National Affairs: Workers' Lobby

A parade of 2,000 men and women formed one morning last week below Capitol Hill and plodded grimly up it. Defying policemen, swarming into the House Office Building, they engulfed the caucus room where some Congressmen were about to hold a hearing on a bill. Neither anarchists nor Anti-Salooners, these lobbyists were white-collar workers in the Government—meek, long-suffering driven to desperation (they said) by "genteel poverty " They told stories of death by starvation, of "coffin and graveyard clubs, of collections for funerals—by-products of life on $1,200 per year. The House Civil Service Committee, to which they protestified was considering, among other pay raises the establishment of $1,500 as a minimum wage for any Federal fulltime job This increase the marchers favored. But one man, Clerk Edwin Evans of the General Accounting Office, cried out: "I am opposed . . . though I stand alone among the 60,000 Government workers in Washington." His points were that the "Welch bill, containing the $300 minimum increase, would benefit the least needy workers the most; that it would keep young married women in Federal jobs, instead of efficient bachelors and spinsters.

In the House, Wisconsin's Berger, lone Socialist, introduced a bill to raise the minimum Federal wage to $2,000. The Committee pondered.