Mr. BARDEN. And he still has his rights as a citizen without being a member of the union?

Secretary TOBIN. Correct.

Mr. BARDEN. And he can still have good sense without being a member of the union, and he can still stand up for his rights; can't he? Secretary TOBIN. And he still gets pretty low wages, as the record shows below decent American living standards.

Mr. BARDEN. I appreciate your enthusiasm, Mr. Secretary, because you are just exactly what Congress set up, and has instructed you to be.

Secretary TOBIN. I would like to answer that immediately. I consider the Department of Labor an agency of the Government of the United States, and not of any particular group. When the Department of Labor-when I and my President have recommended the elimination of child labor and the establishment of minimum wages

Mr. BARDEN. Mr. Secretary

Secretary TOBIN. I just want to say this: We are doing it in the interest of the whole economy, and I think, when this Congress establishes 75 cents an hour as the minimum wage, they are helping the decent employers of the United States and protecting them against the chiseling employers of the country.

I know, as you know, sweatshops should be eliminated from the country, and they are not eliminated, and the one effective way you are going to do it-the two things go hand in hand, collective bargaining and the Government establishing a minimum wage. We establish standards for many other things and I think we ought to establish that minimum-wage rate in our country.

Mr. BARDEN. Mr. Secretary, this as a very delightful discussion, and I share a good many of your views, but if we still have sweatshops the Administrator of this act hasn't been alert as I would expect him to be.

Secretary TOBIN. Well, the Administrator, under this amendment, is going to try to eliminate them because he is extending the coverage to those unfortunates beyond the scope of the law.

Mr. BARDEN. What sweatshops exist now?

Secretary TOBIN. I think 40 cents is a sweatshop wage because it gives

Mr. BARDEN. You said the existence of sweatshops; what sweatshops exist? Let's name just one of them.

Secretary TOBIN. I would invite you to listen to this: Just the other day the Navy Department put out a bid for caps and a bid came in that was so drastically low-so much lower than any other bid that came in that a check was made; and it developed the party didn't realize there was a Walsh-Healey Act. The Walsh-Healey Act establishes a higher rate than 40 cents an hour, and the individual had to withdraw his bid. That man could be in interstate commerce under the Fair Labor Standards Act, and naturally your great purchasing powers your great department stores, your big mail-order houses are going to go to the place in which they can buy for the low dollar. Back in 1933, when Congress passed the National Recovery Act, they passed it with the declared purpose that they wanted to eliminate that depression, and to prevent further ones.

When the Wagner Act was enacted, the premable had the same declared purpose, and even the Taft-Hartley Act had the same purpose, and the Fair Labor Standards Act has the same purpose: To have a ready and a free flow of commerce, and to prevent low wages from putting our country into a depression. And that, I think, is about the complete answer to it, and that one case of that one bid, I think, is typical of just the very thing we are thinking of and what we are trying to eliminate by this act.

Mr. LESINSKI. You gentlemen have taken 9 minutes, and you will only be allowed 10 minutes. I will allow the gentleman only 1 more minute. Hereafter, only 5 minutes will be allowed for questioning. Mr. BARDEN. Mr. Chairman, if you are just allowing a member of this committee 10 minutes on something we are all very much interested in a matter of this kind, and in getting at something helpful to the American people, 150,000,000 of whom are interested in this proposition-if you are just going to allow 10 minutes, I apologize for consuming the 10 minutes, and I will not attempt to use any more because you cannot cover questions of this kind. Frankly, the Secretary has done 90 percent of the talking and I have done about 10, So, now, I think 9 minutes of it should be charged to the Secretary and

1 to me.

I can't even make a sensible conclusion in 1 minute.

Mr. LESINSKI. All right; go ahead.

Mr. BARDEN. No. I am afraid some of the members feel maybe I am, under that rule, consuming too much time.

Mr. LESINSKI. I will withdraw the rule entirely.

Mr. BARDEN. There is no antagonism. The Secretary, I thought, was giving some very valuable information. Maybe I was overestimating it, but I think the chairman is underestimating it. Mr. LESINSKI. I withdraw the rule, Mr. Barden.

