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all low, because the optimum is that which it takes to make it go around. If prices are low your standard of living remains high. If production is still big enough to supply the demand and the price is low, and the wage is in proportion, the wage will buy at the present price a large piece of the productive activity of the USA. The problem is to get these into balance.

So Sachs figured everything on every code from the point of view of the optimum. He was a great ally of myself and of others who were urging for a reasonable wage. We were not thinking in terms of high wages. We were thinking in terms of getting wages up above eleven dollars a week, which is what we found in some cases. I saw pay envelopes of $3.69 for a week's work - eight hours a day, six days a week. Wages had fallen to a level which we just can't imagine now. These were emergency wages, desperation wages. It didn't mean that the employer was making any great profit. Sometimes he wasn't making any profit and the wages weren't anything either. They were hardly subsistence. The people often owned a house, had some left-over clothes, had a little garden, and so five dollars a week would buy something if you were in that relatively fortunate position. But it didn't buy enough to support a family if you were living in a tenement where you had to pay rent every week.