Remarks to Members of the International Labor Press Association

Secretary Wirtz, Secretary Connor, distinguished editors, visitors:

It is a pleasure to welcome you here to the White House. The 350 publications that you represent reach, I am told, almost 20 million Americans. Most of your readers can be counted on to support the programs and the legislation that the distinguished Speaker and the leader of the Senate just spoke about, legislation that I think will keep our country marching ahead if they are kept informed. It is your job and also part of mine to help keep them informed.

I think it is a tribute to you that in some ways the copy in your publications has been getting less dramatic these days.

As I said last Friday to your friends at the United Auto Workers Convention at Long Beach, California:

"The days of the uproarious industrial conflict are behind us--the days of flamboyant heroes and identifiable villains, of the rhetoric of 'scab' and 'sitdown' and 'shutout' and 'yellow-dog contract.'"

The days of open warfare between labor and management with "winner take all" seem to have passed. Of course, there are still inequities, and where we find inequities we must correct them. I have urged the Congress to enact a new unemployment compensation bill. And Senator Long, the leader of the Senate, told me this afternoon as soon as the House passed that bill--it has already been reported--he will take it up in the Senate, and he will, he hopes, add some of the provisions that were modified in the House bill back in the Senate.

We believe that bill should include benefit standards. The present law we think is inadequate. We think it does not cover enough workers. We think it does not meet the economic demands of this period in the 20th century.

I am also urging Congress, as Speaker McCormack told you, to act this week to modernize the minimum wage by raising standards to $1.40 in 1967 and $1.60 in 1968.

I was one of three Members of Congress from my State in 1938 who signed a petition to bring up the minimum wage in the House of Representatives. The other two were defeated that year because they signed that petition.

To show you how far we have come since 1938 when I was a young man in the Congress, that bill provided a 25 cent minimum wage and two out of three men from my State that supported it were defeated. So we have made at least some progress, and I predict before the week is over we will pass a bill that will include 7 million extra people, that will raise the minimum wage not to 25 cents but to $1.60.

But the battle for job security and the battle for social security, pensions, medical care, and decent wages for most workers has already largely been won. Now we must go back to some new business.
What should that new business be?

I would like to think with you this afternoon and ask ourselves some questions.

What can we do to extend education beyond childhood and bring new opportunity to adults who were left behind?

What can we do to give the worker not merely a job but a job that uses all of his abilities?

What can we do to stop the wasteful squander of our human potential?

With unemployment at a 12-year low of 3.5 percent, our economy demands full and not partial use of our human resources. So what can we do about the unequal distribution of our labor force and about seasonal unemployment?

These are all questions that have important meaning, I think, to the men and women who labor in this country, as well as very important meaning to all the Nation.

But there are other challenges that also face us. Labor cannot content itself with what some call the bread and butter issues. So you must join us in the effort to improve our total environment.

For it is the worker who has the biggest stake in the quality of our public education. He does not have the choice of turning to a private school for his children.

It is the worker who has the biggest stake in mass transportation. The highway, the bus, and the train are his links to his livelihood.

It is the worker who has the biggest stake in conservation and natural beauty, and playgrounds that are close to his home for his children, because he does not own a hunting lodge or a home on the seashore.

It is the worker who has the biggest stake in rebuilding our decaying cities because he cannot escape to an expensive suburb.

There is scarcely a measure we have proposed to this Congress and to its leaders that we reviewed this afternoon which does not directly affect the workingman. He has been taken into our calculations in all of our recommendations to the Congress.

It is the workingman, the man who reads your publications, who has the power to turn such ideas as we have recommended into legislative programs that we can execute. Most of you realize this, I think, and your leaders realize it.

Labor leaders were prime movers behind our demonstration cities program. But some have called this program too small to bother with. What they don't understand is that it represents a whole new departure and it is a chance to renew entire urban communities at one time, instead of trying to do it piece by piece. If I were a mayor, I would embrace this program and the rent supplement program with it. I would work for them and I would strengthen them.

There has been far too little modern housing built in our big cities in this country. There is tragically little public housing available to the needy. We build less than 35,000 units in the entire United States per year. So we need to get our foot in the door, and fast, to open that door to the day when private housing provides a decent home for every family in this land.

I think that is what your readers would want, and I think that is what they would work for, too, if they could understand the real need and the real urgency that prevails.

These are two of the most important programs on the agenda of the Congress, and with your help we want to give them life, and we want to make them work.

The time has also come to do something about the effects of a workingman's job on his health. This problem has been neglected far too long, it has been overlooked, but it must be neglected no longer.

Since World War II, dozens of new materials and hundreds of new manufacturing processes have been introduced into our factories, and when they have been introduced new hazards have been introduced, too. We do not know the full long-range impact of these hazards on the health of all the men who work in these factories. We do not know enough about what really happens to men and women who handle chemicals, plastics, asbestos, petroleum products, and glass.