Secretary TOBIN. Mr. Congressman, I did want to say further in that regard, a 40-cents-an-hour rate, based on '35-39 levels, amounts today to a 23-cent purchasing power, or $9.20 a week, based on 1935 and 1939.

Mr. BARDEN. Mr. Secretary, let me say to you I do not think there is a single member of this committee who does not think that wages should be increased, and the minimum should be increased. Your remarks are directed at me as though I would probably be interested in reducing it.

Secretary TOBIN. Mr. Congressman, I most humbly apologize if I Lave created that impression.

Mr. BARDEN. I am interested in increasing the minimum intelligently. Congress put you down there and the law has been so written, and it has been so stated in public addresses, and you did just exactly what Congress intended, to represent labor in the United States, and that is what we want you to do; but at the same time what we are trying to do is to get at what we would determine to be the general thinking in this country because I don't think you are any different from some other human being, and we can't help but be the product of our environment and our association and our thinking along with those who think with us.

I am, right or wrong, what God made me, and I am not going to argue with Him about it, so far as that is concerned; so you may think

very strongly one way, and somebody else may think not quite as strongly as you, and maybe the right place is there in between the two thinkings; so when I ask you a question, I think you are slightly in error in assuming that I am antagonistic. I am not; I am simply trying to see if we can't get your very intelligent thoughts and my very feeble ones together, and maybe get some kind of a mixture that wouldn't explode.

Secretary TOBIN. I would like to say for the record I didn't think a single question asked was antagonistic; and, I think, every one contributed toward my having a chance to state my thoughts on the operations of the act and the effect it would have on the economy.

Mr. BARDEN. Now, Mr. Secretary, I won't follow this collectivebargaining field, because I do feel very keenly about it. I don't think we will ever get to the point and realize the objective we seek until we can get collective bargaining thoroughly established in this country.

Now, the objection that I find in the existing Wage-Hour Act, is that the underlying philosophy of that act is to pit the employee against the employer. You can make this one do that and that one do that, and I think a little more practical philosophy written into this law would probably encourage that feeling which must exist in order to make collective bargaining workable and satisfactory to our economy; so I do feel that too much scope for your industry committees is a very direct invasion of that field that we would like to leave to collective bargaining.

I would rather write some law that would encourage it and give them the right and instruct them that their right is in the field of collective bargaining than to have a committee come down from your Department and say, "You get out of this field of collective bargaining; we have charge of this; this is our jurisdiction, and we are going to fix it from the records and figures." That doesn't always bring about harmony.

There is one other thing I want to ask you about, and that is this question on overtime which you and I both agree isn't right and shouldn't exist.

Secretary TOBIN. I agree with you, Mr. Congressman, because, when the original Wage Act was established, it was passed to establish a minimum wage and to spread the work for 40 hours and a payment of time and a half in excess of 40 hours. Unfortunately, the court handed down a decision and placed a different interpretation than I think Congress intended when it was enacted, but the draft of the act you have before you will correct that.

Mr. BARDEN. In portal-to-portal pay bills-in that bill by the Congress, saying that was wrong, they withdraw from them the use of the courts to sue for that back portal-to-portal pay.

I wonder if there would be any objection on your part if the same protection should be extended here, using that bill as the direct precedent and furnish protection in this case when we correct the overtime on overtime. If we say that is wrong, why shouldn't we at the same time say that, in cases where this has existed, the courts shall be withdrawn and will not be a party to punishing somebody who was doing what we regarded as right?

Secretary TOBIN. Well, I would say, if the committee arrives at that conclusion, that is the action they should take.

Mr. BARDEN. You agree with the philosophy in the portal-to-portal pay bill; don't you?

Secretary TOBIN. I agree with the principle. I will state that this act originally was intended to spread work and grant overtime after a period of 40 hours. There are certain circumstances under which you would have to be very careful in your law, though, to be sure you didn't also bring up traditional practices of the past in which there was actual premium pay for hours beyond.

Mr. BARDEN. That is why we have some of these lawyers around here: to see that we don't go any further than that; but I was sure that

you

Secretary TOBIN. Well, under this amendment, if it is enacted, you wouldn't have any portal-to-portal cases any longer, or any overtime problems.

