SECRETARY OF LABOUR

Grey River Argus, 6 August 1937, Page 7

SECRETARY OF LABOUR

MISS FRANCES PERKINS, OF U.S.A. By Karen Martin in “The Progressive” Sitting behind her great desk in a high panelled office, Frances Perkins looks like a very small person to be talking about such things. But her enthusiasm shines out of warm, brown eyes and you shortly forget that she is a small woman, with a big job. She becomes, through her voice and her personality and a clear projection of her ideas, a competent executive. She spoke with animation of the Department of Labour s accomplishments, and drew little straight lines on a memorandum pad. Each started a little further across the page than the last, each stretched a little further at the end, each stood a little above tlie last. “This,” she says, “is sensible progress, gradual and well thought out,” Her record shows that she believes it. A sane progressive she is willing to work by steps, but is never satislied unless she is getting on with her work. THE PRESENT PICTURE. For instance, some of her recent work: — Her fight for shorter hours started with her work for the 54-hour week for women in New York, passed in 1912, went on to champion the 48hour week, approved in 1933, and is now working for the genuinely progressive investigations now in full swing, of the possibilities of the 40hour minimum week.

During recent days Miss Perkins has seen four of her warmly espoused causes boosted up the ladder towards fulfillment; the new minimum hour and wage legislation, social security—a modern terra for a principle which she has fostered from the beginning of her career—was upheld by the court, the Wagner Labour Relations Act—which she describes as “a law preventing interference with a right labour has always had”—was declared constitutional, and her Kew York minimum hour law won its case in the supreme court. “But I am not satisfied,” she smiled, and tore the marked leaf from her pad. Making more deliberate little lines, she went on to explain that although she feels that the department’s progress has been “broad and beneficial,” and although she goes ahead with a “comiortable feeling,” she is still looking ahead to new developments. The public consciousness is awakened to the possibilities of labour legislation, she feels, and the legislators tnemselves are thus encouraged to view impartially and judiciously the problems before them. ” HER EARLY EXPERIENCE. Born in Boston in 1882, Frances Perkins took an early interest in economic problems. At Mount Holyoke College she studied sociology. Teaching in a private schol in cnicago she visited Hull House and met Jane Adams. Her interest flamed. There followed postgraduate work at the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia, in sociology and economics. Her life work began with investigations of working conditions in New York City as secretary of the Consumers’ League of New York City, and led her to Albany, where she battled successful for the 54-hour bill.

With modesty she states that she “was just a girl who didn’t know exactly what she could do,” when, in 1912, she was made secretary of the committee on safety, promoting measures designed to prevent factory .catastrophes. The men who appointed her and who worked with her had already had ample evidence, however, of the native ability and the zeal that qualified her. Following the investigations she worked with the commission which drafted the new provisions of the labour law in New Yon< on the passages pertaining to hazards and the prevention of fire and accidents. After serving’ on various councils and committees, she was made Commissioner of the State Industrial Commission under appointment of Gov. Al Smith, who made her chairman of the Industrial board in 1926. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt, then governor of New York, she was appointed Industrial Commissioner in 1929. By that lime Frances Perkim was certainly not “a girl who didn’t know exactly what she could do.” She was. already engaged in writing and public speaking, as veil as legislative work. Many problems were preparing her for her next job. In those troubled times unemployment was becoming a larger spectre f han before. She was working now for the ideal of industrial stability, and the forerunners of social security insurance, and driving on in her battle for better hours and wages. When, in March, 1933, President. Roosevelt, who had tested her steel and found it strong, found her his best candidate for the difficult post of Secretary of Labour, she had just won a battle. A few days before she took her new office her 48-hour bill for which she had been fighting, and winning by inches, for 20 years, was made law. In her first memorandum to the president she recommended the kind of old age and unemployment insurance now known as social security. She recommended a great many things in that first memorandum. The president was interested. “Explore the possibilities,” Jie said. By the time social security emerged it had been explored by more than one administration expert. Sociologists had recognised the two spectres of unemployment and old age as remediable ills, but legislators had not. The debate over the legislation was so spirited that its exponents believed its chances were slight.’ The general approval was a pleasant surprise and a sweeping victory. fl he opponents, too, had “explored” and found that principle was generally popular and thoroughly beneficial. One little-known phase of the department’s work is becoming increasingly important. Miss Perkins approves and encourages it. The help they have been able to give to the states in the framing of their own labour laws is a credit to the astuteness of the secretary. Through publications, and above all through n

i own record, she has drawn the interest and admiration of state officials.

When they come to her for help she gives all the information the de- 1 partment has at hand relating to their 'problems. ' The initiative is theirs, for Lhe department does not < interfere in. state legislation} but if

asked, it gives full co-operation in the working out of local problems. A greaf talker, Miss Perkins, warmed to her subject, will go on at length. But she can act, too. She has been ridiculed for going out into the strike area and talking with the men, but of such actions, and of late conferences over black coffee with two-fist-ed and uncompromising industrialists, are born her keen insight, and her sh'arp ability to ferret out the core of an argument and split it to the satisfaction of both sides.

Her quiet and lofty office has been the scene of some historic strike settlements. For to-day, as Miss Perkins herself feels, settlements are more final. We are getting somewhere.

When the department of labour was created under Wilson its purpose was stated as “fostering, promotion, and developing the welfare of wage earners in the United States.” No secretary before Miss Perkins has plumbed the possibilities of those words, or tried to carry them out to their fullest degree. They either failed to see the way to beneficial legislation or, desiring it, lacked the belief to breathe life into the image.

But the little woman in the characteristic three-corned flat black hat had the vision, and the ability to carry it out.