The Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II 229Security tax was imposed, brought a decline of industrial production,
higher unemployment, and another stock market decline. Several ad-
ditional New Deal measures were enacted by which billions of dollars
were pumped into the WPA and AAA. The Minimum Wage and
Hours Act of 1938 not only prohibited child labor but mandated a mini-
mum wage of twenty-five cents an hour, to be increased to forty cents,
and limited a workweek to forty-four hours the first year and forty
hours thereafter. Almost 1 million workers benefited by this measure.
The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act won approval in June 1938 , wid-
ening the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. It required the manufac-
turers of food, drugs, and cosmetics to list the ingredients on labels,
and it prohibited false and misleading advertisements. Violations would
incur heavy fi nes.
One important aspect of the New Deal was its revolutionary stimu-
lation of the labor movement. Labor had gained the right of bargaining
on more or less equal terms with management in most industries. The
American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded in 1886 by Adolph
Strasser and Samuel Gompers of the Cigar Makers’ International
Union of New York, consisted mostly of skilled workers. Gompers was
elected president and served every year but one from 1886 until his
death in 1924. He chose to lead the union toward higher wages and
shorter work hours, rather than the more radical wing of the labor
movement, which aimed to bring about wholesale reform of the move-
ment to include unskilled workers. By 1936 certain labor leaders, nota-
bly John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers Union and Sidney
Hillman and David Dubinsky, presidents of the garment workers’
unions, demanded that the AFL organize industries, irrespective of
the work performed by their laborers, so that the still unorganized in-
dustries, such as automobiles, steel, and rubber, could be unionized.
The old, conservative leaders of the AFL refused, whereupon Lewis
and others, in 1937 , formed the Committee for Industrial Organization
(CIO), which became a separate and inde pendent labor organization.
It soon unionized the steel and automobile industries and others, al-
though the workers sometimes had to resort to sit-down strikes in
which they refused to leave their factories until management agreed to
meet and negotiate fairly with their representatives. Roosevelt aided
labor by refusing to send in troops to end the sit-down strikes. With