We do not know enough about the effects on a worker that is subject to extremes of heat and cold, noise or humidity. Despite all the research that we have done for these men who have been subjected to the extremes of heat, cold, noise, and humidity, we do not know the effects these have on their lives.

We do not even know the full effects of radioactivity, even though we have researched it for years.

But we do know that these hazards are real. We do know that work-related diseases and other physical and mental disorders are on the rise, and that trend must be reversed. We are moving to reverse it.

Last March we amended the Federal Coal Mine Safety Act to extend Federal safety precautions to all the Nation's coal miners. They had urged this step for years, and I was proud to be able to sign it into law, making it a reality.

Now we are going to extend Federal health standards to cover not only coal miners but to all miners as well.

The Metallic and Nonmetallic Mine Act, which has passed the House and is now in the Senate committee being studied, will protect our men mining copper and uranium, or working in sand and gravel quarries-practically everyone who labors under the earth to earn his livelihood.

I am also directing the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare to make an intensified study of all occupational health. He will report to me at the earliest possible moment on what your Government can do:

--First, to isolate and eliminate the hazards to occupational health that now exist; and

--Second, to test new products and processes so that precautions can be taken to prevent health hazards before they occur.

We are no longer content in America with achieving only the greatest good for the greatest number. Today the measure we apply to our national progress is how much we improve the lot of all, and especially of those who have the least.

What we have done in the past in the service of our conscience is only a prolog to what should now be done in the service of our vision. I urge you, as influential members of a great segment of American society to turn your hearts and your minds and your pens to the enlargement of that vision.

In the last 2 1/2 years we have passed many measures in Congress: some 24 in the education and health field alone, many in the conservation field, many in the recreation field, many in the beautification field.

All of these measures, I think, that constitute what we call the Great Society, have been and will be of great benefit to the working people of this country, your audience-those who read your newspapers.

I think the medical care bill that goes into effect July r will be a measure with revolutionary possibilities. Now our big problem is to find competent administration for all those measures.

There are many cobwebs. There are many difficulties. They present many problems: How to bring the elementary school bill into practice; how to bring the medical care to reality and do it justly, do it fairly, and do it without discrimination.

I don't know whether you realize it or not, but in the last 2 1/2 years, since I became President, we have increased the appropriations for health and education alone by almost $10 billion--$10 billion. And someone has to watch each of those dollars from the time it leaves the Treasury until it is spent in the various 50 States in this land.

So we not only have a job of legislating, we have a job of administering. We are trying to do that.

We started a poverty program in this country and we are now spending almost $2 billion--the Federal Government alone, to say nothing of the cities, counties, and States. That is a new program, a difficult program. It has many heartaches and backaches in it. But it is better to have started it and failed in some instances than to have never thought of it at all.

I ask you to carefully review the things we have considered. Some of our recommendations have not been followed. The House Ways and Means Committee this week eliminated some provisions from the unemployment compensation bill that I wanted very much to pass. But that is what you call the check and balance system.

Senator Dirksen eliminated 14(b)¹ in the Senate, but I never committed myself to deliver Senator Dirksen.

I did my best to pass that bill in the House. We passed it by a few votes. I talked to 61 Senators that I thought we could influence in the Senate, and most of them were ready to support the measure. But there was a group that did not favor it. We will have to try again, and try again we will.

But I think we must realize that this Nation has made great progress, that we have moved forward. I doubt that there has ever been a period in our history--speaking of the last 5 years--when the worker got a fairer share of the total income, when the employer had better profits, and when the Nation benefited more.

Last week I visited the city where I taught before coming to Washington. I had left there 35 years ago. I looked up the statistical data to compare conditions then and conditions now.

It was rather startling. The average worker in manufacturing enterprises when I came to Washington in the year 1931-32 was making $17 a week. But, you say, they were 1932 dollars. And they were.

I had my economist convert that into present day dollars, and it ran about $30 a week. And I didn't have an economist when I came here, I might add.

The average farmer during that period made $300 a year, but converting that into present day dollars he made $800 a year. This year he makes $4,500. This year the worker who made $32 in 1932 makes $111-three times as much.

I believe in the last 5 years wages have gone up some 30-odd percent. Profits have gone up 46 percent in the 5 years since the Democratic administration came here-President Kennedy, Secretary Wirtz, and the rest.
So we have much to be thankful for.

That doesn't mean that there are not many improvements yet to be made. We cannot be satisfied with the status quo. We cannot stand still. We are not going to, notwithstanding the fact that the polls sometimes indicate that we are moving ahead too fast, that we need to be checked. I have found that people are able to do that when they think we need to be.

But we are going to have vision. We are going to dream dreams. We are going to look ahead. We are going to continue to try to deserve the right to say that we are the best read, the best fed, the best clothed, and the most prosperous nation in all the world.

If we can only hold ourselves together and continue to believe in our system and our country, to the end that we can have not only prosperity but can lead in the effort to bring peace to all the world, it will be a great day for America.

That occupies my every waking moment. Thank you very much.