As previously mentioned, the construction members were working thirty days at a time, (I do not know what interval occured these 30 day assignments), and member on the Boston Elevated (150 to 200 members), were working a four day work week to prevent layoffs. Then in May 1932, the construction members went to a 1/3 reduction in the workweek to increase the number employed by fifty percent. The signal maintenance department of the Boston Elevated Railway followed suit and agreed to a reduction from six days a week to four days. Their work had covered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on a shift basis. It was a perplexing problem to rearrange their hours so as to prevent layoffs.

The Mayor of Boston, James M. Curley, was deeply concerned as winter approached in 1931 as to what could be done with the thousands of homeless, jobless, starving people when winter set in.

The federal post office job was shut down by strike because of the haphazard construction of the Seaverns Corporations, which was working on a federally funded job where no time was alloted for safety of the workers.

The only good news to report during this period was the passage of the Davis-Bacon Act in 1931, which provided for the payment of prevailing wage rates to laborers and mechanics employed by contractors and sub-contractors on public construction, and the passage of the Morris-LaGuardia Act, (the Anti-Injunction Act), which prohibited injunctions in labor disputes. Wisconsin also adopted the first state unemployment insurance act in the United States.

America was at the bottom of the worst economic abyss it had ever witnessed when on November 8, 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats win the election by a landslide. Roosevelt gets 22 million votes to Hoover’s 15 million and the Democrats take control of both Houses of Congress, promising American labor a new deal.

The unemployed in America peak at 13 million. Total wages declined to 60 percent less than 1929. Business is operating at one half of the 1929 capacity. The economy is at rock bottom.