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for the Army, which had taken place about 1930 or '31. The bid had gone to a Philadelphia raincoat manufacturer who was the worst sweat shop in the whole trade, a true sweat shop, paying preposterously low wages, working long hours, using children, making the workers take home and do a large part of it in their own houses. He got the bid because he was the low bid. It was a scandal. There were other raincoat manufacturers in Philadelphia, who might not have been all unionized, but who paid a reasonable scale of wages and had good conditions. They were organized into a trade. And, of course, there were other raincoat manufacturers all over the country who never got a look at that bid because they couldn't bid as low as that and maintain the conditions they were in the habit of keeping up.

So the purpose of this law was not to make an ideal wage, but to eliminate bad working conditions as a factor which threw the contract to the low bidder who was low only because his working conditions were so debased.

However, that was not what the union men thought we were doing, as I've pointed out. Naturally, I had to stick to my guns, and we continued to hold the same kind of investigations. We just didn't back down in