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to which all good manufacturers might repair.
At any rate, I had talked to the President-elect about that very briefly, as being the only actual project that could clearly be done, as I saw it. He said, “That's good. Get to work on that. Get to thinking about it.”
When we got to Washington the Black-Connery thirty-hour bill was already in the Congress. We had to sort of wash that out, modify it, because it was pretty crazy. When we got to Washington, this public contracts act was the first and only positive, really safe program with regard to legal requirements to hours and wages that we had developed. The NRA was making agreements as to hours and wages as a basis of their codes, but we were proposing to have a bill drafted which would require in at least a limited area - that is, government contractors - a standard of wages, hours of labor, child labor and other working conditions.
When I had that conference of labor leaders during the first few weeks that we were in office, this was the one thing I had prepared in sufficient detail so that I could sell it to them, so to speak, put it before them and say, “How would you like that?” Of course, that struck them as just fine, because it was in line with what they called the prevailing rate of wages law, which had been
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