Mr. LINDER. It will do two things, Senator. It will increase the wage that the farmer will have to pay and it will also increase the number of people, laborers, who will be available on the farm, provided, of course, they can get jobs in some of these high-price industrial plants.

Senator ELLENDER. It is your belief, then, if this bill passes it will have the tendency of further increasing the price of farm labor? Mr. LINDER. Yes; I think it will.

Senator ELLENDER. That is all.

Senator TUNNELL. Thank you, Mr. Linder.

(Charts submitted by Mr. Linder were unsuitable for reproduction and are filed with the record of the hearings.) Senator TUNNELL. Is Harry Bridges in the room?

TESTIMONY OF HARRY BRIDGES, PRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL LONGSHOREMEN'S AND WAREHOUSEMEN'S UNION

Senator TUNNELL. Give your name and your position.

Mr. BRIDGES. Harry Bridges, president of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, affiliated with the CIO. Senator TUNNELL. All right, you may proceed in your own way. Mr. BRIDGES. Gentlemen, previous witnesses from labor; that is, A. F. of L. and CIO, have testified eloquently and persuasively as to the human reasons why we must move as a nation to abolish the worst aspects of poverty in the United States. Your committee has heard a succession of rank and file witnesses tell the pathetic story of their struggles to live on less than a subsistence wage. Their story has been told in the moving accounts of men and women from the sweat factories, mills, and shops that still spread over our country. There is nothing that I feel need be added to their living, first-hand accounts. There are human reasons why we must pass this bill to increase minimum wages first to 65 cents an hour and then to 75 cents. These reasons, taken from the day-to-day experience of workers whose daily lot is the most extreme form of exploitation, should weigh heavily in your deliberations on this bill. I know that you have listened to them with sympathy and the desire to do the thing that is in your power to alleviate their lot.

With your permission, I would like to let the human side of the case for this bill rest with the rank-and-file witnesses from American industry who have appeared before your committee. I would like to address myself now more to the cold economics of substandard wages and of the wage issue as a whole-in my testimony before you. I do this not in any desire to overlook the human issues involved, but rather to supplement them as well as I can with the economic experience of the men and women in the industries covered by the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, which I have the honor to represent.

I appear here as the representative of 65,000 members of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, a union representing men and women in the continental United States, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Our union voices not only the needs of our own members, but the needs and aspirations of the average American everywhere-including the men who fought to give all working people everywhere a chance at a decent and a secure life.

The objectives of this bill before the Congress now were long ago the objectives of our union. Our union organized, struck, and struggled for the purposes of this bill before wage-and-hour legislation was ever conceived by the Congress. Many years ago, we fought through many bitter strikes. We were shot, clubbed, and gassed because we asked for a shorter workweek and system of hiring that afforded greater work opportunity for the individual worker. We were fighting for jobs and job rights. We fought for these issues as we could not have fought for wages. We won because these rights were so vital they could not be surrendered. In their simplest terms they represented the right to work and the right to a decent family and community life.

Because we have gone through this experience and have a perspective of better than 10 years, I believe our experience is of some value to you. My union fought for and apparently won the 6-hour day for west coast longshoremen in 1934. It still appears in our contract. And yet over the years we have lost it. Longshoremen on the Pacific coast do not have a 6-hour day. They have an 8-hour day with 2 hours' work guaranteed them at time and a half. We fought for the right to work 6 hours and go home. We found we were forced to use our union's economic and political strength to fight for overtime. Less men working, more hours worked. We ended with 9 hours' pay for 8 hours' work at a correspondingly lower hourly rate.

Longshoremen, I should explain, on the west coast, are one division of our union, and they comprise about one-third of our membership. They work in the general distributing industries, waterfront terminals, warehouses handling cold storage, other forms of food, as well as the ordinary public warehouses.

In other words, the general warehousing industry as a whole. Most of our membership in that part of the industry is closer to tidewater and terminals, rivers, lakes, and sea, you might say. Senator TUNNELL. I sort of associated the word "longshoremen” with those who load and unload ships. Is that right?

Mr. BRIDGES. Well, generally that is the accepted term, but as the maritime industry changes, and it is changing rapidly, a longshoreman really changes into a freight handler.

