it never even had a chance to be denounced. House procedure empowers the Rules Committee to determine the order in which bills shall be considered, apportion time limits for general debate. Thus, by not giving a "rule" to bring a bill to the floor, the committee can effectively block action on any piece of legislation which its members do not favor. Since the Rules Committee is elected by the House and since the House contains an overwhelming Democratic majority, the present committee could usually be depended upon to put no obstacle in the way of Administration measures. Its highly abnormal behavior in the case of the Wages & Hours Bill was the result of highly abnormal circumstances.

As passed by the Senate, what the Wages & Hours Bill proposed was a five-man Labor Standards Board, named by the President and confirmed by the Senate, to set nationwide pay & working standards in all U. S. industries affecting interstate commerce, except farming and industries already under Government regulation. The LSB was to set minimum wages up to 40-c- an hour, maximum hours down to 40 hours a week. Also included were strict child-labor limits. Infringement of the LSB rulings would be misdemeanors punishable by a $500 fine, six months in jail or both. Any such supervision over U. S. industry is naturally least acceptable to the South, whose industrial platform is that its climate and general living conditions diminish living costs and hence make equitable a lower wage rate than the North. Although the provisions of the bill were flexible enough to allow for regional differentials, such differentials might well be too small to suit Southerners. Of the Rules Committee's 14 members, four are Republicans, five Southern Democrats. When the House Labor Committee turned the bill over to them last August, it soon became apparent that they had no intention of putting it on the House calendar.

Campaign to force the Wages & Hours Bill to the floor started last summer too near the end of the session to be effective. When Congress reconvened last month, the campaign was resumed. A petition was filed with the House clerk by the Labor Committee's Chairman Mary Teresa Norton to discharge the Rules Committee from further consideration of the bill. To be effective such a petition needs the signature of one more than half (218) of the House's members (435). Chairman Norton got the first 150 without much trouble, but thereafter, even when Speaker Bankhead and Majority Leader Sam Rayburn, Southerners reconstructed at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, urged their colleagues to sign, the names came so slowly that Minority Leader Snell felt justified in sneering at the "amazing spectacle" of a 4-to-1 majority leader campaigning against his own Rules Committee. Last week. Representative Rayburn really got down to work. He begged, promised, cajoled, and argued with individual members while the list of signatures grew longer, one by one. Finally the House met one day last week with only eight more names needed to make up the required 218.

By this time, reports that Leader Rayburn had got Southern signatures on the Norton petition by means of trading votes for everything from the Farm Bill to the Florida Ship Canal and fruit fly eradication, had caused New York's Hamilton Fish to propose a House investigation. Before a rollcall vote to table this motion was completed, seven more Representatives had put their names on the petition and the stage was set for a dramatic finale. Democratic Whip Patrick Boland offered Illinois' Scott Lucas "a chance to get your name in the papers'' by being the last to sign. A bystander offered Representative Lucas a big cigar but Representative Lucas was not tempted. At this point, Representative Mansfield--whose own grudge against the Rules Committee goes back to 1935, when it held up a bill prepared by his Rivers & Harbors Committee--made his impressive entrance on the scene.

That a House majority favored getting the Wages & Hours Bill past a committee blockade last week by no means necessarily meant that its difficulties were over. On the contrary, having cleared one formidable obstacle, the bill had merely reached a position where it had to clear two more: 1) a complete redrafting, and 2) a risky final vote.

Favored by C. I. O.'s John L. Lewis, the Wages & Hours Bill is not acceptable to A. F. of L.'s William Green. Whatever chance there was that labor's arch-rivals would arrive at a truce last week (see p. 16) were not enhanced when William Green finally announced that his executive council was drawing up a Wages & Hours Bill of its own, calling for a flat minimum of 40-c- an hour and a flat maximum of 40 hrs. a week with no regional differentials, administrative powers to be vested not in a five-man board but in the Department of Justice. But this time the Labor Committee was already redrafting the bill so that instead of a five-man board its administration will be entrusted to the Labor Department--a compromise which Chairman Norton insisted was the most the A. F. of L. could hope for if any bill at all were to be passed in this session or early next year. With a host of minor amendments also sure to be added to it, the bill will come up for debate next week.

Passage of the Wages & Hours Bill is by no means assured by the fact that a majority of House members favored getting it out of Committee. Most of the petition's signers will doubtless vote for it but some--Representative Mansfield among them--had signed solely because they considered the Rules Committee's action high-handed, with the expressed intention of voting against the bill later on. With the two camps of labor and the two Houses of Congress at odds with each other, best guess last week was that when the No. 2 item on his legislative program finally reaches the President, it will not be much more than a face-saving compromise.

*The other is Ohio's Arthur Oleshire.

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