Mr. BARDEN. I think, Mr. Secretary, you probably did just what the Congress did last time, when we overlooked the drafting, and permitted that in your statement; you overlooked the protection from suits that might arise under it, or don't you agree that you make mistakes? Which?

Secretary TOBIN. Oh, definitely.

Mr. BARDEN. I wanted to know your views on that. I don't know that many exist, but one would be too many.

Mr. WIER. May I inject my views for a moment on the observation made by the committee members?

I am very much interested. I would be very happy to reach an agreement with Secretary Tobin on this question of curing the lowwage payment in this country. It has been my responsibility and my job over a period of 25 years to do just what you are talking about.

In your remarks on the jurisdiction between this wage-and-hour bill, and collective bargaining, I want to say that I hope that before we leave here we will have a repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act so we can get back to the Wagner Act, and to permit the trade-union movement of this country full permission by legislation to the right of selforganization without the handicaps that we have experienced the last couple of years in organizing these low-paid workers.

We are not so much affected, Mr. Chairman, in the industrial areas on questions of organization of the workers, but we are seriously handicapped and quite restrained by legal procedure, in our ability to go out and organize the very people-millions of them-that have no recourse to organization for several reasons:

One of them is the hostility of the employer, and that hostility has been increased under legislation of the Eightieth Congress.

Then we have, in many cases, legislation by our State legislators that makes the job doubly difficult, so I would be in accord with you, Mr. Barden, if we could reach a happy conclusion here so that this law won't be necessary.

Now, insofar as the trade-union movement is concerned, this is not too beneficial to the trade-union movement. This is beneficial to the people that couldn't be reached by the trade-union movement or by employers that take such recourses as to prevent our organization of those employees.

In my State I know thousands and thousands of dollars have been collected in the rural parts of the State that we haven't been able to reach either by opposition of law or opposition of employers in competition; so I am not pleading the case of the trade-union movement past organized, but I am pleading the cause of the millions of people that I love and have worked with for 25 years, that they do have the assistance of Government in a helpful way, and not in a disadvantageous way; so give us back the Wagner Act and we will take care of a considerable part of this problem here.

Mr.

Mr. LESINSKI. May I make an explanation to the gentlemen? Barden had the floor, and hereafter other members may have the right to ask him to yield.

Mr. BARDEN. That is all right, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. LESINSKI. When the member has the floor he has the floor, and if another man wants to ask a question, you ask the man who has the floor-the same procedure as we follow in the House.

Mr. BARDEN. That is all right, Mr. Chairman. I am glad to have the gentleman's views, and he said many things that I agree with.

Mr. Secretary, there is one other matter in here that bothered me a little bit. I have noticed, in some operations that I have been familiar with, that Christmas bonuses, and what you call Christmas presents, and so forth, you want those added to the scale of pay?

Secretary TOBIN. No; it specifically takes them out.

Mr. BARDEN. And as it is now, by interpretation, didn't you issue a bulletin or something that said that, if they expected that, it become a part of their pay

Mr. McCOMB. Some of them are, and some have been declared so by the courts. The principal bonuses that are included are the ones we call production bonuses, tied up with productivity as part of the pay to the man for his production, but we do have some that the courts have ruled on, and we have had to say they are not Christmas bonuses and should be included in the regular rate of pay.

Mr. BARDEN. I wouldn't like to see that go to the point that it would kill these incentive payments in dividends, because I argued with the owner of one concern for quite some time that he would be perfectly protected in going ahead and giving them their checks, and he wound up by deciding that, if he did do it, some of you fellows would frown on him and then if he wasn't as lucky next year he would be stuck; so the result was the workers didn't get those checks. That bothered me. I felt that they ought to have had them.

Mr. McCOMB. This bill is specifically taking care of that in that we have recommended that certain payments should not be included in the regular rate in the rule-making power that the Secretary has asked for; he could make rules which would protect that fellow.

Secretary TOBIN. If we had the rule-making power, consideration could be given to the individual case.

Mr. BARDEN. Your rule-making power is indispensable, to a certain extent. The rule-making power shouldn't extend too far. The average man who is operating a business can't tell from week to week what your rules are going to be. He must have some restricted field in which he knows what is going to happen to him, because lots of times a man must plan his business in January for November or for September, and if in this field there is somebody liable to issue an