Labor
Performed by Woodrow Wilson
Recorded September 24, 1912
To look at the politics of
the day from the viewpoint of the laboring man is
not to suggest that there is one view proper to him,
another to the employer, another to the capitalist,
another to the professional man, but merely that the
life of the country as a whole may be looked at from
various points of view and yet be viewed as a whole.
The whole business of politics is to bring classes
together, upon a platform of accommodation and common
interest. In a political campaign the voters are called
upon to choose between parties and leaders. Parties
and platforms and candidates should be frankly put
under examination to see what they will yield us by
way of progress, and there are a great many questions
which the working man may legitimately ask and press
until he gets a definite answer. The predictions of
the leader of the new party are as alarming as the
predictions of the various stand-patters. He declares
that he is not troubled by the fact that a very large
amount of money is taken out of the pockets of the
general tax payer and put into the pockets of particular
classes of protected manufacturers, but that his concern
is that so little of this money gets into the pockets
of the laboring man, and so large a proportion of
it into the pockets of the employer. I have searched
his program very thoroughly for an indication of what
he expects to do in order to see to it that a larger
proportion of this prize money gets into the pay envelope,
and I have found only one suggestion. There is a plank
in the program which speaks of establishing a minimum
or a living wage for women workers, and I suppose
that we may assume that the principal is not in the
long run meant to be confined in its application to
women only. Perhaps we are justified in assuming that
the third party looks forward to the general establishment,
by law, of a minimum wage. It is very likely, I take
it for granted, that if a minimum wage were established
by law, the great majority of employers would take
occasion to bring their wage scale as nearly as might
be down to the level of that minimum, and it would
be very awkward for the working man to resist that
process successfully, because it would be dangerous
to strike against the authority of the federal government.
Moreover, most of his employers, at any rate practically
all of the most powerful of them, would be wards and
protégés of that very government which
is the master of us all, for no part of this program
can be discussed intelligently without remembering
that monopoly as handled by it is not to be prevented,
but accepted and regulated. When you have thought
the whole thing out, therefore, you will find that
the program of the new party legalizes monopoly and
of necessity subordinates working men to them, and
to the plans made by the government both with regard
to employment and with regard to wages. Take the thing
as a whole and it looks strangely like economic mastery
over the very lives and fortunes of those who do the
daily work of the nation, and all this under the overwhelming
power and sovereignty of the national government.
What most of us are fighting for is to break up this
very partnership between big business and the government.