Readers Theatre Script

September 19^th, 1937

Ever since I was a young child, I have been working. My name is Grace Smith, and I am a young and loving mother and wife. My family and I currently live in Brooklyn, New York, and we have been struggling terribly for the last fifteen years or so. I grew up in a small home in Western Massachusetts, but recently moved to the city with my family in hope that my husband could get a new job. This so called economic depression that is happening right now has been such a burden on my poor family. My husband was laid off from his job at the mill, and we somehow found enough saved up money to move to Brooklyn. I am so proud of my son Charles though. He is such a smart and loving boy that he told me that he will try to find a job in the area so we can maybe “live in a nice house just like the people we see in the movies.” Children are always being hired by factory managers because they can be paid a lot less than an adult would be. I would know: I worked in a mill in a town in Massachusetts for 18 years, and barely got enough money to pay for a pack of gum each week. But I think something exciting is about to happen in the United States soon. I’ve been seeing articles in the paper recently about the government trying to lift the country back up on its feet. They want to help people get their jobs back, or even develop new ways for people to work. Roosevelt, our beloved president, has been telling us on his radio program that they want to make a new standard of working where children under a certain age will not be allowed to work, there will be a required minimum wage for employees, and there will be a legal limit on the amount of work a person could do in one day. That way, they will have to pay extra for the extra hours that a worker puts in in a day. Roosevelt wants to name this law the Fair Labor Standards Act, and that is probably won’t be enacted until next year. This law might really change my family’s life. I am constantly worrying about Charles’ safety out at the factories, so now he wont be allowed to work and be paid nothing for it. My husband will hopefully be able to find a job in the meantime, and eventually be paid fairly for the hard work that he has done. But I did hear that people working on farms, which are mostly the Negros, are not going to be included under this law for whatever reason. All I can do is cross my fingers that his law gets passed so my family can maybe find some peace of mind.

           

50 YEARS LATER

Hi there! My name is Samuel, and I am my father Charles’s son, and my Grandma Grace’s third grandson. Grandma Grace used to always tell me stories about how she grew up during the Great Depression, which I learned all about at school. I never realized how important the New Deal policies were to working people at the time, even the Fair Labor Standards Act. I take it for granted that children are not working factory jobs and that I am getting paid minimum wage at the local grocery store. But at the time, my grandfather and dad were treated unfairly. Because the FLSA is so important to economic structure in the United States, its still in place today, and I’ve come to appreciate what many people have taken for granted.