Pegler: Pay raise issue
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
To the proposal that the salaries of Congressmen and Senators be raised from $10,000 to $25,000 comes a quick retort that many of them are overpaid, even now, an unfortunate truth encountered also in many of our factories and, as the law says, “facilities.” However, having adopted the principle that a monkey is as good as a man, we now have to consider whether we should be kind to those who make our laws, or brusquely refuse to consider their problems and necessities. We might also bear in mind that, if we treat them so, they could be real mean to us.
This small group of about 600 men is one of the very few elements of the American people having no collective bargaining, rights or agent. Although, with questionable wisdom, they provided these boons for others, with special benefit to the bargaining agents, themselves, our lawmakers bashfully neglected to improve their own position and, meanwhile, have been compelled to raise their own income taxes. They, almost alone among us, have held the line along their own little sector against inflationary wages.
Long before the CIO was even a mischievous gleam in the brooding eye of John L. Lewis, Congress was operating on that basis which is sometimes called levelism in the jargon of the night-school economist. The best was like the worst, and so remains today; for we pay the intelligent, diligent man no more for his long hours and superior work than we pay the clowns, loafers, nonentities and frauds. Like many sluggish, unskilled and highly overpaid hands employed in the war industries, some members of both houses are little better than useless and, in some spectacular cases, are a little worse if you insist.
Can’t treat people that way
But surely, they have not thought things through, as our horn-rimmed essayists say, nor weighed the implications, who would turn off this proposal in this highhanded way. I should like to get the word “impact” in here somewhere and a casual use of “pattern” to show that I am up on my reading, but tomorrow is another day.
Certainly, experience should have taught us that if you arrogantly refuse to sit down and bargain in good faith you cause explosions. And certainly, the American people, who are the boss in this case, have been insincere in their approval of the right to bargain if at the first test we rudely say that these servants are a lot of bums who are getting too much now.
You just can’t treat people that way, these days. You have to open your books and explain your financial position; you have to be polite and, above all, even if you are running at a loss at the time being, you sometimes have to raise their pay so that they can catch up with the advanced cost of living.
Demand too much servility
There is another point or two in our popular treatment of Congress which should be reconsidered. We demand altogether too much servility. In private industry even the president, or the chairman of the board in his plug hat and plush weskit, spanned, as the Alger books used to say, by a heavy gold watchchain, cannot fire a sweeper in the plant for calling him any of the popular simple or compound names.
That is the sweeper’s human right and the situation is one to be met man-fashion or in the courts. Yet, no Congressman dares call his employers by any of the names that he might have good reason to apply to them and we, in our inconsistency, would fire anyone who did.
We do demand high respect from the people, however little we try to deserve it; and the very fact that we get it should make us suspicious or their honesty. But if an honest candidate told us his real opinion of us, would we elect him?
We might question, too, our employer-espionage on these, our hired help. For, while Congress has provided that employers are guilty of intimidation and provocation who snoop and peer in the shop, and after hours, it is our own practice to check the Congressman’s votes on current issues, to mark down how much time he spent in his seat; and if he is seen with certain people that news is quickly spread. We don’t even grant him the right to select his own social company and he, like as not, if challenged for what we consider to be evil companionship, instead of telling us to go to hell, explains that he was investigating something for some committee.
Congressmen are human and can be driven too far. Goaded just so much, they might get good and sore and pass a pension law giving everybody $1,000 a week from the cradle to the grave. It would be cheaper to grant that raise and keep them in a good mood.
