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Act in any bid for the government. Our whole scheme was to prevent the lowest bidder from being the bidder who paid the lowest wages, worked the longest hours, hired the most children, operated without a workmen's compensation law, without any protection against accident, illness, or so on. That was the purpose of the act. It didn't even pretend to be an act which fixed a proper wage, or a suitable wage, but it just prevented the people who paid the lowest wage from bidding competitively against those who paid a reasonable wage. The idea was, of course, that the prevailing wage usually was slightly above the living wage. Indeed, it was way above the living wage. If we had been fixing just the bare subsistence wage, it would have been much lower in most cases.

However, that was what this act was intended to do. It wasn't intended to fix all the wages all the way up and set up an ideal wage. It was to prevent competition from utilizing bad working conditions as a factor which would bring the low bidder into a position to get the contract. That was where there had been great abuses. Take the raincoat industry. One of the great scandals that we had in this country about wages and working conditions was a bid for raincoats