Question

"A Paper Read Before the International Labor Congress, Chicago, Illinois, September 1893.

By no means the least demand of the Trade Unions is for adequate wages.

The importance of this demand is not likely to be underestimated. Adam Smith says: “It is but equity that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.” But the Trade Unions’ demand is for better pay than which Adam Smith deemed equitable. The Trade Unions taking normal conditions as its point of view, regards the workman as the producer of the wealth of the world and demands that wages (as long as the wage may last), shall be sufficient to enable him to support his family in a manner consistent with existing civilization and all that is required for maintaining and improving physical and mental health and the self-respect of human beings.

Render our lives while working as safe and healthful as modern science demonstrates it is possible. Give us better homes is just as potent a cry today as when Dickens voiced the yearnings of the people a generation ago.

Save our children in their infancy from being forced into the maelstrom of wage slavery. See to it that they are not dwarfed in body and mind or brought to a premature death by early drudgery. Give them the sunshine of the school and playground instead of the factory, the mine, and the workshop.

We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.

These in brief are the primary demands made by the Trade Unions in the name of labor.



Official Book of the American Federation of Labor, Issued for the Tenth Annual Convention, Vol. 10–13"
Based on the speech by Samuel Gompers, the development and demands of the labor movement were primarily a response to

A.
the inequitable distribution of wealth among the government and the people.

B.
the government's increasing restrictions on competition in the economy.

C.
the government's increasing restrictions on the rights of industrial workers.

D.
the inequitable distribution of wealth among workers and business owners.

Answer 1

D. the inequitable distribution of wealth among workers and business owners.

Gompers’ speech focuses on demands for adequate wages, safer conditions, protection for children, and greater share of the wealth produced—indicating labor’s response to economic inequality between workers and employers.