FDR

We have developed a nationwide service with seven hundred district offices and one thousand branch offices, thus providing facilities through which labor can learn of jobs available and employers can find workers.

Last spring I expressed the hope that employers would realize their deep responsibility to take men off the relief rolls and give them jobs in private enterprise.

We do not surrender our responsibility to the unemployed.

In this country we insist, as an essential of the American way of life, that the employer-employee relationship should be one between free men and equals.

We refuse to regard those who work with hand or brain as different from or inferior to those who live from their property.

We insist that labor is entitled to as much respect as property.

But our workers with hand and brain deserve more than respect for their labor.

They deserve practical protection in the opportunity to use their labor at a return adequate to support them at a decent and constantly rising standard of living, and to accumulate a margin of security against the inevitable vicissitudes…

The average man must have that twofold opportunity if we are to avoid the growth of a class-conscious society in this country.

They would try to refuse the worker any effective power to bargain collectively, to earn a decent livelihood and to acquire security.

It is those short-sighted ones, not labor, who threaten this country with that class dissension which in other countries has led to dictatorship and the establishment of fear and hatred as the dominant emotions in human life.

There is no cleavage between white collar workers and manual workers, between artists and artisans, musicians and mechanics, lawyers and accountants and architects and miners.

Anyone who calls it a class holiday challenges the whole concept of American democracy.

Labor Day symbolizes our determination to achieve an economic freedom for the average man which will give his political freedom reality.

The change of one vote would have thrown all the affairs of this great Nation back into hopeless chaos.

In 1933 you and I knew that we must never let our economic system get completely out of joint again--that we could not afford to take the risk of another great depression.

We also became convinced that the only way to avoid a repetition of those dark days was to have a government with power to prevent and to cure the abuses and the inequalities which had thrown that system out of joint.

We then began a program of remedying those abuses and inequalities--to give balance and stability to our economic system--to make it bomb-proof against the causes of 1929.

Individual or local or state effort alone cannot protect us in 1937 any better than ten years ago.

To complete our program of protection in time, therefore, we cannot delay one moment in making certain that our national government has power to carry through.

If we learned anything from the depression we will not allow ourselves to run around in new circles of futile discussion and debate, always postponing the day of decision.

For in the last three national elections an overwhelming majority of them voted a mandate that the Congress and the President begin the task of providing that protection--not after long years of debate, but now.

The courts, however, have cast doubts on the ability of the elected Congress to protect us against catastrophe by meeting squarely our modern social and economic conditions.

We are at a crisis in our ability to proceed with that protection.

I want to talk with you very simply about the need for present action in this crisis--the need to meet the unanswered challenge of one-third of a Nation ill-nourished, ill-clad, ill-housed.