Part of his time he can be working at actual longshore work, meaning the actual loading of goods on and off a vessel, and part of his time, mostly now through the development of machinery, technological devices, he is working at other types of work, unloading cars either by better physical labor or by machinery, working in a warehouse, working around docks and terminals.

By the way, industry is progressing; the old term of a longshoreman does not truly describe what the work is or what the individual does. Of course that has been true throughout all the years of the maritime industry.

Originally a longshoreman was what the name implies. He was someone that roamed along the shore looking for work on an old sailing ship when it came into port. Generally the crews of the ships used to do the work and the longshoreman was a roustabout, picking up a job here and there mostly when the members of the crew were drunk, and were not available, and I am sorry to say it happens even

now.

Senator TUNNELL. Do they still do that?

Mr. BRIDGES. Yes; now and again I see a seaman get drunk.

We attempted through a well-organized union, some 10 years ago to do in essence what this bill seeks to do, to reduce the hours of work and at the same time to give working people mainly a decent and normal way of life.

We went into a big strike in 1934, and we had written into the contract that came out of that strike, as the result of a decision by an arbitration board, a 6-hour day.

That 6-hour day is still in our contract. It was our purpose at that time to have a 6-hour working day, meaning the men would work 6 hours and go home. It was hard work, and although their wages might not be as much as if they had worked overtime, we thought that the gains of a short working day at hard work, and some time at home, counterbalanced what extra money might be made through working overtime.

However, that is not the way it worked out. The longshoremen at the present time on the Pacific coast do not have the 6-hour day, they have the 8-hour day, with 2 hours of work guaranteed them at time and a half.

We fought for the right to work 6 hours and go home. We were forced to use our union's economic and political strength to fight for overtime in other words, less men-working with more hours of work. What we ended up with was, in effect, a provision in our contract guaranteeing our men 8 hours if work was there, with 6 hours of it! paid at a straight hourly rate and the other 2 hours at time and a half. Senator ELLENDER. What is the hourly rate now and what was it then?

Mr. BRIDGES. At the present time, it is $1.10 per hour, and at that time it was 85 cents an hour.

Senator ELLENDER. That is back in 1934?

Mr. BRIDGES. Back in 1934; yes, sir.

Senator ELLENDER. What position did your organization take with respect to the present wage-and-hour law when it was being considered by Congress?

Mr. BRIDGES. Of course, we supported it.

Senator ELLENDER. Did any of your members appear before the Education and Labor Committee in support of it?

Mr. BRIDGES. Not directly. I think we were represented by our affiliated groups. Our union did not, itself, appear.

Senator ELLENDER. How would this bill affect your organization? Mr. BRIDGES. Well, in terms of wages, that is the 65 cents an hour. it would only affect a very small number of the workers organized in our union.

Senator ELLENDER. What effect would it have in upping the present hourly rates that are being received by your membership?

Mr. BRIDGES. It would not have a great effect. That is, if what you mean is those members in our union who are getting less than 65 cents an hour now, as to how many of them would be affected, not a large amount, but some of them would.

Senator ELLENDER. What percentage, do you know?

Mr. BRIDGES. Offhand I could not say. It would be purely a guess. But we have members right here in this city, members of our union working in warehouses where their wages probably average around 40 cents. It would affect them. It would mean a 25-centan-hour increase in wage.

Senator ELLENDER. When you say that hourly wages were 85 cents in 1934, you mean on the Pacific coast?

Mr. BRIDGES. I was confining this particular statement to one group of our workers, namely, the Pacific coast longshoremen.

Senator ELLENDER. Do you know what the rates were in other parts of the country?

Mr. BRIDGES. For the same work?

Senator ELLENDER. Yes; the same class of work.

Mr. BRIDGES. I cannot quite remember it. In some places it was higher, I think, or the same. I think in the North Atlantic ports of the United States the rate was either the same or 5 cents an hour more. In the South Atlantic ports, I think it was less, either 15 or 20 cents an hour less, and in the Gulf ports it was also less, either 5, 10, or 15 cents an hour less.

Senator ELLENDER. You mean less than 85 cents?

Mr. BRIDGES. Yes; I think it was something like 70 or 75 cents. Senator ELLENDER. What do you mean when you say that some were receiving 40 cents?

