Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day, who has been turning his employees over to the Government relief rolls in order to preserve his company’s undistributed reserves, tell you – using his stockholders’ money to pay the postage for his personal opinions — tell you that a wage of $11.00 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1938, Fireside Chat, the night before signing the Fair Labor Standards Act that instituted the federal minimum wage (via derryderrydown)

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