LABOR: Little Martyrs

One year after their “sick chicken” had routed the Blue Eagle in the U. S. Supreme Court at a cost to them of $20,000, Brooklyn’s four NRA-hating Schechter brothers were discovered to be broke, their home and their big poultry jobbing business gone. Last week in Brooklyn the press turned up another martyr to the cause of Rugged Individualism in the person of Joe Tipaldo, laundryman who fought New York’s minimum wage law for women up to the U. S. Supreme Court and won (TIME, June 8).

Favored by most laundries, the minimum wage law was chiefly opposed by hotels and restaurants. The New York State Hotel Association underwrote some $50,000 of Joe Tipaldo’s court costs, but he spent more than $15,000 of his own money. When the case was won, Laundryman Tipaldo had $8,000 left, used it to expand his plant. Since many laundries kept the minimum wage, he prospered for a time by undercutting his competitors with what he saved on labor costs.

“Then,” he explained last week, “business didn’t seem to be coming in. My drivers were beginning to complain that customers told them I shouldn’t have fought this case. People were listening to stories in the newspapers against me. My customers wouldn’t give my drivers their wash. Then the Laundry Workers International Union tried to demonstrate in front of my plant and I got the police to chase them away. But they went to the next corner and made speeches knocking me every night.”

Last week Joe Tipaldo, his business gone, was looking for a job.

Since Alf Landon himself plumped for minimum-wages-for-women in his convention telegram, it seemed improbable that Joe Tipaldo would be employed in the Republican campaign. Already enlisted as a GOP speaker, however, was a more famed New Deal martyr, Fred C. Perkins of York, Pa. Because he could not pay workers in his battery plant NRA code wages, the big, hairy-fisted onetime Cornell footballer went to jail for 18 days, was fined $1,500, became the nation’s prime symbol of the “little man” oppressed by NRA (TIME, Dec. 17, 1934 et seq.). Since then the Perkins’ battery business has gone steadily downhill, due, he believes, to the New Deal’s rural electrification program and to the fact that his competitors call him a “jailbird.”

Declared the Republican National Committee in announcing Fred Perkins’ enlistment: “He joins the ranks of Republican speakers because he loves liberty and fears a dictatorship.”

Said Fred Perkins last week: “The New Deal tried to ruin me, and now I’m going to do my best to ruin the New Deal.”