Mr. BRIDGES. Well, I was talking about that part of our membership that at the present time receive 40 cents an hour. We have workers affiliated with our organization in the city of Washington here whose wage rates right now are 40 cents an hour.

Senator ELLENDER. They are not longshoremen, they are just members of the CIO group?

Mr. BRIDGES. They are members of our union and of course indirectly members of the CIO. They are warehousemen.

Senator ELLENDER. Warehousemen?

Mr. BRIDGES. Yes.

Senator ELLENDER. I see. The differential then between those members of the group, that is, the warehousemen, and the longshoremen is 60 some-odd cents?

Mr. BRIDGES. At the present time, it is 70 cents.

Senator ELLENDER. Seventy cents, all right. Now, if Congress should raise the minimum wage of the membership of your union that is now receiving 40 cents per hour to as much as 75 cents what, in your opinion, would be the effect in causing the raising of wages of those in the upper brackets?

Mr. BRIDGES. No effect at all, unless we adopted a wage policy that said that the men getting $1.10 or $1.15 an hour should get an increase because workers that are getting 40 cents an hour are getting an increase. We would try to take the lower brackets and get them to the $1.10 rate, instead of taking the $1.10 bracket and get them up higher.

Senator ELLENDER. Doesn't it usually follow that whenever a particular group in a union gets a raise in wages that others in the upper brackets succeed in having their wages raised?

Mr. BRIDGES. Not in our unions, Senator. It does not follow in our union; it might in some, but, in my experience, it generally does not follow in our union.

Senator ELLENDER. When you say your union, you mean the Pacific coast union, or do you mean the CIO or all of the unions affiliated with the CIO?

Mr. BRIDGES. In this case, I mean the organization that I am an official of, the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen Union.

Senator ELLENDER. Yes.

Mr. BRIDGES. To go back, although we started and fought for a 6-hour day we finally ended up with actually an 8-hour working day with 9 hours' pay.

Senator TUNNELL. Well, you did get a 6-hour day on straight time. Mr. BRIDGES. That is right. That is the point. We got a 6-hour day on straight time, but the straight time rate was so long that there was not sufficient money for the men to live on, and they were not only forced to work overtime, they were forced to fight for the right to work overtime. Fighting for the right to work overtime is really the same as the union, or any organization, fighting for, or this Senate committee thinking of passing, a law that will create unemployment. That was our experience.

This experience was an instructive one for us and we will not make the mistake a second time. We offer this experience to the committee, in the hope that through suitable legislation, workers may get what inevitably they will be forced to seek through strikes. We offer this experience to the committee because it affords a clear and concise illustration of a grave inadequacy in past wage and hour legislation and, I am sorry to say, in the proposed legislation which you are now considering. The simple fact is that the overtime penalties provided in the present act are totally inadequate and the proposed legislation does not cure that defect.

Now, overtime rates really reduce wages and they cause unemployment. In a nutshell, that has been our experience in dealing with this problem.

Senator TUNNELL. What do you mean by that? I don't understand you.

Mr. BRIDGES. Well, I posed the question in that way in the hopes you would ask me just that, Senator. It is just as I have told you. Generally, throughout American industry straight-time rates for workers are so low that the income must be added to in order that a decent living wage is made. The usual term for it is take-home wages. Now, what is happening in the Nation today and what is underlying all these strikes today is that the overtime has been taken away from the workers and therefore their wages, in effect, have been reduced. They are all asking the same thing in principle, and correctly so. They want the 48-hour or 52-hour take-home wages that they were earning during the war for 40 hours of work. Therefore, it reduces the number of hours they are required to work a week to make a living wage and they get a higher basic or higher straighttime rate. Our experience with workers is if they get something like that they do not want to work overtime. The only reason overtime is worked is not to benefit the worker in any way, it is extra exploitation of the worker solely in the interest of profit, in the interest of industry and to the detriment of the worker, and that is detrimental to all phases of the worker's life.

Senator TUNNELL. And they had to fight for what would be detrimental to them?

Mr. BRIDGES. That is exactly what has happened in the last few years. That is based on my judgment and experience in the labor movement. In effect, it is something that is probably being considered here. I do not know what testimony has been offered in this senseas far as I know not a great deal-but the purpose of my statement is to point out to the committee that overtime rates after 40 hours