Labor's Drive for Security

Abstract

11 is difficult to understand the interest of the average worker in security—the kind of security that organized labor is asking for and striking for—unless you remember that at every union meeting a ghost is present. It is the ghost of unemployment which haunted the lives of eighteen million Americans in the early thirties and of nine million Americans as recently as 1939. This ghost is the uninvited guest at every union meeting; it will haunt these men and women as long as they live, for unemployment was one of the most significant experiences of their lives. Today I never sit down at a CIO banquet table, where labor leaders are celebrating their newly won freedom, without recalling the days when these same men stood in bread lines. Believe me, they, too, recall those days. When I am asked what the most revolutionary factor in America's recent history has been, I always reply that it was the wartime experience of full employment from 1939 to the present. Almost all Americans able and willing to work have been given the opportunity to earn a living, and at better wages than they have ever enjoyed before. During this decade—which includes our preparation for war, the war itself, and its aftermath —the American worker has had both guns and butter. He has made up his mind never to give up the butter. Before 1939 a southern textile worker could be immediately identified by the clothes he wore and the food he ate. To-