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“Oh, what's the good of having so much method in here. You put all that in and then they get into a row about it in the Congress. Then they fix up the method. Now look at the prevailing rate of wages law. We never had any trouble about that at all, and that's just the way that reads.”
Well, as a matter of fact, he may have thought that we had no particular trouble about it, but anybody who was on the inside of an administrative job knew that what had happened, the only thing that ever had been done, was that the Secretary of Labor had announced the union scale for that community. The union scale for Atlanta, Georgia was so much a day, or so much an hour, for each trade. The union scale of wages for New York City was something else for every one of these trades. So whenever there was a project the union scale of wages was announced, with no very great care taken to look it up and see whether perhaps more people in the community were paid another scale. Although in the City of New York practically everybody in the building trades belonged to a building trades union, that was not true in Atlanta, Georgia. There was at that time a lot of building trades labor available that was not union labor. Nevertheless, this was an old law and it had been the custom for the
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